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A Recently Discovered Gandy Sketchbook
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 April 2016
Extract
A sketchbook, which has recently been acquired by Sir John Soane’s Museum, is one of the very few known to have survived by Joseph Michael Gandy (1771–1843), the architectural perspectivist and architect, and the only one to show him working ‘on the spot’ as architect, artist, surveyor and antiquarian. There are many sides to Gandy: he was a visionary, a complex theorist, a brilliant perspectivist and a highly original architect who produced a handful of pioneering works, as well as two separate pattern books entitled The Rural Architect and Designs for Cottages, Cottage Farms and Other Rural Buildings, both published in 1805. That he was also a ‘scientific antiquary’ is well demonstrated in this sketchbook which provides within its modest format the source material for his architectural schemes at Lancaster Castle and Storrs Hall as well as for his illustrations of Roslin Chapel in Britton’s Architectural Antiquities and his great perspectives of Roslin, Merlin’s Tomb and Melrose Abbey.
- Type
- Section 3: Drawings and Designs
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 2001
References
Notes
1 Purchased at Sotheby’s, 15 July 1999, Lot 1, with the help of the National Art Collections Fund and Friends of the National Libraries. Provenance: by descent from Thomas Gandy, J. M. Gandy’s son.
2 Other buildings represented by single sketches are Shrewsbury Market House, Melrose Abbey, Kelso Abbey and unidentified schemes.
3 Storrs Hall, sold in 1889 by a descendant of John Bolton and converted into a hotel, was recorded in 1998 by the RCHME (since April 1999 part of English Heritage), and the historical and architectural information about it in this article is derived from Ian Goodall and Simon Taylor, ‘Storrs Hall, Windermere, Cumbria’, English Heritage Historic Building Report, NBR No. 30550 (2001) held by English Heritage in the National Monuments Record Centre, Swindon.
4 John Bolton bought Bolton Hall in 1804, altering it to Gandy’s designs, in the Gothic style, between 1806 and 1808. See Whitaker, T. D., The History and Antiquities of the Deanery of Craven, in the County of York (Leeds and London, 1878), p. 131 Google Scholar; Colvin, Howard, A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects, 1600-1840, 3rd edn (New Haven and London, 1995), p. 389 Google Scholar. Bolton Hall was demolished in 1959 but was recorded by RCHME in February that year: see Robin McDowall, ‘Bolton Hall, Bolton-by-Bowland, West Yorkshire’, English Heritage Historic Building Report, NBR No. 37779 (1959).
5 Graves, Algernon, The Royal Academy of Arts. A Complete Dictionary of Contributors and their Work from its foundation in 1769 to 1904, 11 (London, 1905), p. 199 Google Scholar. The drawings have not survived.
6 Op. cit., p. 198.
7 The watercolour is reproduced in Lukacher, Brian, Joseph Michael Gandy: ‘The poetical representation and mythography of architecture’, DPhil thesis (University of Delaware, 1987), pl. 31 Google Scholar.
8 Summerson, John, ‘The Vision of J. M. Gandy’, in Heavenly Mansions and other essays on architecture (London, 1949), pp. 111-34Google Scholar (pp. 114-15).
9 Thompson, Bruce, ‘A Naval Temple on Windermere’, Country Life, 29 November 1962, p. 1338 Google Scholar, is circumspect about Gandy as the architect of the boathouse and the Temple; but Des Hill (incorrectly writing of the boathouse as demolished) attributes both to Gandy: see ‘Gandy’s Professional Career’, vajoseph Michael Gandy (1771-1841), ed. Summerson, John, Lukacher, Brian and Hill, Des (London, 1982), pp. 26–35 Google Scholar (pp. 29-30).
10 Jessy Harden of Brathay Hall wrote in her diary that on 2 May 1805 she ‘breakfasted in the Temple of the Heroes, a summerhouse Sir John Legard built in honour of Lords Howe, Vincent, Duncan & Nelson’: see Foskett, Daphne, John Harden of Brathay Hall, 1772–1847 (Kendal, 1974), p. 28 Google Scholar.
11 The oil painting by Mary Dixon, wife of Jeremiah Dixon, owner of Fell Foot at the southern end of Windermere, is reproduced in Woof, Robert, ‘The Matter of Fact Paradise’, in The Lake District: A sort of national property (Cheltenham and London, 1986), pl. 7 Google Scholar.
12 Hankinson, Alan, The Regatta Men (Milnthorpe, 1988), pp. 2–5 Google Scholar, Appendix: Peter Crosthwaite’s map of Pocklington’s Island, republished 1788.
13 Wordsworth, William, A Guide through the District of the Lakes, 5th edn (Kendal, 1835), p. 63 Google Scholar.
14 For accounts of Harrison and Gandy’s work at the Castle see Crook, J. M. in Country Life, 15 April 1971, pp. 876-79Google Scholar; Champness, John, Lancaster Castle: A brief history (Preston, 1993)Google Scholar; Chalkin, Christopher, ‘Quarter Sessions Building in Lancashire, 1770-1830’, Georgian Group Journal, X (2000), pp. 92–121 Google Scholar.
15 In the Lancaster City Museums.
16 Chalkin, art. cit., does not credit Gandy with the design of the Female Penitentiary, although he exhibited a perspective of the building at the RA in 1822 (no. 888) with the title ‘. . . designed and now building under the direction of the architect’.
17 Maggi, Angelo, ‘Poetic stones: Roślin Chapel in Gandy’s sketchbook and Daguerre’s Diorama’, Architectural History, 42 (1999), pp. 263-83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
18 Britton, John, Architectural Antiquities of Great Britain, 5 vols (London, 1807-26), III, p. 47 Google Scholar.
19 Collection Frits Lugt, Fondation Custodia, Paris, 1998 A 666. We are most grateful to Brian Lukacher for drawing the letter to our attention.
20 Quoted in Bolton, Arthur T. (ed.), The Portrait of Sir John Soane RA (London, 1927), p. 348 Google Scholar.
21 Soane Museum, Private Correspondence, Gandy, 4 December 1821, 31.