[1] Copy from a measured drawing by George Dance

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Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
- Soane's architectural education: Royal Academy and Italy including measured drawings: 1770-1780
  - Soane in Italy: measured drawings made or copied, 1778-80
    - Italy: Tivoli: Temple of Vesta (or Temple of the Sibyl), 1778-80 and later (9)

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Reference number

SM 45/3/31

Purpose

[1] Copy from a measured drawing by George Dance

Aspect

THE PLAN OF THE REMAINS OF A TEMPLE AT TIVOLI

Scale

½ in to 1 ft

Inscribed

as above and dimensions given

Medium and dimensions

Pen and sepia wash, pencil, within raw umber wash border on laid paper (622 x 958)

Hand

Soane

Watermark

J Whatman

Notes

The plan shown here is a close copy of that made by Dance (D3/1/2; Lever, op.cit., catalogue 13.13), drawn to the same scale with a title added.

Dance may have been irked by such plagiarism for it is mentioned at least three times in his friend Joseph Farington's diary. Thus (4 March 1810) Farington recorded that Soane 'borrowed Dance's drawing of the Sybils temple at Tivoli & copied it, & hung it up in His House with John Soane written under it, as if the drawing had been originally made by Himself.' (The Diary of Joseph Farington, 16 volumes, 1978-98).

Literature

P.du Prey, John Soane's architectural education 1753-80, 1977, pp. 122-3,144
P.du Prey, John Soane, the making of an architect, 1982, pp.148-51, 359 fn.8
M.Richardson, 'John Soane and the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli, Architectural History, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain, XLVI, 2003, pp.127-46
J.Lever, Catalogue of the drawings of George Dance the Younger (1741-1825) ... 2003

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.

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).