Scale
to a scale
Signed and dated
Medium and dimensions
Pencil, wash, coloured washes including raw umber, burnt sienna, blue and Indian Red, pen, on wove paper (unframed dimensions, 952 x 728)
Hand
Joseph Michael Gandy ARA (1771 - 1843), draughtsman
Verso
not inspected
Notes
The drawing is clearly a finely worked-up version of SM Vol 61/45, which gives almost exactly the same view onto the Court room. The variant treatment of the lower level openings is here, however, made consistent, with vertical consoles supporting the cornice over the latter. The vista has been increased at the top to include additional details of the lantern light, whose complex form is worthy of note. The dark green figures of kings were never installed, and like the allegorical busts in P274, represent a decorative foray by Soane into figural sculpture. They intermittently occur in design drawings for this Court (see SM 53/3/7), and were perhaps inspired by the mediaeval figures of kings on the south wall of Westminster Hall, which were incorporated into William Kent's courtrooms.
Level
Drawing
Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation.
This catalogue of Soane’s designs for the New Law Courts was generously funded by The Worshipful Company of Mercers and The Pilgrim Trust.
Sir John Soane's collection includes some 30,000 architectural,
design and topographical drawings which is a very important resource for
scholars worldwide. His was the first architect’s collection to attempt to
preserve the best in design for the architectural profession in the future, and
it did so by assembling as exemplars surviving drawings by great Renaissance
masters and by the leading architects in Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries
and his near contemporaries such as Sir William Chambers, Robert Adam and
George Dance the Younger. These drawings sit side by side with 9,000 drawings
in Soane’s own hand or those of the pupils in his office, covering his early
work as a student, his time in Italy and the drawings produced in the course of
his architectural practice from 1780 until the 1830s.
Browse (via the vertical menu to the left) and search results for Drawings include a mixture of
Concise catalogue records – drawn from an outline list of the collection – and
fuller records where drawings have been catalogued in more detail (an ongoing
process).
