Presentation design for the north front of the house

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English Baroque Drawings: architecture, sculpture and garden design
- Designs for other buildings, gardens and interiors
  - Wimpole, Cambridgeshire (James Gibbs)

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Reference number

SM volume 111/18

Purpose

Presentation design for the north front of the house

Aspect

3 Elevation, with plan of the north front including perron and steps

Scale

10 feet to 1 ½ inches (just over) (10 feet = 38.5 mm)

Inscribed

In pen and grey ink at top centre, probably by Gibbs, North Front, and at bottom left-centre, in pencil, in a C18-19 hand, Wimpole

Signed and dated

1719-21

Medium and dimensions

Pen and grey ink with grey wash over faint pencil under drawing, with black inked ruled border (partly trimmed away); three joined sheets of laid paper, backed with modern tissue; 426 x 740.

Hand

James Gibbs

Watermark

Strasbourg bend / LVG (r.h. sheet); IV and IV (l.h. two sheets)

Notes

This grand proposal for an applied Corinthian portico on the garden front of the house was unexecuted. In the mid-1740s the garden front was given the central canted bay shown in a proposal drawing for the elevation by Flitcroft c.1742, and in a survey by Soane's office in 1790 (Adshead, 2007, cat. nos 48, 104).

Literature

Wren Society, XVII, pl. 16; T. Friedman, James Gibbs, 1984, p. 1115, pl. 112; D. Adshead, Wimpole, 2007, cat. 10, p. 22

Level

Drawing

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

If you have any further information about this object, please contact us: drawings@soane.org.uk

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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