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Reference number

SM D3/8/1

Purpose

Theatre Royal, Beauford Square, Bath, 1804-5

Aspect

[1] Rough elevation with panelled pilasters and rough perspective

Scale

not to scale

Signed and dated

  • 1804-5

Medium and dimensions

Pencil and warm sepia wash, hatching, shaded on grey laid paper (255 x 495)

Hand

Dance

Notes

The elevation shows a three-storey, 11-bay front with segmental-arched ground floor above which the projecting five-bay centre is emphasised by a balcony/canopy supported on brackets and by pilasters (outlined by mouldings) with mask 'capitals' and crowned by antefixae centred over the end pilasters, and the Royal Arms. The three-bay ends each have a porch that supports a sculptured figure. The perspective shows a similar design except that there is an attic above the cornice.

Kalman (p.142) relates the frontispiece of the Beauford Square facade to the composition of the garden front of Soane's new block at Pitzhanger Manor, 1800-1. They more or less share giant panelled pilasters (Soane's are incised - an idea he owed to Dance's studies for the Bank of England's Stock Office), a festooned frieze in which Soane centres rosettes over the pilasters, a first floor balcony (discarded in Dance's built design) and a free-standing element crowning the centre bay. Segmental arched openings are also found in both designs.

D. Stillman (English Neo-classical architecture, 1988, vol.2, p.493) describes the design catalogued above as 'characteristic of Dance's severe, planar late works, such as the Legal Quays design of 1794-96'.

REPRODUCED. Stroud fig.70a; D. Stillman, English Neo-classical architecture, 1988, vol.2, fig.358.

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).