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Signed and dated
- 1805-12
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Hand
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Another alternative elevation
Pencil
One elevation (recto) retains the domestic character of the two houses, having front doors emphasised by porches with balconies over, and an order attached to the centre five bays of the first and second floors as well as an attic order. Another, smaller and fainter, elevation shows the centre five bays projecting forward from the pavement to the roof in a way that is reminiscent of Soane's new facade for his house at 13 Lincoln's Inn Fields, designed later in 1812; though the most interesting solution, it was not developed. Two others (recto and verso) are closer to the executed design having a portico with six Ionic columns. See [SM D5/2/3] verso for a related design with an Ionic portico. A folder inscribed by Dance Sketch of my design / for the Medal at Parma / 1763 with his competition drawings for a public gallery, re-used a sheet with two drawings for the Royal College of Surgeons [SM D4/11/1A]. One is a rough perspective of the Lincoln's Inn front showing a pedimented portico, the other an unfinished part-plan of the basement of the north end of the Hunterian museum, c.1810.
There is in the Royal College of Surgeons Archives (RCS 66/3/17) a finished elevation for the principal front drawn and signed by Dance. It shows a seven-bay, three-storey building with a pedimented Ionic portico of four columns on pedestals.
Level
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).