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Reference number

SM D4/11/6

Purpose

Competition design for a public gallery awarded the Gold Medal of the Parma Academy in 1763, copies 1763-c.1765 and 1794 or later

Aspect

[2] Elevation of entrance front(s) and cross section(s)

Scale

to a scale (larger than [SM D4/11/5])

Inscribed

No 2

Signed and dated

  • 1763

Medium and dimensions

Pen, sepia and yellow ochre washes, shaded, pencil within double ruled brown and black pen and raw umber wash border on laid paper (695 x 475)

Hand

Dance

Watermark

J Whatman and fleur-de-lis in crowned cartouche and GR below

Notes

The elevation shows a 21-bay front with a nine-bay Doric colonnade in the centre flanked by rusticated six-bay wings, the inner three-bays projecting and pedimented. An entablature with a blocking course is surmounted by sculptured figures behind which rise twin domes and the two storey central hall. The cross-section includes details of decoration, and of a queen-post roof truss - a type common in Italy but rarely found at this date in England.

In many ways, the sections best reveal the intelligence and beauty of Dance's scheme; the varying height and shape of the compartments; the variety of lighting - oculi in the domes, clerestory in the barrel-vaulted grand gallery and elsewhere, small windows in depressed vaults; the interior treatment using modified elements from the exterior such as columns, alcoves and roundels, as well as the richness of the varying types of coffered ceiling.

The suggestion is that these two drawings on large imperial Whatman sheets (27 1/2 by 18 3/4 inches) were made in Rome. They differ from the three drawings later made in London ([SM D4/11/3], [SM D4/11/2], [D4/11/4]) from Rome on 7 June 1763. They may represent the penultimate design before Dance committed himself to the very large (four and five imperial sheets joined) competition drawings for the Academy of Parma. Or they could be copies to a smaller of three of those drawings made with great care as a record for himself so that, for instance, the 224 columns as well as the half-columns and semicircular alcove the plan are compass-drawn and the figures of fountains, statues and reliefs seen on [SM D4/11/6] are each shown. However, the vertical courses of rustication and the details of the Doric frieze on the right-hand side of the elevation are lacking.

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).