together with many preliminary drawings for the palace at Whitehall.
At the Royal Institute of British Architects is a drawing of the west
front of St Paul’s, together with many others, notably those of the
King Charles block at Greenwich, and almost the whole series which Kent
used for his second volume of “Designs of Inigo Jones.”
Besides these drawings there are yet others attributed to Jones at
the British Museum. Some of these are the originals of the design for
Whitehall Palace published by Campbell in his “Vitruvius Britannicus,”
which is quite different from that published by Kent. Others are
sketches of figures and drapery undoubtedly drawn by Jones. The
drawings used by Campbell were in 1717 in the possession of William
Emmett, of Bromley, an architect, but it is not known how he became
possessed of them, nor whether they once formed part of Webb’s
collection, but their style links them up with the rest of the drawings
of the palace.[27]
The whole of these drawings have until quite recently been regarded
as the work of Jones himself. Aubrey mentions them as his; Kent
published many of them as his; Campbell attributed to him those which
he used, presumably on the authority of Emmett. All subsequent writers
have taken the authorship for granted, although some have agreed that
Jones’s hand is not visible in the finished designs of the palace,
preserved at Worcester College. This acquiescence in established
opinion is not surprising. The drawings had not been thoroughly
examined and catalogued, and in particular those at one library had not
been collated with those at the others. But when recently the various
collections came to be catalogued and definitely arranged, when, by the
aid of photographs, they were brought together and compared one with
another, very interesting results were obtained. It soon became easy to
differentiate between Jones’s draughtsmanship and Webb’s. The result
was that it became apparent that nearly the whole of the drawings
should be assigned to Webb and very few to Jones. Nor would logic allow
a halt to be called there, and suffer us to say that Webb may have been
the draughtsman, but Jones was still the designer. For many of the
drawings are sketches with notes in Webb’s writing, which go to show
how he developed his ideas as he went along. It would be impossible in
the space at command to indicate fully which drawings are by Jones,
which are by Webb inspired by Jones, and which are of Webb’s own
design. But in the latter category the evidence constrains us to place
the designs for the palace at Whitehall, the designs in the second
volume of Kent, and those for King Charles’s block at Greenwich.[28]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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