Scale
A SCALE OF ENGLISH FEET (3 in to 1 ft)
Inscribed
Inscribed as above, dimensions given and (frieze) EO.L.L.GELLIO.L.F
Signed: G DANCE ARCH/FECIT
Signed and dated
Medium and dimensions
Pen, grey and burnt umber washes, shaded, triple ruled and wash border trimmed on card (585 x 900)
Hand
Dance
Notes
This is a highly finished drawing with a 'chiselled' serif title that shows the festoons and non-skeletal butcher's shop bucrania (that is, the chubby ox-heads of early Roman architecture) of the frieze that was used by Soane, at, for instance, Pitzhanger and Tivoli Corner, Bank of England. An unsigned copy was made of it by Soane, probably at the same time as the 'Geometrical Elevation' [SM D3/1/3] since they are both in identical frames and hang together in the South Drawing Room Loggia in the Soane Museum. A copy of [SM D3/1/6] was also made for his Royal Academy Lecture III, No.50 [SM 23/8/1], reproduced in A.T. Bolton, Lectures on architecture, 1929, pl.11) that was compared with a copy [SM, 23/8/2] of the same subject from A. Desgodetz, Les Edifices antiques de Rome (1682). Soane's point was that the French architect's measured drawing was inaccurate unlike the 'drawing of the same building from my own mensurations which have been collated with those of several other people' adding, 'the uncommon accuracy of one of them in particular, who is a member of this Institution, is well known' (quoted in D. Watkin, Sir John Soane: Enlightenment thought and the Royal Academy lectures, Cambridge, 1996, p.352). This was a reference to Dance whose drawings of Temple at Tivoli Soane, had of course, copied. REPRODUCED. J. Mosley, The Nymph and the grot: the revival of the sanserif letter, 1999.
Level
Drawing
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).
