- English Baroque Drawings: architecture, sculpture and garden design
The tall pedestals in the design were not executed. This was probably the result of an instruction Hawksmoor received from the Committee on 6 August 1713 'to make an Estimate of finishing the Stone Stairs at the Terras next the Thames, in the plainest manner, without any ornaments at present' (Wren Society, VI, p. 68). The fine pen and brown ink and light grey wash technique, combined with loose pen shading, is characteristic of Hawksmoor's hand in the c.1711-15 period (see [10/4]).
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).