These two drawings are not from Dance's own collection but from Soane's. They are included here because they document a key building for which no drawings by Dance have survived at the Soane Museum or elsewhere. Whether the elevation and detail catalogued here were made from Dance's original drawings or from the building itself is not known though their precision suggests a graphic source. The Index to Journals 1799-1811 (CLRO safe) has an entry (f.15) that refers to a 'request to the Lord Mayor to permit the Drawing of the Shakespeare Gallery to be hung at the Guildhall' but if this was agreed, the drawing has not survived.

Client and site
The Shakespeare Gallery was built in 1788-9 for Alderman John Boydell (1719-1804) who was initially an engraver, then a print publisher as well as Lord Mayor of London, in 1790. He conceived the idea of commissioning paintings of Shakespearian scenes and characters from 33 artists including Reynolds, Romney, West, Fuseli and Kauffman, and these were hung in his gallery as well as engraved for sale. The site was a house of 1726-7 on the north side of Pall Mall (later No.52)

The front
As the elevation shows the Gallery, which cost 'upwards of £30,000' (DNB), had a stone frontage 25 feet wide with a composition in two stages reflecting the internal division of two storeys. The lower one had an unmoulded Serlian motif consisting of a lunette over a double-leafed door (shown as glazed in engravings) and wide side lights flanked by tall, narrow windows. In each spandrel there was a carved lyre within a ribboned laurel wreath. The upper stage has an aedicular motif with a pair of coupled pilasters with Ammonite capitals below a plain entablature and pediment and above a panelled string course. In the centre was a sculptured panel by Thomas Banks RA representing 'The Apotheosis of Shakespeare' with the poet between the Dramatic Muse and the Genius of Painting.

Ammonite capital
The capital consisted of a pair of ammonites, a palm leaf, a lotus leaf and two acanthus leaves. As in the Aeolic order the volutes of the Ammonite rise separately from the shaft and are not linked horizontally as are those of the Ionic order. Aeolic, an archaic Greek order probably derived from Asiatic and Egyptian sources, was discovered by archaeologists long after Dance's time and he could not have known it. However, the use of fossil ammonites with 'primitive' broad, ribbed water leaf and with lotus as well as Classical acanthus leaves suggests that Dance was seeking inspiration not only from Nature but also from an architecture older than that of Greece and Rome. In any case he was the first architect to use an Ammonite order though it was taken up later by a handful of others including Amon Wilds and Amon Henry Wilds in Lewes and Brighton. Stroud (p.161) suggests that Dance got the idea from Piranesi's Diverse maniere d'adornare i cammini (1769) where two plates illustrate shells (opposite pp. 20 and 21 of 'Apologia'). Other plates show a voluted shell form for consoles and bracket ends to friezes in three of Piranesi's designs for chimney pieces. Though Soane deplored the invention of new orders, he made an exception for Dance's Ammonite order. Addressing the Royal Academy students he commented that 'the beautiful capital in the drawing before you is so well conceived in all of its parts and so truly in the grand style of antiquity that it is impossible for any man with the least spark of knowledge of architecture, or with any love for the art, not to feel highly gratified with this production of successful genius' (Lecture III, quoted in Watkin 1996, p.517). Soane's collection includes large ammonite fossils - there are two in the Monument Court on the top of the north wall of the Soane Museum (SM, MC 2 and MC 3).

Sources for the front
Stroud (p.161) suggest that Dance 'had in mind the Roman tomb houses or temples, such as that of Clitumnus near Spoleto, or those he would have seen along the Appian way during his stay in Italy', such as perhaps the temple-fronted tomb of Annia Regilla near Rome. Kalman (pp.135 and 137) gives the 'upper level of the frontispiece of Vanbrugh's old Board of Ordnance at Woolwich Arsenal' as one possible source and also Piranesi's unconventional design shown in a vignette on the title page of his Parere su l'architettura (1765).

