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Purpose

Preliminary designs for unidentified domed buildings: a mausoleum? and churches (5)

Notes

The eight drawings on five sheets catalogued here are grouped together since they are for domed buildings. They reveal Dance's interests in domical forms including saucer domes as well as fan shell decoration, oculi and centralised plans. Most are roughly and rapidly drawn: two [SM D3/14/33] recto and [SM D3/14/26] were made with straight edge and compasses but are unfinished. It has not been possible to identify them through [SM D3/14/34] and [SM D3/14/32] - catalogued as a design for a mausoleum? - have an affinity with Dance's studies for the Bank Stock Office made to help Soane in 1791. Harold Kalman has made a comparison with Soane's unexecuted triangular scheme for a sepulchral church for Tyringham, 1800-01 and the plans on the verso of [SM D2/14/33]. Again, comparison with some of the preliminary drawings made by the younger Dance for the Mansion House throw up intriguing but inconclusive possibilities as to identification; for example, a sheet of studies for an unrealised top-lit Saloon at the Mansion House.

LITERATURE. A.T. Bolton, Works of Sir John Soane, 1924, pp.16-22; P.du Prey, Sir John Soane, 1985, pp.58-9; M.Richardson & M.Stevens (eds), John Soane Architect: master of space and light, catalogue of an exhibition at the Royal Academy, 1999, pp.226-7.

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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.

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Contents of Preliminary designs for unidentified domed buildings: a mausoleum? and churches (5)