Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  Design for a Royal Gallery, December 1822

Browse

  • image SM 71/2/68
Use of images and copyright
Enlarge this Image
Print this image in A4 view  (icon indicating printer link)

Reference number

SM 71/2/68

Purpose

Design for a Royal Gallery, December 1822

Aspect

Perspective Sketch of a Design for the proposed Royal Gallery forming the / Approach for His Majesty to the House of Lords

Inscribed

as above

Signed and dated

  • December 1822
    Lincolns Inn Fields, December 1822

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen, sepia, blue and yellow washes, shaded, with multi-ruled caput and black wash border on wove paper (408 x 303)

Hand

Soane Office

Notes

A complete rebuilding of the room marked 'B' on SM 71/2/84, Soane's new Royal Gallery has three bays with characteristic pendentive domes, the centre one of which carries a lantern and at least one of which appears to be painted with a naturalistic sky effect. The domes are richly ornamented with scrolls, rosettes and acanthus motifs. The plan of the room is shown on SM 71/2/85, although the perspective differs in some respects. For instance, the apses in the perspective are top lit, and the niches in the apses on the plan become open arches. Furthermore the perspective shows no columns whereas the plan has pairs of columns between each of the bays. Soane favoured top-lighting for galleries as can be seen at Dulwich Picture Gallery and his own Picture Room at Lincoln's Inn Fields. The panelled double-doors at the end of the gallery lead through to the Painted Chamber. The Royal Gallery was executed in 1824 to an entirely different design.

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).