a bird’s-eye, or elevated perspective view of an unexecuted design for the rebuilding of Brasenose College, Oxford, in the early 18th century, from ‘Oxonia Depicta sive Collegiorum et Aularum in Iclyta academia Oxoniensi Ichnographica et Scenographica..’, by Williams. The acquisition of land from several colleges to allow building of the Radcliffe Camera led to several further small land exchanges and acquisitions between them to iron out a few territorial irregularities of access and contiguous ownership, as some of the colleges needed to reorientate themselves to some degree. Brasenose College now desired frontage onto the High Street, which created a potential opportunity for extensive remodelling of the entire college along fashionable neoclassical lines. Nicholas Hawksmoor was engaged to submit proposals, and his first design, upon which this view is very closely based, appears in an engraving by George Vertue for the Oxford Almanack of 1723. William Williams drafted the ground plan for that design, and then produced this very slightly modified perspective view, projected almost head on, instead of being angled from the right, and without the prominent allegorical figures in the foreground, of Vertue’s rendering. In the upper area of the plate is a central title banderole, with a dedication catouche to college benfactors, William, Thomas and John Cartwright, upper left, and the coat-of-arms of the Cartwright family in the upper right corner,
engraving, 455 x 555 mm. (17 7/8 x 21 7/8 in), slight browning along the central vertical fold, a repaired short tear near the foot of the fold, just through the borderline, another in the left margin, well outside the plate,