Martin's Bank, 68 Lombard Street, City of London, 1791-2

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George Dance office drawings: the drawings of George Dance the Elder and George Dance the Younger
- Some work in the City of London (11)
  - Martin's Bank, 68 Lombard Street, City of London, 1791-2 (5). Design and revised design, neither as executed, for new premises for Martin, Stone & Foote

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Reference number

SM D3/10/1

Purpose

Martin's Bank, 68 Lombard Street, City of London, 1791-2

Aspect

[5] Principal elevation of four bays and five storeys with basement

Scale

2/5 in to 1 ft approximately

Signed and dated

1791-2

Medium and dimensions

Pen and watercolour technique, partly pricked for transfer on laid paper (695 x 565)

Hand

Dance

Watermark

J Whatman

Notes

This presentation drawing, with its streaky watercolour technique conveying the character of rain-washed masonry, shows a design with four storeys of brickwork above an ashlar-stone ground floor and basement. Square-headed casement windows (those of the first and second floors having lattice window guards) reduce in height as they rise and are centred over four tall semi-circular arched openings, three glazed and one the entrance to Change Alley. Two figures are shown stepping up, presumably into a door, on the left-hand side of the alley. The stonework is finished by a string-course composed of a coffer-like motif punctuated by circular bosses on a square. Under the right-hand window, a railing fronts a square-headed basement entrance.

Comparison with a watercolour view by Valentine Davis (1784-1869) of 'Mess^rs Martin, Stone & C^opy, 68 Lombard Street', c.1810 (Guildhall Library, Prints & Maps Department, Record: 4138) shows that, as built, Dance modified the revised design so that the front was organised with five bays with sash and not casement windows; the top storey became an attic with a parapet and dormer windows. At ground floor level were five bays with semicircular-headed openings that, from the left, read: door, two windows, entrance to Change Alley and another window.

Much of the accommodation was domestic. James Martin II, the senior partner between 1775 and 1807, lived in Downing Street, Westminster but junior partners as well as clerks would have resided in Lombard Street in the floors above the 'shop' and in the two eastern bays.

REPRODUCED. Stroud fig.53a.

Level

Drawing

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.

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