Theatre Royal, Beauford Square, Bath, 1804-5

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George Dance office drawings: the drawings of George Dance the Elder and George Dance the Younger
- Public buildings (3)
  - Theatre Royal, Beauford Square, Bath, 1804-5 (15). Designs for the Beauford Square front and for the interior for John Palmer

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Reference number

SM D3/8/4

Purpose

Theatre Royal, Beauford Square, Bath, 1804-5

Aspect

[3] Elevation of five-bay centre showing a frieze of festoons (modelled on those at Tivoli) alternating with masks set in square frames and centred above panelled pilasters; above the parapet, three pediments with antefixae, the centre one, crowned with the Royal Arms, the end pediments each with a lyre

Scale

not to scale

Inscribed

Verso Rough details of stele and frieze-cornice to a larger scale and slight elevation with temple front Pencil The unfinished nature of the drawing may explain the lack of an architrave.

Signed and dated

1804-5

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, hatching on laid paper (315 x 460)

Hand

Dance

Watermark

fleur-de-lis in crowned cartouche and WR below

Notes

Dance uses an entablature in which the architrave is no more than a delicate moulding. But it is not quite an elided entablature, the earliest and most significant example of which was employed in his church of All Hallows. The stele detail of a pediment with antefixae or 'end stops' above a panelled plinth is one of Dance's most characteristic decorative motifs while the lyre, an attribute of the Muses, was used by Dance, for example as a carved relief on the front of the Shakespeare Gallery, 1788-9.

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.

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