Soane Museum Study Group: Dr Frances Sands

Soane Museum Study Group: Dr Frances Sands The Soane Museum Study Group is an open forum for scholars – both established and emerging – to present new research into an aspect of architectural history and/or Soane’s collection. Frances Sands – Locating George Dance within John Soane’s legacy machine George Dance has been consistently overshadowed by his famous pupil, John Soane, but was this simply because Soane expended greater effort on constructing his own legacy? Neither architect can boast vast numbers of surviving buildings – admittedly, Soane more than Dance – but it seems likely that Sir John Soane’s Museum has held Soane’s reputation at the forefront of architectural historical thought. Dance’s legacy is principally tied to his surviving drawings, the majority of which are at the Soane Museum, forming a mere portion of that wider corpus. This paper will consider the provenance of the Dance drawings collection at the Soane Museum in this context, and crucially, will introduce a number of lesser-known Dance drawings at the Soane Museum which do not form part of the formal ‘Dance collection’. There are a number of examples of Dance’s hand among the Soane office drawings collection, most notably among those for the Bank of England, produced long after the expiration of Soane’s pupilage with Dance.