Design for Victoria and Albert Museum, South Court, lunette gallery, Godfrey Sykes or from his studio, ca. 1860s

Pen and ink drawing with watercolour, forming a design for part of the lunette gallery (now Room 102) of the Victoria and Albert Museum. The design shows a balustraded gallery filling the semi-circular tympanum of one of the two northernmost column-supported roof trusses of the South Court. On its north side, the gallery is closed by a blank wall; on its south side, it is separated from the South Court by a decorative ironwork balustrade which curves inwards at either end. The balustrade is divided into four sections by hexagonal shafts; the shafts rest on the capitals of columns belonging to the storey below. Above, the barrel-vaulted ceiling of the lunette-shaped gallery is decorated with alternately square and rectangular compartments. The square compartments contain small figures, as do roundels set beneath the balustrade. The drawing is lightly finished with blue, red and buff watercolour.

As built during the 1860s, the richly-embellished South Court (since reclad internally; now Rooms 38-39) of the Victoria and Albert Museum consisted of two long parallel halls, bordered at the northern end by a first-floor gallery or corridor (now Room 102). Fitted beneath the curved roof trusses of the two halls, the gallery in effect occupied two vast semi-circular recesses. As seen in this design, perhaps by Godfrey Sykes or Francis Moody, on the southern side it looked down into the South Court. The closed, northern side was intended to be decorated, but only one lunette-shaped fresco was produced: the Industrial Arts as Applied to War by Lord Leighton (Leighton also painted a fresco for the equivalent gallery added to the south end of the South Court). Today the gallery retains much of its original appearance, but its long southern side is now closed in.

D.85A-1887