Architecture has always an intimate relationship with the allied arts of painting and sculpture. The Manuscripts Collection, therefore, contains a significant amount of information on these subject areas.
There are a number of letters in the Collection written by and to painters and sculptors, such as Matthew Coates Wyatt (1777-1862), Sir George Chalmers (d. 1791), Robert Smirke (1752-1845), Joseph Bonomi (1796-1878), Benjamin Robert Haydon (1786-1846), Sir Edward John Poynter (1836-1919), and Sir Gerald Kelly (1879-1972). Many of these letters are in connection with the affairs of the Royal Academy or addressed to the RIBA. There are also some essays and research papers on painters and sculptors, such as P.H. Hood's collection of papers on the life and work of Alfred Stevens (1817-1875).
Records relating to monuments and memorials often refer to sculptural elements. Examples include a number of projects by Sir Herbert Baker (1862-1946) such as the Winchester College Memorial Cloister and Rhodes Memorial in South Africa, numerous war memorials by Sir John Ninian Comper (1864-1960) and the Wellington Monument in St Paul's Cathedral by Alfred Stevens (1817-1875).
Notes and essays may cover architecture and its relation to the other arts. C.R. Cockerell's Royal Academy lecture notes, 1840-1856, refer to the union of architecture with painting and sculpture. Essays range from an essay of 1842 by E.T. Paris on the application to architecture of the higher branches of painting to a prize-winning essay of 1934 by Olive Briggs on the painted screens of Norfolk. Architects may also commission painters to create murals and other works. Ben Nicholson created a mural for Jane Drew's pavilion for the Festival of Britain and she refers to this in one of the amusing anecdotes in her memoirs.
Architectural sculpture is often a very visible element on a building façade and modern works in particular have frequently caused strong public reaction. Charles Holden, for example, employed Jacob Epstein to design the sculpture on the London Transport Headquarters, 1928-1929. The figures he created , named 'Day' and 'Night', were uncompromisingly modern and unlike anything most people had seen before. At the time, they attracted a great deal of ridicule and abuse from the press and many of the public. The controversy is well documented in the press-cuttings collection and in his own notes Holden explains his ideas about the relationship between architecture and sculpture.