Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  Variant designs for a 'Gentleman's Country seat', c.1757-8 (5)

Purpose

Variant designs for a 'Gentleman's Country seat', c.1757-8 (5)

Notes

This was an exercise made under the tutelage of Dance's father whose handwriting can be seen on some of the drawings [SM volume 19/11], [SM volume 19/8] and [SM volume 19/10]. The Young Dance made a number of variant designs for a 'Gentleman's Country Seat' and the five drawings in the Soane Museum can be related to another six in the RIBA Drawings Collection that were made for the same project. These are stuck into a copy of The Architecture of A. Palladio (3rd ed., 1742) edited by Giacome Leoni - the 'Dance Leoni' volume - to which were added many drawings made from perhaps 1758, the year that the young Dance left for Rome.

Essentially the designs are all for a three-storey, six-part villa with the entrance facing north and with a room on either side having a bow on the east and west fronts. The south front has a projecting centre that is bowed or chamfered or flat with the two later plans (at the RIBA) showing first a bow and then a square projection. Of the six front elevations, the two earliest [SM volume 19/7] and [SM volume 19/9] have an Ionic portico in antis which is then banished in the next drawing to reappear either side of the centre and framing the first and second floor windows. Of the four later front elevations (at the RIBA), two have Ionic porticos, one has a giant order and a dome and another is so 'stripped' that it may in fact, be unfinished.

That Dance had no experience of country houses can be seen by the clumsy planning in which kitchen, scullery, larder, drying room and footman's room are mixed up with the reception rooms on the ground floor. The later schemes (at the RIBA) improve on those at the Soane Museum so that the final scheme (Dance Leoni Nos 43 and 44) is more disciplined and compact with a basement storey for the kitchen and other service rooms clearly shown.

Kalman drew attention to the related designs at the Soane Museum and suggested that they may be further associated with a design for the 'Garden front of a house for a gentleman in the country' exhibited by Dance at the Royal Academy in 1771 (see [SM D2/8/24] and [SM D2/8/25]).

LITERATURE. Catalogue of the Drawings Collection of the Royal Institute of British Architects, vol.C-F, 1972, entry for the 'Dance Leoni' volume by Harold Kalman,pp. 59-63.

Level

Group

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).  


Contents of Variant designs for a 'Gentleman's Country seat', c.1757-8 (5)