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Reference number
Purpose
Aspect
Scale
Inscribed
Signed and dated
- c.1816
Medium and dimensions
Hand
Notes
Each successive drawing shows Dance developing more strongly the 'grid' or controlling trace lines on which he composes his design. In the final elevation (assuming that his sequence has been correctly reconstructed) the pencilled intervals of the street railings exactly match those of the first floor balcony and the window guards of the second floor as well as the mullions to the windows of all four floors and the panelled pilasters with brackets on the ground floor, the giant order on the first and second floors and the attic order - everything is centred. The only relief are the narrow panels between the first and second floors carved with a Vitruvian scroll motif and the order that consists only of a pair of waterleaves with a central five-petalled flower.
REPRODUCED. D. Watkin, 'Soane and his contemporaries' in John Soane, [no ed.], 1983, fig.9; D. Stillman, English Neo-classical architecture, 1988, vol.I, fig.132.
NOTES TO [SM D3/7/9], [SM D3/7/11], [SM D3/7/10], [SM D3/7/12] and [SM D3/7/13]
The titles are inscribed in pencil and [SM D3/7/9], [SM D3/7/11], [SM D3/7/10], [SM D3/7/12] seem to have been added later by Dance.
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).