Independent mind
Alan Powers
Arechitects have always come in differnt shapes and sizes. Some enter public consciousness and remain there over centuries, but, for each of these, there is usually another associated architect whom the famous one recognises as 'ii miglior fabbro', as Dante said of Guido Cavalcanti, and T. S. Eliot of Ezra Pound.
This roughly describes the relationship between John Soane (1753-1837) and George Dance (1741-1825). Soane was literally Dance's pupil, between the ages of 15 and 19, and his final act of loyalty was to buy the collection of Dance's drawings from the family in 1836, as an addition to his museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields. While Soane strained every nerve to achieve professional and artistic success, Dance was a personality who, without descending to bathos or superficiality, walked on the sunny side of the street. Gillian Darley describes him as 'a convivial man, the fifth son of a large family of actors, singers and painters, he was a good musician and an excellent draughtsman'.
In the exhibition of Dance's drawings, Architecture Unshackled, at Sir John Soane's Museum in London, a small selection shows the originality and range of Dance's mind, as well as his attention to the solution of practical building problems. His father. Clerk of Works to the City of London, sent him to Italy, whence he returned with knowledge of the latest European developments based on the purification of classical architecture, coupled with a romantic spirit of drama, achieved by top lighting, as in the Roman baths, and windowless wall surfaces. Dance's design for a Public Gallery, awarded a Gold Medal at the Academy of Parma in 1763, was an indication of things to come.
Soon after returning to London, Dance was commissioned to design a new church of All Hallows, London Wall. Then, as now, this church ran alongside a busy road, and lent itself to a sound-baffling brick wall, with lunette windows. Dance showed his independence of mind by altering the conventions of classical form and leaving out the architrave in the frieze running round above the columns inside. All Hallows is one of all too few of Dance's major buildings to have survived.
His entrance elevation to the Guildhall in the City, an exotic mixture of Gothic and Indian, is a curiosity of its time, but we would gladly give it away in return for Newgate Prison, which went in 1902 to make way for the Old Bailey. Newgate played up its drama, as well as responding to humanitarian claims of the time. The aerial perspective from the Dance collection offers a precise vision rather than a fantasy in the manner of Piranesi. Again, one would give away several of the Dance survivals in order to regain the library of Lansdowne House, which was mutilated when the building was turned into a club in the 1930s. Here, the drawings show Dance's hand communicating ideas directly on to the paper, experimenting with the effect of decoration on the curved end walls, and the unconventional three-quarter domes that allowed a mysterious light to enter the library and wash over the coloured surfaces.
The same concern with heightened perception comes in the sheet of freehand perspectives, one of 15 made by Dance to assist Soane in the design of the Bank Stock Office at the Bank of England in 1791, and therefore a poignant moment of handover between master and pupil, the latter beginning his major work, itself almost entirely lost with the same carelessness suffered by Lansdowne House.
As early as the Guildhall Council Chamber of 1777, Dance had begun to develop the kind of continuous domed vault which Soane made one of his trademarks. The remainder of Dance's oeuvre, as presented in the exhibition, is like watching the best form of ballet gala or variety show. Each act is excellent of its kind, whether it is a country house or a lunatic asylum, but they do not form a continuous story that unfolds through time. It is striking, nonetheless, how often Dance chose styles other than classical, as in the elevations of Ashburnham Place, Sussex, which was described as 'a very curious mixture of Italian and Gothic architecture, with Indian elements. On the inside, the stairhall was severely classical.' This indeed was 'architecture unshackled'.
The last major book on Dance was by Dorothy Stroud, the late Inspectress of the Soane Museum, published in 1971. The present exhibition heralds the publication of a catalogue of the Dance drawings at the Soane Museum, by Jill Lever, which may in turn generate further study of this fascinating figure.
Architecture Unshackled is at Sir John Soane's Museum, 13 Lincoln's Inn Fields, London WC2, until 3 January 2004.
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