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, 52 Pall Mall, Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery (later the British Institution), Fancy order entablature, capital and base for the Ammonite order. SM 24/2/10. ©Sir John Soane's Museum, London. Photo: Ardon Bar-Hama

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Reference number

SM 24/2/10

Purpose

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

Aspect

[2] Elevation of Ammonite order

Scale

1/5 FS approximately

Inscribed

(black pen) 9, (red pen) 411

Signed and dated

1788-9

Medium and dimensions

Pen, yellow ochre, blue and sepia washes, shaded, pencil, within triple ruled sepia and black wash border on thick wove paper (910 x 585)

Hand

Soane office (Bailey)

Notes

This elevation was prepared as drawing 8 for Soane's Lecture III, first given at the Royal Academy on 22 January 1810. It is by the same hand as [SM 18/7/14]. A reduced version of the drawing is at the Soane Museum (SM Soane Case 37, No.8). Soane chose to illustrate and commend Dance's Ammonite capital in an analysis of the orders.

The elevation shows the base, top and bottom of the shaft, the capital and the entablature. The details of the cornice shown here are from the raking cornice of the crowning pediment and not its more simple bed-mould cornice.

The base is conventional with plinth, and torus, fillet, scotia, fillet, torus, fillet and apophyge mouldings. Dance's inventive capital employs a pair of ammonites with five-petalled flowers at each eye, a broad, ribbed water leaf, a lotus leaf and two acanthus leaves. The architrave is plain and divided from the equally plain frieze by fillet, astragal, ovolo and cyma reverse mouldings. The cornice consists of astragal, cyma reversa, corona, astragal, fillet and cyma recta mouldings.

REPRODUCED. A. Stratton, ' Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery in Pall Mall, Architectural Review, XLI, 1917, pp.49-52.

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).