Lowther Castle, Westmorland, 1803

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George Dance office drawings: the drawings of George Dance the Elder and George Dance the Younger
- Country Houses (31)
  - Lowther Castle, Westmorland, 1803 (3). Survey drawings of stable block and rough design for a new house and unexecuted variant designs in a Castle style for Lord Lowther, later (in 1807, by a new creation) 1st Earl of Lonsdale

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Reference number

SM D2/8/11

Purpose

Lowther Castle, Westmorland, 1803

Aspect

[1] Rough front elevation and plan of front wall, with very rough plan of proposal for a new house on a rectangular plan, with porch and large round corner towers, and extensive offices in curved wings behind the house

Scale

not to scale

Inscribed

Lowther Hall / near Penrith Westmorland / 286 Miles from London, labelled Slate (roof), redstone (pediment and plinth) rough cast white, rough cast very white (wall) and notes opening of Windows about 4.6, Ridges & Hyps clumsily finish'd with stone, Quoins Tympanum of Pidiment [sic] & all dressing of a red chocolate colour Stone
Dated: Sep^r 25^th 1803

Signed and dated

1803

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil on laid secretary paper (200 x 315)

Hand

Dance

Watermark

Britannia with spear, shield and olive branch in crowned roundel 1801

Notes

The stable block recorded here is nine bays wide and two storeys high with hipped, projecting end bays, a pedimented centre of three bays, and with quoins and cross windows. It was built in and soon after 1678 and survived until the construction of Smirke's castle, 1806-11.

Dance's rough elevation corresponds to an elevation (with plan) of the east outer (stable) wing of Lowther Hall, a survey drawing made after the fire of 1718 (Lowther Archive, Cumbria Record Office Carlisle, L,11/2/11), reproduced in H. Colvin, J. M. Crook & T. Friedman, 'Architectural drawings from Lowther Castle Westmorland', Architectural History Monograph No.2, 1980 fig.7b.

The faint rough plan for a new building is a preliminary version of a Dance plan in the Lowther archive (Cumbria Record Office, Carlisle, L,11/6/1), reproduced in Colvin et al. 1980, fig.30b. Robert Smirke's executed design was to retain much the same layout.

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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