East India House, Leadenhall Street, City of London, c.1796

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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)
  - East India House, Leadenhall Street, City of London, c.1796 (3) Design, not executed, and design by Henry Holland, almost as executed

George Dance, London, Leadenhall Street, East India House. SM 13/6/1. ©Sir John Soane's Museum, London. Photo: Ardon Bar-Hama

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Reference number

SM 13/6/1

Purpose

East India House, Leadenhall Street, City of London, c.1796

Aspect

[1] Preliminary elevation of principal front

Scale

to a scale

Signed and dated

c.1796

Medium and dimensions

Brown pen and warm sepia wash, pencil, shaded, hatching, partly pricked for transfer on thin buff-coloured laid paper (170 x 500)

Hand

Dance

Notes

The effect of this drawing, made freehand over pencil outlines, is of an apparently spontaneous act of design.

The building is 15 bays wide and three storeys high, arranged in a tripartite composition five by five by five with a giant Corinthian order. In the centre is a six-column pedimented portico, the tympanum of which is bare, the frieze undecorated and the wall behind left plain. Either side, the five end bays are fronted by an attached Corinthian order with festoons hanging between the capitals and above, the upper storey has an attic order and balustrade. The ground floor is arcaded, the windows on the first floor have square heads.

The semi-Palladianism of Dance's front is probably due to the influence of the earlier building by Theodore Jacobsen, built 1726-9 and kept as the west wing. The visible attic is the most characteristic part of Dance's elevation; panel pilasters continue the vertical emphasis of the giant order and above these the pedestals of the balustrade are stopped by antefixae. The area around the pediment is unresolved with pencil indications of panel pilasters.

REPRODUCED. D. Stillman, English Neo-classical architecture, 1988, fig.299.

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.

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).