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  • image SM 24/2/10
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

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