Dance's designs for a commercial art gallery, a theatre and a professional institution made their purpose and status very clear. However, in establishing an appropriate character for each building, compromises had to be made: the plan and structure of the Theatre Royal at Bath had already been decided by the architect-owner and the Royal College of Surgeons was designed in collaboration with another architect and included existing buildings.

The design of the Shakespeare Gallery - only the second purpose-built public gallery in England - offered the greatest scope. The building was composed of two tall storeys in a street of four-storey houses and shops, the temple front giving monumentality. The generous height, width and transparency of the entrance was an invitation to step inside a public building whose function as a gallery dedicated to representations of scenes from Shakespeare's plays was well advertised by the sculptured group of Shakespeare with Drama and Painting set in a picture-like framed recess, while two carved lyres, each within a wreath, represented Poetry.

As well as the interior decoration, Dance designed the principal front of the Theatre Royal in Bath. The planar composition is enlivened by well-judged details such as giant mask-capitals representing Comedy, Tragedy and Truth between ribboned festoons. Four carved stone lyres decorate the roofline together with a vigorously carved Royal Arms that underlines the status of the theatre.

The Royal College of Surgeons had two fronts. The Lincoln's Inn elevation, a reworking of existing terrace houses, was required to be 'appropriate' and a portico fronted by wide steps was provided. The building's status was marked by the inscription 'COLLEGIUM REGALE CHIRURGORUM' in the frieze and by the arms of the College with supporters on the parapet of of the portico flanked by tripodal braziers with serpents. The elevation to Portugal Street was more innovative - and discreet: its two small doors set diagonally in a three-storey arch closed fronted by railings not seeking to advertise the anatomy theatre and museum that lay behind the stripped Neo-Classical front. The aedicular framing of the giant arch was an echo of the aedicular storey over an arched entrance of the front to the Shakespeare Gallery.

See also Dance's preliminary scheme, of about 1806, for the London Institution on the site of Blackwell Hall, City of London.

Group

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