Shakespeare Gallery, 52 Pall Mall, Westminster, London, 1788-9

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George Dance office drawings: the drawings of George Dance the Elder and George Dance the Younger
- Public buildings (3)
  - Shakespeare Gallery, 52 Pall Mall, Westminster, London, 1788-9 (2). Drawings of Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery made for Soane's Royal Academy lectures

Soane office, George Dance the Younger, 52 Pall Mall, Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery (later the British Institution). SM 18/7/14. ©Sir John Soane's Museum, London. Photo: Geremy Butler

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Reference number

SM 18/7/14

Purpose

Shakespeare Gallery, 52 Pall Mall, Westminster, London, 1788-9

Aspect

[1] Front elevation

Scale

9/16 in to 1 ft

Inscribed

(red pen) 59 Dated: April:10 1810

Signed and dated

1788-9

Medium and dimensions

Pen, yellow ochre, blue, sepia, shaded, pencil, within multiple-ruled and sepia and black wash border on thick wove paper (980 x 685)

Hand

Soane office (Bailey)

Watermark

James Whatman Turkey Mill Kent

Notes

This elevation was prepared as drawing 32 for Soane's Lecture IV, first given at the Royal Academy on 29 January 1810 (according to the 'List of Soane's lecture illustrations at the Royal Academy', D Watkin, Sir John Soane: Enlightenment thought and the Royal Academy lectures, Cambridge 1996, p.32), though this drawing is dated 10 April 1810. A reduced version of the drawing is in the Soane Museum (SM, Soane Case 38, no.27). Soane's Day Book records on 10 April 1810 Mr Soane / About Drawing of the / British Gallery &c &c / Bailey, that is George Bailey (1792- 1860), a pupil in Soane's office.

Soane's choice of the Shakespeare Gallery (by the time of his lecture, the British Institution) was related to his condemnation of the illogical use of antae or of pilasters. It was a survey that ranged from the buildings of Antiquity via Palladio, Wren and Jones to Dance's Royal College of Surgeons. Soane's argument was that to use a massive entablature designed for columns over slender pilasters was a 'strange and extravagant absurdity' (Watkin, 1996, p.136).

REPRODUCED. A. Stratton, 'Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery in Pall Mall', Architectural Review, XLI, 1917, pp.49-52; Survey of London, Parish of St James, Westminister, XXX, 1960, pls 43a-c; Stroud fig 55b; M.Kerney, 'Ammonite architecture', Country Life, CLXXIII. 1983, pp.214-15, 218, fig.2.

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).