Design for part of the Royal Gallery, 18 December 1823

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Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
- Office of Works
  - London: Palace of Westminster: designs for alterations and additions, 1793-1828 (499)
    - London: House of Lords, Palace of Westminster: alterations and additions, 1817-28 (220)
      - Royal Gallery and Committee Rooms, 1823-24 (66)
        Further designs for the Royal Gallery, December 1823

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Reference number

SM 51/2/36

Purpose

Design for part of the Royal Gallery, 18 December 1823

Aspect

Section of part of the Royal Gallery

Scale

bar scale of 5/8 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

as above, labelled: House of Lords, Old Wall, and dimensions given

Signed and dated

18 December 1823
18^th Dec^r 1823

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pink and yellow ochre washes on wove paper (530 x 736)

Hand

David Alfred Mocatta (1806 - 1882)
Pupil March 1821 - February 1827.

Notes

This drawing shows the end of the Royal Gallery next to the entrance to the Painted Chamber looking north and west in two sections. The 'Old Wall' belongs to the medieval Painted Chamber, which explains its thickness. The arch has multiple roll mouldings in the archivolt and further roll mouldings in the soffit, as well as a caduceus motif (a winged staff entwined with two serpents). The caduceus is an attribute of Mercury and therefore represents, among else, commerce, no doubt intended in this instance as a reference to British economic prosperity. The entrance beneath the arch in section to the right leads into a small closet.

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).