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Reference number

SM D2/8/21

Purpose

Design for an unidentified villa in a Gothic style

Aspect

[1] Front elevation of a three-bay, two-storey villa with a three-storey, 12-sided central tower

Scale

¼ in to 1 ft

Inscribed

(pencil) Elevation of the North Front and some dimensions given

Medium and dimensions

Pen, warm sepia and blue washes, shaded, pencil within single ruled pencil border on laid paper, affixed to [SM D2/8/20] (545 x 810)

Hand

Dance

Watermark

D & C Blauw IV and D&CBxX in cartouche surmounted by fleur-de-lis

Notes

Approximately 87 feet wide, the front is composed of a five-sided canted bay in the centre (fronted by a porte-cochere) flanked by arched tripartite windows. On the ground floor these are lancets, on the first floor, drop-arched; the glazed front door has reticulated tracery while the battlemented tower has lancet windows with plate tracery. Polygonal turrets flank the end bays and more slender ones mark each corner of the polygonal tower.

Carefully drawn, washed and shaded, the elevation must have been intended for presentation. It is not known who was the client though it may have been the same unidentified person for whom Dance made another, sketchier, design for a three-storey Gothic villa. One of the elevations for that scheme ([SM D2/8/20]) is affixed to the drawing catalogued here (though one has a north front and the other a southeast principal elevation). Or could this be an alternative elevation for an unidentified six-part villa in a Classical style where the front is 78 feet and not 87 feet wide?

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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