Dance's mausoleum for an unidentified person and site does not conform to the usual 18th-century precedents of temple, pyramid or even rotunda and though his design has only one stage with an order, his source may be the superimposed columns found in the funerary monuments of Antiquity. According to Colvin (1991, pp.353-5) 18th-century examples of these are exceedingly rare; one is the monument at Downhill, Co. Down, Ireland to the 2nd Earl of Bristol erected by the 4th Earl, the Bishop of Derry, in 1779.

It is frustrating that a design, even if unexecuted, which had significance for Dance remains unidentified. It was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1785, and therefore its date, as well as character, precludes its use as a tomb for Dance's wife Mary (born Gurney), who died in 1791 (Stroud p.171). If we search for a public figure worthy of commemoration, the choice might fall on the statesman William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham (1708-78). As it turned out, a huge monument by the elder John Bacon was erected in Westminster Abbey in 1784 with a statue of Pitt and allegories of Prudence, Fortitude, Britannia, Earth and Ocean. Two years earlier another large monument by the same sculptor was erected at the Guildhall with Pitt in Roman dress attended by Commerce and the City, and by Britannia reclining on a lion.

LITERATURE. H. Colvin, Architecture and the after-life, 1991.