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  • image SM D2/8/24

Reference number

SM D2/8/24

Purpose

Design for an unidentified country house, c.1771?

Aspect

[1] Elevation of North Front showing a screen wall

Scale

to a scale, perhaps 1/8 in to 1 ft

Inscribed

as above

Signed and dated

  • c.1771?

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil, sepia, raw umber, green earth, blue and crimson washes, white highlight,
watercolour technique, shaded within single ruled and sepia wash border on wove paper (275 x 1305)

Hand

Dance

Notes

The elevation, like [SM D2/8/25], is carefully rendered and with trees and sky added. The house is washed in sepia and drawn with restraint so as to emphasise the screen wall tinted in a Bath stone-like colour with ashlar masonry.

The house consists of a three-storey centre of five bays with a canted centre bay and two-storey wings. It is fronted by a wall with a four-columned Doric porte-cochere flanked by blind pavilions with twin aediculed alcoves while pilasters, two solid gates and pavilion ends further articulate this long screen wall. Dance has drawn a horse and carriage passing through the porte-cochere in front of a plain, solid door. An initial impression is that this might be a design for a screen to an existing house and certainly the wall is the point of the drawing and suggests a household requiring seclusion.

Literature updated April 2024.

Literature

F. Sands, Fanciful Figures: people in architectural drawings, 2024, p. 27

Level

Drawing

Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

If you have any further information about this object, please contact us: drawings@soane.org.uk

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.


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