[3] Design for a plain fire surround and an overmantel with a portrait frame, surrounded by swags of flowers, birds and foliage, hung from ribbons, and including a male portrait medallion

Explore Collections

You are here: CollectionsOnline / [3] Design for a plain fire surround and an overmantel with a portrait frame, surrounded by swags of flowers, birds and foliage, hung from ribbons, and including a male portrait medallion

Browse

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

Use of images and copyright
Enlarge this Image

Print this image in A4 view

Reference number

SM, volume 110/36

Purpose

[3] Design for a plain fire surround and an overmantel with a portrait frame, surrounded by swags of flowers, birds and foliage, hung from ribbons, and including a male portrait medallion

Aspect

Elevation, incomplete on right side of overmantel

Scale

About ¾ inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

In ink by Dance, at bottom right,Gd, and by C19 hand to right, (36)

Signed and dated

Undated, but probably near beginning of period c. 1689-94

Medium and dimensions

Pen and brown ink with grey washes, over graphite under drawing, with some additions in graphite; on laid paper, laid down, with pinkish-brown blotching and staining in top 60mm; 466 x 285

Hand

Gibbons

Watermark

Countermark: PVL (see 110/32)

Notes

Compositionally, this design is closest to 1, 110/32. The cresting is surmounted by an acanthus whorl (only the left half of which is shown) in a manner reminiscent of Gibbons's reredos carving at St. James's Piccadilly (mid-1680s). The figure in the large portrait medallion appears to be in the garb of a classical figure, possibly a philosopher.

Literature

Wren Society, vol. IV, pl. 32, bottom

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).