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- George Dance office drawings: the drawings of George Dance the Elder and George Dance the Younger
Reference number
Purpose
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Inscribed
Signed and dated
- 1777
Medium and dimensions
Hand
Watermark
Notes
The signature of star and olive branch on the backs of the otherwise unsigned drawings for Design A seems to unite them as does the 'No 2' on the recto here, and they presumably relate to the competition held in 1777. The competition conditions were announced from 22 April 1777 and required competitors to produce at least two plans, a section and an elevation of the principal front to a scale of 14 feet to an inch; entries had to be handed in by the end of May.
P.du Prey (John Soane, the making of an architect, 1982, p.41) in his discussion of the St Luke's competition considered that Dance was definitely not responsible for Design A 'on grounds of style, the extreme derivativeness of the proposal, and the uncertain handling of motifs, such as the cluttered end pavilions' and argued that the design may be an unclaimed competition entry that passed into Dances' possession.
E. McParland (James Gandon Vitruvius Britiannica, 1985, pp.24-5) suggests James Gandon as a possible author relying on details such as 'the cupola with its diagonally placed columns the tall relieving arch of the pavilions, the stepped angles, the surface recessions, and the Pantheon-derived staircase gallery [that] all find immediate parallels in Gandon's other work. The grey wash technique is familiar from known Gandon drawings.' On the other hand 'the designs are not impressive. The central and end blocks are meagre for such a long front, and the management of projection and recession across the facade is arbitrary rather than forceful .... It is as if the author shrank from utilitarian expressiveness ... to compromise with the more polite demands of conventional decoration'.
REPRODUCED. P. du Prey, John Soane, the making of an architect, 1982, fig.3.3.
Level
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).