Designs for entrances to the counting houses, September 1810 (2)

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Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
- Bank of England
  - London: New Bank Buildings, Princes Street, City of London, 1807-10 (115)

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Reference number

SM (85) 11/3/3 (86) 11/3/2

Purpose

Designs for entrances to the counting houses, September 1810 (2)

Aspect

85 Plan of the Entrances to the Offices of the London Dock Company / Mess^rs Thelussons & C^o &^c from the Old Jewry as designed; (verso): section through counting house of No. 2 86 Elevation Sketch of a Design for the Entrance to the Offices of the / London Dock Company from the Old Jewry

Scale

(85) to a scale (86) bar scale of 15/16 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

85 as above, labelled: The Bank of England, Mess^rs Thelusson & C^o, London Dock Company 86 as above, labelled: The Bank of England, A (twice), B, C, E, F, A is 1½ before B / C sits back from / A 6 In / E is ½ Inch before F and some dimensions given

Signed and dated

(85) 1810 (86) Sep^r 16 1810

Medium and dimensions

(85) Pen, sepia and burnt Sienna washes, (verso) pen, pricked for transfer on wove paper with two fold marks (600 x 452) (86) pen, brown pen, sepia and yellow washes, pricked for transfer on stout laid paper (584 x 458)

Hand

(85) Soane office (86) Soane

Watermark

(85) SH

Notes

The entrances to the counting houses of the London Dock Company (No. 1) and Thellusson, Nephew & Co. (No. 2) were arranged around a small courtyard, open at one end (west) to Meeting House Court (q.v. drawings 67-68). The elevation drawing (86) shows a frontage around 12 feet wide and 15½ feet high. A central doorway is flanked by rectangular niches raised on socles. The attic consists of two pedestals supporting antefixes and plinths with canopy domed caps, reminiscent of the gated entrance at Pitzhanger and the later Soane monument. The plinth on the right is decorated with a caduceus (winged staff) motif, a symbol associated with Mercury, the Roman god of merchants and used frequently by Soane at the Bank of England. The whole entrance has banded rustication which gives the impression of robustness and echoes the screen walls of the Bank of England.

The initial design on drawing 86 has been partly scratched out and re-drawn with alterations in brown pen by Soane.

Level

Drawing

Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

If you have any further information about this object, please contact us: drawings@soane.org.uk

Sir John Soane's collection includes some 30,000 architectural, design and topographical drawings which is a very important resource for scholars worldwide. His was the first architect’s collection to attempt to preserve the best in design for the architectural profession in the future, and it did so by assembling as exemplars surviving drawings by great Renaissance masters and by the leading architects in Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries and his near contemporaries such as Sir William Chambers, Robert Adam and George Dance the Younger. These drawings sit side by side with 9,000 drawings in Soane’s own hand or those of the pupils in his office, covering his early work as a student, his time in Italy and the drawings produced in the course of his architectural practice from 1780 until the 1830s.

Browse (via the vertical menu to the left) and search results for Drawings include a mixture of Concise catalogue records – drawn from an outline list of the collection – and fuller records where drawings have been catalogued in more detail (an ongoing process).