Variant design for a six-part villa in a Classical style 78 by 81 feet based on a design by an unidentified architect, c.1811-12

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George Dance office drawings: the drawings of George Dance the Elder and George Dance the Younger
- Country Houses (31)
  - Variant design for a six-part villa in a Classical style 78 by 81 feet based on a design by an unidentified architect, c.1811-12 (13)

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Reference number

SM D2/8/43

Purpose

Variant design for a six-part villa in a Classical style 78 by 81 feet based on a design by an unidentified architect, c.1811-12

Aspect

[1] Ground floor plan of house and offices with very faint rough perspective

Scale

1/5 in to 1 ft

Inscribed

rooms labelled including Hall, Library, Drawing room, Breakfast / or / Billiard room, Eating room and dimensions given

Signed and dated

c.1811-12

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pink and black washes, pencil, pricked for transfer on laid paper, two sheets joined (665 x 1230)

Hand

Dance

Watermark

D & C Blauw and (twice) D&CBxX in cartouche surmounted by fleur-de-lis

Notes

The house has a six-part villa plan that is 77..9 wide by 81..9 deep, the offices with a small link wing approximately 132 feet wide by 47 feet deep and placed on one side (to the right). The almost square house plan has a central canted bay, re-drawn as a bow, black wash indicating revisions. The blind windows that appear in later drawings are not shown here, and except for a faint pencil indication, no porte-cochere is drawn in.

Kalman (p.179) comments 'the three most important ground-floor rooms [are] 24 feet by 36 feet (also 2:3, and the same sizes used at Norman Court) [designed 1810] .... This project, for which at least twelve drawings survive, may perhaps be the country house for which Dance "stole" ideas from Soane's Tyringham in 1802. The size, shape, and disposition of the plans of the two houses are similar, and Dance's central feature is a square, galleried, top-lighted space quite similar to the tribune at Tyringham.' The mutual exchange of ideas between the two men is well illustrated in a letter dated 2 August 1801 (SM Priv.Corr.III.D.5.14) in which Dance asks Soane to show him the plan for Tyringham since 'I want to steal from it'.

Four drawings by an unidentified architect for an unidentified six-part villa in a Classical style ([SM D2/8/30], [SM D2/8/29], [SM D2/8/27] and [SM D2/8/28]) relate to this set of 13 drawings. The handed plan, drawn by Dance, on the verso of the first of that set corresponds, more or less, to drawing [SM D2/8/43] catalogued here. The disposition of rooms, for example, is the same though each is larger by several feet. It is as if Dance has taken someone else's design, switched the office wing from the left hand side to the right and improved the proportions and circulation.

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).