[2] Design for chimney-piece with a relief of a Roman battle scene over the fire surround and a portrait frame in the overmantel, surrounded by swags of drapery, fruit, flowers and other motifs

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English Baroque Drawings: architecture, sculpture and garden design
- Hampton Court Palace
  - Designs for chimney-pieces, room cornices and entablatures, door cases and internal wall elevations, c.1689-1694, mostly by Grinling Gibbons
    - Five 'early' presentation designs for chimney-pieces, mainly in grey wash

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Reference number

SM, volume 110/35

Purpose

[2] Design for chimney-piece with a relief of a Roman battle scene over the fire surround and a portrait frame in the overmantel, surrounded by swags of drapery, fruit, flowers and other motifs

Aspect

Elevation, complete except for right half of overmantel surround

Scale

About 1 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

In ink by Dance, bottom right, Gd, and in a C19 hand, (35)

Signed and dated

Undated, but within range c.1690 to c.1693

Medium and dimensions

Pen and brown ink with grey washes over graphite under drawing on laid paper, top 40 mm with pinkish brown staining and blotching, and the paper eroded in placed 458 x 257

Watermark

Countermark: PVL (for Piet van der Ley)

Notes

The technique of the drawing is identical to that of 1 and 3 (110/32 and 36), although each is drawn to a slightly different scale. The drapery is made to fit precisely within the frame of the overmantel and is overlapped by the ribbons from which all the decorative features are hung. Gibbons probably intended to execute this entire relief in limewood, as a bravura exercise in trompe l'oeil carving.

Literature

H. Avray Tipping, 1914, p. 89 Wren Society, IV, pl. 35, top; H. Avray Tipping, Grinling Gibbons and the woodwork of his age (1648-1720), 1914, fig. 82

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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