Design for Chimney-Piece with Pair of Putti
Creator(s): Grinling Gibbons 1648-1721
Date: Undated, but datable 1689-94
Accession Number: SM 110/45
Dimensions: 446mm x 240mm
Materials: Pen and russet-brown ink over graphite under-drawing with green, light pink, light green and grey washes, and with black ink redrawing of baseline; on laid paper
Location: Sir John Soane's Museum
Credit Line (copyright notice for material) : © Sir John Soane's Museum
Online Catalogue Entry : http://collections.soane.org/OBJECT287
NOTES ON THE ARTWORK
Design for a chimney-piece with a pair of putti. Gibbons’s overmantel has a central vertical background in light pink and an outer border in light green, probably for damask coverings, although he has not drawn in the usual architrave fixings. On 110/47 [Design for Chimney-Piece with Urn on this website] the fixings are shown, and the drawing as a whole is more complete. The coved cornice is a type found in the smaller rooms in the king’s and queen’s apartments at Hampton Court. Standing or seated cherubs are also found on Gibbons’s funerary monuments, where they are carved in marble and, in one instance, linked to a garland of flowers that overhangs a pediment (St Mary the Virgin Bottesford, monument for eighth earl of Rutland, d. 1679; Beard, 1989, fig. 88).
Literature: Wren Society, IV, pl. 38, top.
Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation.
Design for Chimney-Piece with Pair of Putti © Sir John Soane's Museum
