[42] Working drawing

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Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
- Public buildings
  - London: Dulwich Picture Gallery, Southwark for the Governors of Dulwich College, 1811-1813 (108)
    - Revisions to the approved design, 12 July to 19 October 1811 (14)

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Reference number

SM 65/4/57

Purpose

[42] Working drawing

Aspect

Cross section through domed central bay of the Gallery and Mausoleum

Scale

bar scale of 1/8 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

(pencil) some dimensions given

Signed and dated

datable to July or August 1811

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil, sepia and raw sienna washes, shaded on laid paper (430 x 595)

Hand

Soane office and Soane

Watermark

A Stace 1798, fleur-de-lis above cartouche with bar and below, AS

Notes

This south-north section through the centre of the building has the Mausoleum on the east side and the enfilade through the Gallery and the two storey almshouses on the west side of the Gallery. The drawing reveals the dramatic contrast in scale between the large top-lit gallery spaces to the low rusticated antechamber of the Mausoleum with Doric columns forming a circle, which leads to the arched burial chamber beneath the tall domed lantern. This would have created dramatic variations of light.

Soane has also sketched two designs in pencil above the drawing, one for possible clerestory windows, the other for an archway with some dimensions given.

Literature

F. Nevola, Soane's favourite subject: the story of Dulwich Picture Gallery, 2000, pp. 55 & 183

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.

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).