A catalogue of the drawings of George Dance the Younger is a highlight of recent books on architecture and design

Apollo, April, 2004 by David Watkin

CATALOGUE OF THE DRAWINGS OF GEORGE DANCE THE YOUNGER (1741-1825) AND OF GEORGE DANCE THE ELDER (1695-1768) FROM THE COLLECTION OF SIR JOHN SOANE'S MUSEUM Jill Lever Azimuth Editions, London, 2003, ISBN 1 898 592 25 X, 150 [pounds sterling] (cloth)

Justice has at last been done to George Dance the Younger, whom Sir John Summerson hailed in Georgian London as 'among the few really outstanding architects of the century'. Jill Lever has produced what is probably the most detailed catalogue of the drawings of any British architect, a monumental work of scholarship, rich with information on a wide variety of topics, and lavishly illustrated with hundreds of black and white plates as well as fifty in colour. No architect could be a more appropriate recipient than Dance of such a comprehensive illustrated inventory of his drawings, because most of his buildings have been demolished: in London alone, these include the Royal College of Surgeons; Newgate Gaol; St Luke's Hospital for Lunatics; the Shakespeare Gallery in Pall Mall; the library at Lansdowne House; and the Common Council Chamber and Chamberlain's Court at the Guildhall. In the country, his major houses have also gone: Ashburnham Place, and, save for its Greek Doric portico, Stratton Park.

Dance was, moreover, a reticent, unpretentious figure, who published nothing himself, left no theoretical statements, and few letters: how different from other Georgian architects such as Gibbs, Paine, Chambers, Adam, and Soane, who all published their own designs. Despite being an early member of the Royal Academy, he exhibited work there on only seven occasions. This was despite the regulation that members should exhibit drawings annually. He also totally failed to deliver the lectures which he was obliged to give in his capacity as Professor of Architecture at the Academy from 1798 to 1805.

Though so much has been demolished, a vivid impression of his extremely varied language is provided by his chief surviving works: All Hallows, London Wall, where he stripped the entablature in a way that shocked the young Soane; interiors at Cranbury Park, Hampshire, with a starfish vault derived from the tombs of the ancients; Coleorton Hall, Leicestershire, an essay in disembodied gothic, rather like Flaxman; the entrance hail at Laxton Park, Northamptonshire, in the revolutionary style of Ledoux at the Hotel Thelusson; and the quasi-Indian facade of the Guildhall. This stylistic diversity should not lead us to describe him as a chameleon architect like Thomas Hopper, for Dance was a poet architect, committed to creating an appropriate character for each commission and also to reducing architecture and style to their essence: a classic Enlightenment project.

We know Dance's innermost architectural thoughts only from the diarist Farington, who recorded a conversation with him in 1804 in which 'He derided the prejudice of limiting Design in Architecture within certain rules ... [for] Architecture unshackled would Afford to the greatest genius the greatest opportunities of producing the most powerful efforts of the human mind'. This, I believe, comes straight from Piranesi, whom Dance met in Rome. The concealed top-lighting from lunettes in sliced-off semi-domes in Dance's library at Lansdowne House recalls Piranesi's designs for St John Lateran made when Dance was in Rome.

Jill Lever provides more than a dry catalogue, for she constantly enlivens it with perceptive aesthetic analysis: for example, in a section on mausolea, monuments, and the Egyptian style, she explains how, 'in developing his ideas for the doorways to the [George] Washington tomb, he was reaching back to something primitive, archaic and finally prehistoric'; indeed, the tomb recalls the designs of Friedrich Gilly. Lever describes Dance's designs of c.1816 for a town house in St James's Square for the 5th Earl of Bristol, as resembling an 'office building or a department store', comparing them rightly to the work of Schinkel. Describing the poetic Polygon Hall at the heart of Coleorton Hall, she explains that, 'The lighting of this complex centre changes by the hour as the sun moves around the 12 Gothic-arched openings'. Indeed, the sensation produced by light was a key concern for Dance and even more so for his disciple, Soane.

The minds of Dance and Soane clearly interlocked architecturally, for they stretched classical architecture to its limits, even beyond them, in their search for 'unshackled' form, as Dance put it. Lever thus provides an illuminating section called 'Dance and Soane', explaining Dance's contribution in sixteen drawings to Soane's seminal Stock Office at the Bank of England of 1791-92. One sketch by Dance is for a diaphanous interior with vast, horse-shoe-shaped arches springing from the floor, in which mass has been totally dissolved. It was previously identified as for the Stock Office but Lever believes that it is for a domed mausoleum or church. She suggests that it is 'humorous', though, to me, its cyclopean scale and giant arches recall the numinous interiors of Boullee. We should also recall that, as an important town planner, Dance made visionary schemes for the Port of London, along the Utopian lines of architects such as Boullee. More realistically, Dance introduced the circus and crescent to London.