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  • image SM volume 19/4

Reference number

SM volume 19/4

Purpose

Design for a garden temple on a trefoil plan, c.1757-8

Aspect

[1] Plan of a garden temple

Scale

1/4 in to 1ft

Inscribed

Plan of a design for a Temple and dimensions given

Signed and dated

  • c.1757-8

Medium and dimensions

Pen, sepia, raw umber and yellow washes, pencil on laid paper (350 x 465)

Hand

Dance

Watermark

I*Portal and fleur-de-lis in crowned cartouche and LVG

Notes

The plan form - drawn on an illusionistic scrolled sheet held on one side by two pins (or tacks) - consists of three lobes with a rectangular portico in antis having two columns set behind a further two columns; the overall dimensions are 47 by 43 feet.

Stroud (p.95, pl.26b) relates this design to a summerhouse for Cranbury of 'pale yellow brick [having] a slightly bowed front, with a central window ... flanked by semicircular colonnades of a Greek Doric order, an arrangement which in plan has an affinity with one of Dance's early designs for a garden "temple" of clover-leaf outline'.

Level

Drawing

If you have any further information about this object, please contact us: drawings@soane.org.uk

Sir John Soane's collection includes some 30,000 architectural, design and topographical drawings which is a very important resource for scholars worldwide. His was the first architect’s collection to attempt to preserve the best in design for the architectural profession in the future, and it did so by assembling as exemplars surviving drawings by great Renaissance masters and by the leading architects in Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries and his near contemporaries such as Sir William Chambers, Robert Adam and George Dance the Younger. These drawings sit side by side with 9,000 drawings in Soane’s own hand or those of the pupils in his office, covering his early work as a student, his time in Italy and the drawings produced in the course of his architectural practice from 1780 until the 1830s.

Browse (via the vertical menu to the left) and search results for Drawings include a mixture of Concise catalogue records – drawn from an outline list of the collection – and fuller records where drawings have been catalogued in more detail (an ongoing process).