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- 1810
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The presentation drawings ([SM D2/7/11], [SM D2/7/12] and [SM D2/7/13]) are for a three-storey house separated from the kitchen offices by a walled yard. The 12-sided Polygon Hall and double return stair of all the earlier designs are kept; and the quadrant-curved vestibules of Designs B-D. Alternative elevations offer a Gothic design with drop-arched windows, and a continuous first floor balcony pierced by quatrefoils and polygonal turrets. The Classical design has a Corinthian porte-cochere, string course, entablature and balustraded parapet. Both have a 12-sided tower which in the Classical design has a shallow-pitched roof whose jaunty finial appears rather pagoda-like.
While the Classical design has a semi-Chinese element, the alternative elevation 'used Indian elements for simplifying the forms of Gothic in these designs' (N. Cooper, 'Indian architecture in England, 1780-1830', Apollo, XCII, 1970, fig.7). Indeed, it is possible to read the strongly shaded elevation as Indian: the proportions of the overall building with an apparently flat roof and the placing and proportion of windows to wall though conventional in English terms might also be seen as Indian. The pointed-arch openings outlined by concentric mouldings, the voids emphasised by a dark sepia wash, and the pierced front to the balconies supported on brackets also suggest India. And though the finials to the porte-cochere turrets are crocketed those at the angles have kalasha finials. Leafing through, say, Thomas Daniell's Oriental Scenery nothing strikes as an obvious source and yet the plates confirm the abstractly Indian character of Dance's 'Gothic' design.
For a note on Dance's use of Indian architectural elements see the general notes on the Guildhall, London.
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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).