The purpose of this puzzling design is not clear except that it is an entrance on a monumental scale. Bailey's Soane Museum inventory of 1837 (A a) lists it as '2 Sketches of a Design for a Monumental Structure - (q^y Mausoleum)' while Spiers's inventory of 1907 (D) has 'A Cemetery, 2 Sketches of designs for an Entrance to' (though this is unlikely since 'garden cemeteries' were not established in London until the 1830s). The pyramids, which are about 80 feet high, might be funerary chapels or mausolea. The friezes of figures on the conically lidded 'urns' could be seen as biblical or Classical and the two right-hand figures in the second drawing are wearing turbans. The coronet - if it is one - is incorrect since an earl's coronet has five balls and viscount's eight but it is so prominent that it must have some significance. Were Dance's designs made to commemorate Frederick, Bishop of Derry and 4th Earl of Bristol who died on 8 July 1803? Dance had a connection with the Earl Bishop's country seat, Ickworth House and was later to make unexecuted designs for the 5th Earl's London town house at 6 St James's Square. In 1779, the 4th Earl had erected a monument to the 2nd Earl at Downhill, Co. Down, Ireland that was a striking and unusual example taken from the Antique.

Another possibility relates to the competition of 1799 for a monument to commemorate naval victories. A column was preferred by the competition committee but disapproved of by John Flaxman who proposed either a triumphal arch crowned with a seated statue of Britannia or a gigantic Britannia standing on a circular pedestal. A model of the latter, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1801, is now in the Soane Museum (SM, M1079) as is a copy of Flaxman's pamphlet A Letter to the Committee for Raising the Naval Pillar...(1799; SM, PC32). In it he discusses and illustrates the merits of an obelisk, column, meta, triumphal arch, pharos, temple or colossus and gives an opinion on the best location, choosing the summit of Greenwich Hill as a site and concluding 'I shall close these pages with my acknowledgements to Mr. G. Dance for some of the observations concerning the situation of the Monument; as also for the first hint, that a Colossal Statue might be a proper subject for the Monument itself.' Despite the flat topography, could Dance's pyramidal design be for a naval monument at Greenwich? Other architects including Jeffry Wyatt and C.H. Tatham submitted designs thought, in the end, nothing was built. Farington records in his diary (29 December 1799) that Jeffery [sic] Wyatt wrote to me to desire me to call & see his design for the Naval Column, which I did.' Tatham published hs proposals in Three designs for the National Monument proposed to be erected in commemoration of the late glorious victories of the British Navy (1802).

Again, Dance's pyramidal design could be for an entrance into London, though insufficiently wide for a roadway. Soane, who deplored the miserable approaches to the capital, made a number of designs that were exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1786. Two of these based on a triumphal arch form, were published in, for example, his Designs for public improvements in London and Westminster (1828, plates 1 and 2).

It is also worth comparing Dance's design with that published by J.M. Gandy in The Rural architect; consisting of various designs for country buildings (1805, plate XXXIX), for an 'Entrance Gate & Double Lodge': twin pyramids about 20 feet high, either side of an iron gate, have each a gable window lighting a room 14 feet square with a cow shed and a pig and poultry shed concealed behind the screen wall on either side.

LITERATURE. D. Irwin, John Flaxman 1755-1826, 1979, pp.163-6.