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Monument in the form of a mausoleum for George Washington (1732-99) Washington, USA, 1800 (4). Preliminary designs and unexecuted design

Notes

The United States Congress voted for a monument (with tomb) to George Washington on 24 December 1799, ten days after his death and two years after he stepped down as the first President of the United States. It was to be pyramidal in form and was to be erected in the new capital which, Farington noted in his diary (29 November 1794) was 'laid out, but no buildings erected'. Benjamin Henry Latrobe (who went to America from England in 1796) submitted a pyramid design in April 1800 but political squabbling seems to have prevented its acceptance. Dance's design was submitted by his friend Benjamin West, the American-born painter and Royal Academician, narrowly approved by the Congress in January 1801 but blocked in the new Republican-dominated Congress two months later.

On the strength of Dance's design for Washington's monument, Colvin (1991, pp.354-358) places him with Boulée, Ledoux and Freidrich Gilly among the pioneers of an architecture that 'transcended the limitations of archaeology and gave classical architecture a new intensity of meaning by stripping down to its essentials and eliminating the clichés of the classical vocabulary...[giving rise to a] new style of geometric simplicity and often of historical archaism'. Here Dance's 'architecture could do no more to emphasise the rugged fortitude of one of the founders of American independence'.

A monument to George Washington was completed only in 1884. It takes the form of an obelisk 555 feet high.

LITERATURE. H. Colvin, Architecture and the after-life, 1991, pp.354, 358, fig.343 (diagram of Dance's development of ideas as shown on [SM D3/13/5]; S.S. Cohen, 'Monuments to greatness: George Dance, Charles Polhill and Benjamin West's design for a memorial to George Washington', Virginia Magazine, 1991, IC, No.2,pp.187-203 ([SM D3/13/4], [SM D3/13/6], [SM D3/13/5] reproduced as figs. F,G,E).

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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 Monument in the form of a mausoleum for George Washington (1732-99) Washington, USA, 1800 (4). Preliminary designs and unexecuted design