Egyptian Hall, Mansion House, City of London, 1795

Explore Collections

You are here: CollectionsOnline / Egyptian Hall, Mansion House, City of London, 1795

Browse

George Dance office drawings: the drawings of George Dance the Elder and George Dance the Younger
- Some work in the City of London (11)
  - Egyptian Hall, Mansion House, City of London, 1795 (1). Design for lowering the roof of the Egyptian Hall. Design, close to as executed, dated October 1795

Use of images and copyright
Enlarge this Image

Print this image in A4 view

Reference number

SM D3/7/1

Purpose

Egyptian Hall, Mansion House, City of London, 1795

Aspect

[1] Cross-section showing the king-post roof truss and coffered ceiling and plan at two levels of Half the Ceiling in Ledgiment [sic]

Scale

to a scale

Inscribed

as above, labelled Beam (twice), Plate (four times), King post, Principal, Inter Tye and some dimensions given including 9.10 (five times) between centre of bays Dated: (faint pencil) Oct^r 1795

Signed and dated

1795

Medium and dimensions

Pen and pencil on wove paper (285 x 580)

Hand

Dance

Notes

Dr Sally Jeffery (letter July 1996) wrote 'I do think [the drawing] is of the Egyptian Hall at the Mansion House. The dimensions fit - 9ft 10 in is the distance between the centre of the bays - and the roof truss is very close to what was eventually built. It is very similar to a drawing in the Corporation of London Records Office (MAN/GEN 12) .... Here Dance (or someone else) has added an additional brace, and you can see the as-built result in an 1881 drawing (CLRO, MAN/GEN 54) .... Your drawing looks like Dance working out detailed dimensions just before the final contract for lowering the roof, which was signed with William Rolfe on 11 November 1795. Drawings were shown to the committee on 16 October 1795 and approved on 28 October, and I see that there is an annotation 'October 1795' on the drawing.

The Clerk of the Works Journal from 1792 to 1801 (CLRO 131B f.140 verso) has an entry for 12 October 1795, recording that a model was to be made of the design for lowering the roof. This was made by Fisher and cost £2.13.0.

David Yeomans (email, 19 July 2001) commented that 'The curious thing about this [design] is the way in which there are long timbers to the top of the king post to carry the ceiling plaster falsework. In the earlier churches with vaulted ceilings this falsework was always hung from the beam of the trusses'.

'Ledgement' refers to the stretching out of the barrel-vaulted ceiling on a plan 'so that the dimensions of the different sides may be easily ascertained' (OED). Dance uses the same term - a 'section in ledgement' - for the Royal College of Surgeons ([SM D5/3/24]).

See drawing by George Dance the Younger or his office for designs for alterations to the 'cortile', the Egyptian Hall and the front steps at the Mansion House.

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).