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You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  Copy drawing, probably by C.H. Tatham, dating 1824 or soon after, of an overlay plan of old and new St Paul's by William Dickinson, c.1709-10, in the Wren Collection at All Souls College, Oxford
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Reference number

SM volume 111/72

Purpose

Copy drawing, probably by C.H. Tatham, dating 1824 or soon after, of an overlay plan of old and new St Paul's by William Dickinson, c.1709-10, in the Wren Collection at All Souls College, Oxford

Aspect

Plan

Scale

100 ft to 1 5/16 inches

Inscribed

Probably by C.H. Tatham, beneath scale in grey ink, The Sites of Old and New St Pauls / Compared / from a Drawing by S.r CWren in / the Library of All Souls Coll. Oxon --; and with dimensions vertically to right of the plans, 500 [for new St Paul's], 610 [for old St Paul's].

Signed and dated

  • 1824 or soon after

Medium and dimensions

Pen and grey ink with grey washes, on laid paper; 219 x 133.

Hand

Probably C.H. Tatham.

Watermark

[WH]ATMAN [TURKE]Y MILL [18]24

Notes

The drawing is a free copy of an overlay plan by William Dickinson of old and new St Paul's Cathedral in the Library All Souls College, Oxford (Geraghty 2007, no.109). In 1816 Tatham made red-ink tracings of two St Paul's elevations in the All Souls Library: the 'Greek Cross' design of c.1672 and an elevation of the west front by Simon Gribelin of c.1701-02, preparatory for his engraving of 1702 (Geraghty 2007, nos 53 and 106). These two tracings are in the Greenwich Hospital volume (SM volume 109/76 and 77), which Tatham gave to Soane in 1833. Tatham's handwriting in the letter of 23 July 1833 that accompanied the volume (now pasted on its front flyleaf) closely matches the hand on this drawing.

The copy drawing simplifies the layout of the west end of old St Paul's in Dickinson's original by omitting the west towers and west portico. The orientation is changed to place east at the top of the sheet. The street blocks of the precinct are omitted. As in the original drawing, the plan of the new cathedral is misaligned in relation to the pre-fire church: the axis of the new building was tilted in a north-easterly direction at the centre of the crossing rather than at the apse of the choir, as shown here.

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).