Inscribed
(inscribed by Dance) Phoenix ( as a dome finial, associated with resurrection and found in funerary sculpture) and Sepulchral Urns (for the terraces)
Signed and dated
- datable to before 18 March 1778
Medium and dimensions
Brown pen on laid secretary paper, worn, with three fold marks (389 x 269 on half of the sheet )
Hand
George Dance (1741-1825)
Watermark
dove on monti, C and I within a roundel
Notes
The first mentioned plan is clearly the antecedent of the later plan seen in SM 45/1/23. The drawing on the recto of the sheet is a sketch design by Dance for a British Senate House (q.v.) made before Soane's departure to Italy on 18 March 1778. It must be presumed that Dance's design for a mausoleum on a trefoil plan on the verso of this sheet was also made before 18 March 1778, and thus two months before the Earl of Chatham's death. Soane had a strong interest in the design of mausolea and may have that building type in mind as a subject for a design to be sent back to London for exhibition at the Royal Academy. Thus, it seems that Dance's sketch designs were generalised without any particular person in mind. There is something puzzling here which is that the drawings were made on Italian-made paper. As a very young man, Dance made a design for a garden temple on a trefoil plan see J.Lever, Catalogue of the drawings of George Dance the Younger (1741-1825) ... from the collection of Sir John Soane's Museum, 2003, catalogue [3]. In the first rough designs, the more complex plan shown here is (du Prey, op.cit) 'almost a direct copy of the 'Petite Eglise Ou Rotonde' engraved in Marie-Joseph Peyre's Oeuvres d'architecture, Paris, 1765.
Literature
P. du Prey, John Soane's architectural education 1753-80, 1977, pp.134-6
Level
Drawing
Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation
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).
