A Recently Discovered Gandy Sketchbook

Abstract

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.