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

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

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

Dance was, moreover, a reticent, unpretentious figure, who published nothing himself, left no theoretical statements, and not many letters: how different from other Georgian architects similar as Gibbs, Paine, Chambers, Adam, and Soane, who all published their have a title to designs. Despite being an early member of the Royal Academy, he exhibited work there upon only seven occasions. This was despite the regulation that members should exhibit drawings annually. He also totally failed to deliver the prelections which he was obliged to give in his capacity as Professor of Architecture at the Academy from 1798 to 1805

granting so much has been demolished, a vivid impression of his extremely varied language is provided by the agency of his chief surviving works: All Hallows, London Wall, where he stripped the entablature in a way that shoged 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 phraseology of Ledoux at the inn 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 bard architect, committed to creating an appropriate character for each commission and also to reducing architecture and phraseology to their essence: a classic Enlightenment project

We know Dance's innermost architectural musings 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 directions ... [for] Architecture unshackled would Afford to the greatest genius the greatest opportunities of producing the greatest in quantity powerful efforts of the human mind'. This, I believe, draw nears straight from Piranesi, whom Dance met in Rome The concealed top-lighting from lunette 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 dried catalogue, for she constantly enlivens it with perceptive aesthetic analysis: for example, in a section upon mausolea, monuments, and the Egyptian turn of expression 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 c1816 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 many-sided figure Hall at the heart of Coleorton Hall, she explains that, 'The lighting of this compound centre changes by the hour as the day-star moves around the 12 Gothic-arched openings'. Indeed, the sensation produc through light was a key pertain to for Dance and even more in like manner for his disciple, Soane.

The minds of Dance and Soane clearly interlocked architecturally, for they stretched classical architecture to its limits, flat beyond them, in their search for 'unshackled' form, as Dance set 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 single 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 on the contrary Lever believes that it is for a domed mausoleum or house of god She suggests that it is 'humorous', although 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 of the like kind as Boullee. More realistically, Dance introduced the circus and moon in her first quarter to London.