Presentation design for the house

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English Baroque Drawings: architecture, sculpture and garden design
- Designs for other buildings, gardens and interiors
  - Welbeck Abbey, Northamptonshire (William Talman)

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Reference number

SM volume 111/23-25

Purpose

Presentation design for the house

Aspect

1 Elevations (3) of the two principal fronts and side of the proposed new courtyard house

Scale

no scale

Inscribed

On verso in top left-hand corner, in pen and brown ink in a C18-19 hand, 3W47, and in centre, in pencil, in a C18-19 hand, Gard.

Signed and dated

c.1702-03

Medium and dimensions

Pen and brown ink, with grey wash, with grey ink and grey wash in places; fine pencil construction lines; faded double red ruled border round edge of sheet; 512 x 677

Hand

William Talman

Watermark

Strasbourg Lily/4WR/AJ; countermark: IHS/CDG

Notes

The proposal is for a courtyard house with a piano nobile raised on a three-quarter height ground floor. From the elevation of the principal front, at the bottom of the sheet (111/25), it can be assumed that a large, two-storey hall would have run back from the main front towards the rear, connecting with a saloon on the garden front (111/24). The principal apartments would have run along the flanking sides, shown at the top of the sheet (111/23). An alternative version of the rear elevation at Welbeck Abbey is reproduced in Wren Society, XVII, pl. 13, bottom. This has the Newcastle armorial crest, flanked by backward-facing crouching lions on the apex of the pediment, and the Newcastle motto on a scroll on the tympanum. It also has cigar-shaped vase finials on the central and outer pavilions, like those on the stable design at 111/47 (see Unidentified designs, 3).

Literature

Wren Society, XII, pl. 40; J. Harris, William Talman, 1982, p. 38, pl. 66.

Level

Drawing

Exhibition history

Europe and the English Baroque: Architecture in England 1660-1715, V&A + RIBA Architecture Gallery, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1 May - 9 November 2009

Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

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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.

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