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

Soane office copy of a Dance drawing (SM 13/6/1), London, Leadenhall Street, East India House. SM 13/6/2. ©Sir John Soane's Museum, London. Photo: Ardon Bar-Hama

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Reference number

SM 13/6/2

Purpose

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

Aspect

[2] Finished wall plan and elevation of principal front

Scale

1/6 in to 1 ft

Inscribed

THE PLAN AND ELEVATION OF A DESIGN FOR THE FRONT OF EAST INDIA HOUSE

Signed and dated

c.1796

Medium and dimensions

Pen, sepia, light Indian red, green earth, black and cream washes, shaded, watercolour technique, within a double ruled and grey wash border on laid paper (515 x 980)

Hand

office

Watermark

J Whatman

Notes

Not in Dance's hand, the plan and elevation are carefully drawn and finished with a clarity not usually found among Soane's office drawings. The support and lettering are typical but not the border, where the ruled lines are thinner than in other of Soane's office drawings. A watercolour technique is used to render the rain-washed texture of the masonry, a cloudy sky is faintly suggested, shading and cast shadows are finely done, and pencil underdrawing erased.

The design differs in some details from that shown in [SM 13/6/1]: the ground floor now has horizontally ruled rustication and the semicircular-headed openings are voussoired; the first floor windows of the five end bays are pedimented; the festoons between the capitals have gone; the attic pilasters are plain not panelled; the balustrade has gone and the roofs to the end five bays are shown; the wall behind the pediment has been removed and at the apex of the pediment a broad acroterion supports the East India Company's heraldic device.

The 'cleaning up' of the front along with a drier drawing style gives a graver, more sober appearance than the preliminary design.

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).