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Signed and dated
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Notes
The coffered apsidal end is probably influenced by the Temple of Venus and Roma, also known as the Temple of the Sun and Moon, built in 121-35 by Hadrian and illustrated by Palladio in The Four Books of Architecture. Beside the office were two smaller rooms, one for the Chief Cashier and another office 'for conducting the more confidential concerns of this department'(Britton).
Two related drawings are in the Victoria & Albert Museum, showing details of a pendentive decoration with a palmette-like motif. Neither of them are dated.
Literature: J. Britton, The beauties of England and Wales: or, Delineations, topographical, historical, and descriptive, of each county, Volume X, Part 1, 1814, p.565; J. Francis, History of the Bank of England: its times and traditions, vol. 2, 1847, P. du Prey, Sir John Soane, 1985, in series of 'Catalogues of architectural drawings in the Victoria and Albert Museum', 1975, cat.144-145; p. 231; E Hennessy, A Domestic History of the Bank of England, 1930-1960, 1992, pp. 1, 224; D. Abramson, Money's architecture: the building of the Bank of England, 1731-1833, Doctoral thesis for the Department of Fine Arts, Harvard University, 1993, p.367.
Madeleine Helmer, 2010
Level
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).
Contents of Chief Cashier's Office, 1799-1802 (6)
- Preliminary design for the Cashier's Office, September 1799
- Design for the ornament in the semicircular end of the Cashier's Office, 19 October 1802
- Design for the doors and moulding on the west end of the Cashier's Office, 9 November 1802
- Design for two offices north of the Cashier's Office, 9 November 1802
- Designs for the Cashier's Office, showing interior ornament, one dated 29 May 1805 (2)