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It is frustrating that a design, even if unexecuted, which had significance for Dance remains unidentified. It was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1785, and therefore its date, as well as character, precludes its use as a tomb for Dance's wife Mary (born Gurney), who died in 1791 (Stroud p.171). If we search for a public figure worthy of commemoration, the choice might fall on the statesman William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham (1708-78). As it turned out, a huge monument by the elder John Bacon was erected in Westminster Abbey in 1784 with a statue of Pitt and allegories of Prudence, Fortitude, Britannia, Earth and Ocean. Two years earlier another large monument by the same sculptor was erected at the Guildhall with Pitt in Roman dress attended by Commerce and the City, and by Britannia reclining on a lion.
LITERATURE. H. Colvin, Architecture and the after-life, 1991.
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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.
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).