A SCALE OF ENGLISH FEET (3 in to 1 ft)

Inscribed as above, dimensions given and (frieze) EO.L.L.GELLIO.L.F Signed: G DANCE ARCH/FECIT

• 1761-3 1794-5

Pen, grey and burnt umber washes, shaded, triple ruled and wash border trimmed on card (585 x 900)

Dance

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.

Drawing

Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

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