[9] Design for a chimney-piece with two large cherubs on the mantel shelf holding a swag of flowers, and an overmantel frame bordered by acanthus, fruit and flowers, and with a roundel in the cresting

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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
    - Thirteen designs for tall and richly sculpted chimney-pieces, in a variety of wash colours; probably for principal state rooms

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Reference number

SM, volume 110/45

Purpose

[9] Design for a chimney-piece with two large cherubs on the mantel shelf holding a swag of flowers, and an overmantel frame bordered by acanthus, fruit and flowers, and with a roundel in the cresting

Aspect

Elevation, partly unfinished on right

Scale

About ^7/₈inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

In ink by George Dance at bottom right, Gd, and to right in C19 hand, (44)

Signed and dated

Undated, but datable 1689-94

Medium and dimensions

Pen and russet-brown ink over graphite under-drawing with green, light pink, light green and grey washes, and with black ink redrawing of baseline; on laid paper, with pinkish-brown staining in top 40 mm of sheet; 10 mm repair strip in wove paper at bottom of sheet, probably 1850; 446 x 240, including 10 mm repair strip at bottom of sheet

Hand

Gibbons

Watermark

Countermark: JJ

Notes

Gibbons's overmantel has a central vertical background in light pink and an outer border in light green, probably for damask coverings, although he has not drawn in the usual architrave fixings. On 10, below (110/47) the fixings are shown, and the drawing as a whole is more complete. The coved cornice is a type found in the smaller rooms in the king's and queen's apartments at Hampton Court.Standing or seated cherubs are also found on Gibbons's funerary monuments, where they are carved in marble and, in one instance, linked to a garland of flowers that overhangs a pediment (St Mary the Virgin Bottesford, monument for eighth earl of Rutland, d. 1679; Beard, 1989, fig. 88).

Literature

Wren Society, IV, pl. 38, top

Level

Drawing

Exhibition history

Grinling Gibbons and the Art of Carving, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 22 October 1998 - 24 February 1999

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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