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That the drawings are early (and pre-date Dodington) is shown by the inscribed titles that are in the youthful hand found on Dance's drawings for the Parma competition of 1763, All Hallows Church, 1765 and Newgate Sessions House, 1769. The rather severe design with its block-like massing, use of stone and niches for sculpture also suggests an early date. Soane, in his unpublished Memoirs of the professional life of an architect (1835, p.11 footnote), mentions Dance 'having been employed to design and superintend the erection of a house for a friend' on his return from Italy in 1764. It is tempting to link this commission with a house at Isleworth, Middlesex for 'Mr (probably John) Franks, c.1770' listed by Colvin) that may be connected with 'The Garden front of a house for a gentleman in the country' exhibited by Dance at the Royal Academy in 1771; Dorothy Stroud (p.179) suggests that it may have been a design for Pitzhanger.
The south elevation, catalogued here, is certainly a garden front with its loggia and (highly unusual) twin treillage plant houses 80 feet long that suggests a horticulturally inclined client. What is curious is the screen-like function of the treillage arrangement which steers people away from the flanks of the house and conceals, from the garden side, much of the screen wall that fronts the north elevation. The nearness of this screen wall to the house and its high, blank walls suggest that it is sited near a road rather than in the middle of a park. Until new evidence emerges, it is not possible to speculate further about a possible client or location.
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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).