Perhaps the most striking of Dance's designs for mausolea and monuments - of which only the inconspicuous wall monument in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey was carried out - is that for a monument/mausoleum to George Washington. A pyramid was asked for by the United States Congress so the choice of that form was not Dance's although he used it for an unidentified and undated monumental entrance. There was an earlier precedent in Britain: Joseph Bonomi's pyramid mausoleum at Blickling Hall, Norfolk, 1794, with its Neo-Classical entrances. In Rome Dance would have seen the pyramidal tomb of Caius Caestius, c.12 BC, standing near the Protestant Cemetery.

Dance and the Egyptian style

Pyramids, obelisks and pylons are among the forms most associated with ancient Egyptian architecture: its decorative details include winged sun-discs, lotus and palm. Dance's use of such forms and details dates from about 1790 when he designed a chimney-piece with pylon-like jambs for the library of Lord Lansdowne's town house in Berkeley Square [SM D3/3/2] [SM D3/3/3] and [SM D3/3/4]). It included two Egyptian figures from Lansdowne's collection so that the character of the chimney-piece was pre-determined to a degree. Later in 1804, Dance designed another more chastely Egyptian chimney-piece with jambs battered on the outside edge and 'fringe' ornament for Stratton Park ([SM D1/3/16], [SM D1/4/9], [SM D1/4/8], and SM D1/4/35]). On the verso of one of these drawings ([SM D1/4/9]) there is a rough alternative elevation of an Egyptian portico for the Theatre Royal in Bath, pylon-like in form, with two bulbous columns, battered antae and a large cavetto cornice. This relates to another rough elevation (on the verso of [SM D3/8/3] for the Theatre Royal, 1804-05) that has winged sun-discs on the frieze. A further design for a mausoleum in an Egyptian/Arabian style was a satirical exercise possibly made in 1777. It has a pylon-like centre and titled '...antique Edifice in the middle of the Desert of Arabia...' [SM 69/8/2].

Several decorative details among Dance's drawings at the Soane museum could be described as Egyptian including lotus leaves on the base of a pilaster for Stratton Park [SM D1/4/53] and again, lotus leaves on the shaft of an unidentified alternative design for a dwarf column [SM D3/14/31]. To support the gallery of the Theatre Royal in Bath, Dance proposed gilded palm trees ([SM D3/8/15] verso) and his Ammonite order (see the Shakespeare Gallery), which includes lotus and palm leaves, may have Egyptian antecedents.

These examples show Dance's inclusive approach to architecture. More importantly, in developing his ideas for the doorways to the Washington pyramid, he was reaching back to something primitive, archaic and finally prehistoric.

For further designs see the preliminary studies for a mausoleum? and churches with domes.

LITERATURE. H. Colvin, Architecture and the after-life, 1991, pp.353-63, fig.343; J. S. Curl, Egyptomania, the Egyptian Revival: a recurring theme in the history of taste, Manchester, 1994, passim.

Group

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