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Reference number
Purpose
Aspect
Signed and dated
- datable to November 1791
Medium and dimensions
Hand
Notes
This drawing explores various planning and vaulting schemes. On the recto are studies for a hall with a single, great saucer dome flanked by barrel vaults and surmounted by a wide lantern, with a fireplace along the back wall, scrolled ornamentation in the dome, and floral capitals for the supporting piers (as in SM 10/4/19). Dance also sketched a structural section of the arch and dome junction, and a plan showing lines of parallel counters running in front of the long walls. The plan and sections on the verso depict a triple-domed alternative with barrel-vaulted side-aisles (like one of the perspectives in SM 10/4/19). The verso also contains plans for single-dome and double-dome alternatives. Dance's preference is probably for the monumental single-lantern dome scheme, though recognising that a triple-dome, basilican scheme would provide more light and a more appropriate character; the double-dome scheme represents a compromise.
Level
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).