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Reference number

Four large-scale designs for room cornices and entablatures, contemporary with those in 6/1

Purpose

Four large-scale designs for room cornices and entablatures, contemporary with those in 6/1

Signed and dated

  • 1689
    Main Year
  • 1690-94
    Other Years

Notes

These four drawings for cornices and entablatures (110/58, 59, 60 and 62) appear to be preliminary designs for the principal cornices and entablatures of the main rooms of the Privy Garden range. All four are identical in technique and are likely to date near to the early stages of design work for interiors at Hampton Court. They cannot be later than 1694, as 4 (110/62) bears the WM monogram, thus pre-dating Queen's Mary's death in late December that year. The grey-wash technique has affinities with that on the group of five designs for chimney-pieces which, as noted above in 6/1, appears to be earlier than that of the the main group of colour-washed designs. Moreover, this drawing and 110/60 are on identically watermarked paper to 110/32 (ornamental Fleur de Lys over 4WR, with triple lobe motif for the intermediate floret of the crown).

The staining patterns on the drawings provides clues to their grouping before the contents of the volume were reordered, prior to Dance's numbering of the sheets before he gave the volume to Soane in 1817. The staining pattern on 2 (110/59) closely matches that on Hawksmoor's two drawings for the bridge link between Queen's Mary's closet and the Privy Garden in September 1694 (section 5/1, nos. 2, 3; 110/20 and 21). The patterning on these two drawings be connected, in turn, with the staining on Hawksmoor's large-scale elevations for the principal fronts in 1689 (section 4 no. 1; 110/8) and his design for the grotto in the Orangery (section 5 no. 3; 110/17). This demonstrates that Gibbons's drawings and Hawksmoor's were together in the same volume at the time the staining occurred.

Level

Group

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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Contents of Four large-scale designs for room cornices and entablatures, contemporary with those in 6/1