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  • image SM volume 19/5
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Reference number

SM volume 19/5

Purpose

Design for a town house, c.1757-8 (1)

Aspect

[1] Front elevation

Scale

1/8 in to 1ft

Signed and dated

  • c.1757-8

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pink, sepia, raw umber, blue and red washes, pencil within single ruled and wash border on laid paper. (460 x 355)

Hand

Dance

Watermark

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

Notes

The design - drawn on an illusionistic scrolled sheet held down by pins (or tacks) - shows a plain, five-bay, three-storey house over a raised basement with a pedimented door approached by six steps.

The design is restrained with plain windows relieved only by sills on the upper floors and a pedimented door of the sort that the elder Dance might have designed.

It seems that this is another of Dance's juvenile productions made as part of his early training under his father. Like his design for a temple on a trefoil plan [SM volume 19/4], it is drawn as though on scrolled paper fixed by nails and alarmingly, the chimneys at each end have flames as well as smoke erupting from them.

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).