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Reference number

SM volume 111/41

Purpose

[1] Survey plan of the ground floor of Hampton Court Palace, including the tennis court, probably intended for engraving, c.1699

Aspect

Ground plan, but with some areas at first floor level included (e.g. the hall at raised ground-floor level, and the applied orders of the Privy Garden and Park fronts)

Scale

100 feet = 3 7/10 inches

Signed and dated

  • Undated, but datable c.1699

Medium and dimensions

Pen and brown ink with black wash; on laid paper, backed by C20 tissue and white canvas strips (to reinforce folds); single sheet, save for narrow strip joined at top left 677 x 675, including joined strip at top left, which is 88 x 200

Hand

Unidentified, but possibly that of William Dickinson

Watermark

Strasbourg Lily / 4WR; IHS /IVILLEDARY

Notes

This plan can be dated to the period when works resumed on the interior of the palace in the spring and summer of 1699, but before the laying out of the Broad Walk and the associated walls and gates along the east front of the palace from early 1700. The construction of the walls and gates along the east front involved the demolition of the canted turret at the south end of the narrow corridor that links the north range of the palace with the Tennis court. Immediately south of this turret, the plan shows the walls of the former Tudor Queen's Long Gallery broken off, indicating that demolition was anticipated at the time the plan was drawn but had not yet happened. Another indication of a c.1699 date is the absence of any internal detail within the plan of the chapel. The chapel interior was refurbished from early in 1700. When work resumed in 1699 the scheme for the grotto in the orangery, which had been costed in 1693, and for which a design had been prepared (5, no. 3; 110/17), was not put in hand. Work on the grotto is not part of Wren's estimate of April 1699. This drawing illustrates an alternative treatment for the central bay of the grotto. It now provides access from the Privy Garden to Fountain Court.

This drawing is the only complete ground plan of Hampton Court Palace from the William and Mary period. It is therefore of considerable importance as a record of Wren's works of alteration up to and including the start of the second phase in 1699. The hand cannot be identified with certainty, but it is more precise than Hawksmoor's in plans of this kind from the period c.1698-99 (e.g. his plans for Whitehall Palace of 1698). William Dickinson, who was working as a draughtsman for projects at Hampton Court in 1699-1700 (see 7; 110/27-29), is one possible candidate.

Literature

Wren Society, IV, pl. 9

Level

Drawing

Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

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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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