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  • image SM volume 146, no. 251 (Fauntleroy Pennant, volume I, p. 380)
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Reference number

SM volume 146, no. 251 (Fauntleroy Pennant, volume I, p. 380)

Purpose

Final presentation design for a monument to John Holles, 1st Duke of Newcastle

Aspect

2 Elevation and plan of the monument within the bay

Scale

no scale, but approximately 2 ½ feet to 1 inch

Inscribed

In pencil at bottom left, d. Another pencil inscription (probably C18) has been trimmed from the bottom of the sheet.

Signed and dated

  • c.1721-23

Medium and dimensions

Pen and grey ink with grey washes over pencil under drawing

Hand

James Gibbs

Watermark

none visible

Notes

The drawing is of the executed design for the north bay of the east side of the north transept, adjoining the north wall (hence the half plan of the pier on the left). The monument itself closely follows this design and is 'more Baroque than any of Gibbs's buildings' (Bradley and Pevsner, p. 144). Friedman notes the source in Carlo Rainaldi's altar in the church of Gesù e Maria in Rome (1671-80), engraved as plate 48 in G. J. De' Rossi's Disegni di Vari Altari e Cappelle nelle Chiese di Roma (1713). This drawing differs in some details from the design that was engraved by George Vertue in 1725 and published in Gibbs's A Book of Architecture in 1728 (p. 111; Friedman, pl. 77). The colouring of the marble is not indicated (veined marble, with black marble for the sarcophagus and obelisk), and the cupid on the left-hand side of the upper pediment has a sickle, which is missing from the engraving. Much smaller in scale than the initial presentation design at 1, this drawing is probably a record of the approved design, for which models were prepared in 1721. All the figurative drawing appears to be by Gibbs himself.

The standing figures are Prudence on the right and Temperance on the left. The Duke is depicted in a half-seated position, looking up to the two angels seated on the open curved pediment. He holds his ducal coronet in his right hand and a staff in his left hand. For further discussion of the design and contemporary reaction to it, see Friedman, p. 88.

Literature

Wren Society, XII (1935), pl. 33, bottom; T. Friedman, James Gibbs, 1984, pp. 87-88, 314, and pls 77, 78); S. Bradley and N. Pevsner, The Buildings of England: London 6: Westminster (New Haven and London, 2003), p. 144.

Level

Drawing

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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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