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Notes
How Dance received the job is not known. That there was a connection between him and Lord Eardley is established by an entry in Soane's Journal No.1 (at the Soane Museum) for 24 October 1794: Called on him [Dance] & went with him to Lord Eardley's. Farington noted in his diary (13 December 1795) 'Dance was yesterday with Lord Eardley, who he describes to be a good humoured man, that has many laughable oddities' and earlier (5 July 1794) 'Hearne does not set to Dance today. The latter is to pass the day at Lord Eardleys, at Belvedere.' Belvedere, near Erith, Kent was rebuilt c.1775 by James Stuart for Sir Sampson Gideon (later Lord Eardley) who, at the age of 17, had inherited a fortune of half a million pounds from his father of the same name. Much more interesting than his son, the elder Gideon was descended from Portuguese Jews and was instrumental in consolidating and reducing the interest on the National Debt (DNB).
The chimney-piece no longer survives at 22 Arlington Street. The Large Dining Room was elaborately redecorated in a Pompeian manner in 1840 by an Italian fresco painter, Eduardo Latilla. An account in the Civil Engineer and Architect's Journal (1840, III, p.226) states that 'the chimney and fire-place is of black marble with ormolu ornaments' and this must have replaced Dance's chimney-piece. The black marble chimney-piece was itself removed in one of two subsequent redecorations.
Purchased in 1947 by the Eagle Star Insurance Company, the 18th-century part of the house was restored over the following years: in the course of this work, the Large Dining Room (now Music Room) was accidentally gutted by fire in 1978. Earlier investigations showed that the ceiling had been a shallow vault and it was returned to that form and the room rebuilt in 'a style of decoration in keeping with 1790'. Dance's authorship was not known at that time.
LITERATURE. P. Campbell, ed., A House in Town: 22 Arlington Street, its owners and builders, 1984, passim.
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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).