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- 1804-5
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Dance's task was to incorporate five panels depicting the Arts and Sciences painted by Andrea Casali (1705-84) for the ceiling of the picture gallery at Fonthill Splendens, c.1757-70. They had been bought for 13 guineas at the 1801 auction of the contents of Splendens by Wyatt Dimond, joint proprietor of the Theatre Royal, Bath. The panels were removed from the Theatre in 1845 and installed in the ceiling of the Great Hall at Dyrham Park where they remain. In fact, the move was fortunate since the Theatre was gutted by fire in 1862.
REPRODUCED. C. Woodward, 'William Beckford and Fonthill Splendens, Apollo, XLVIII, 1998, fig.12.
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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).