Plan and lighting
Inside the building, the gallery on the first floor was arranged as three enfilade rooms linked by plain round arches. The stair rose into the centre room which, like the south room, was approximately 37 feet long while the north room was 41 feet in length. Each room, 23 feet wide, had a large rectangular lantern set in a deep cove, which (with the position of the stair in the gallery itself) allowed more wall space for picture hanging and gave a more even light.

Picture galleries at this date were not common. Dance had some theoretical experience of gallery design gained earlier from his competition scheme for a public gallery that was awarded the gold medal of the Parma Academy in 1763. Though the planning of this unbuilt design was on a palatial scale, functional considerations such as natural light sources were studied and, for example, four sculpture galleries were lit by occuli with fountains placed strategically below. Chambers had designed the Great Room at Somerset House in the 1780s and given it top-lighting but it was only from about 1795 that a number of top-lit galleries in private houses in London and the country were constructed. For instance, James Lewis, with whom Dance was to collaborate on the building of the Royal College of Surgeons, remodelled Cleveland House for the 3rd Duke of Bridgewater, 1795-8; his work included a gallery 113 feet long, the centre top-lit by a large rectangular lantern.

In a study of British art gallery design from 1790, Giles Waterfield wrote that 'the interior of the building played an important part in the development of art galleries in England' (1991, p.130). The entrance foyer with an attendant who took charge of sticks and umbrellas, the wide easy staircase, the novel division into three rooms that were distinct but visually connected and the use of top-lighting were all to be influential. Certainly, Soane seems to have borrowed from the Shakespeare Gallery for his designs for Dulwich Picture Gallery, 1811. In particular as Waterfield (1987, p.11) noted 'the sequence of plain round arches linking the exhibition spaces at Dulwich is reminiscent of ... the Shakespeare Gallery.' Soane also adopted the idea of top-lighting that Dance later employed for the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons in which circular lanterns replaced the less sophisticated rectangular ones used in his Pall Mall building. At Dulwich, Soane used octagonal and stretched octagonal lanterns for the galleries.

It is possible that the hinged picture panels that are such a distinctive feature of Soane's design for his top-lit Picture Room at 12 Lincoln's Inn Fields, 1819, and the second Picture Room behind no.14 (realised in 1824) had their source in Alderman Boydell's shop in the Strand, which was established before the gallery in Pall Mall. And that the idea might well have come from Dance.

Later history
The Shakespeare Gallery was opened in June 1789, initially with a collection of 34 pictures that by 1802 had grown to 162; the publication of engraved copies began in 1791.

Unfortunately, Boydell fell into financial difficulties and the building and its contents were sold in 1805. The newly founded British Institution leased the building and exhibited selling and loan exhibitions. In 1868 or soon after, the one-time Shakespeare Gallery was demolished to make way for the Marlborough Club (which is presently used as offices) at 52 Pall Mall.

Views
Representations of the exterior of Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery, other than those given here, include: an engraving by Samuel Rawle (1771-1860) for the frontispiece to the European Magazine, 1804 (Guildhall Library, Prints and Maps Department, Record: 22970); C. F. Bell, Annals of Thomas Banks, 1938, plate XIV.

LITERATURE. DNB (Boydell); A. Stratton, 'Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery in Pall Mall', Architectural Review, XLI, 1917, pp.49-52; Survey of London, St James, Westminster, XXIX, 1960, pp.335-8 and p.493, figs 233 a-d (Cleveland House); British Museum, Crace Views, XI, sheet 20, No.47; interior view in T. Rowlandson & A. Pugin, R. Ackermann's Microcosm of London, vol.I, 1808-10, opposite p.99; Stroud pp.160-61; Kalman pp.134-41, 340-43; M. Kerney, 'Ammonite architecture', Country Life, CLXXIII, 1983, pp. 214-15, 218; G. Waterfield, Soane and after, the architecture of Dulwich Picture Gallery, catalogue of an exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, 1987, pp.10-13; G. Waterfield (ed.), Palaces of art, art galleries in Britain 1790-1990, 1991, catalogue of an exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery and the National Gallery of Scotland, pp. 80-2, 129-32; D. Watkin, Sir John Soane: Enlightenment thought and the Royal Academy lectures, Cambridge 1996.

Group

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