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

Henry Holland, London, Leadenhall Street, East India House. SM 13/6/3. ©Sir John Soane's Museum, London. Photo: Ardon Bar-Hama

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Reference number

SM 13/6/3

Purpose

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

Aspect

[3] Elevation of principal front, almost as executed

Scale

1/6 in to 1 ft

Inscribed

some dimensions given and (verso, Dance) Front of the India House Leaden Hall Street

Signed and dated

c.1796

Medium and dimensions

Pen, sepia, pink, green earth and black washes, shaded, within double ruled border on wove paper (520 x 985)

Hand

office of Henry Holland

Notes

Though the design was previously catalogued as a 'Soane office copy of a Henry Holland drawing' this is unlikely, given the style of draughtsmanship and Dance's inscription, if it is understood to mean that it was in his collection.

The elevation shows a 15-bay, two-storey building with a tripartite composition. In the centre is a six-column giant Ionic portico with an anthemion frieze, sculpted tympanum and three acroterion figures. There are round-arched openings on the horizontally rusticated ground floor, square-headed windows on the first floor with cornices and shouldered architraves, and a balustraded parapet.

A watercolour of East India House by T. H. Shepherd made in 1817 in the Museum of London (reproduced in C. Fox (ed), London - world city 1800-1840, 1992, p.29), showing the executed design carried out under Richard Jupp, scarcely differs from Holland's elevation. Two details were embellished: the columns of the portico were fluted in execution and the plain keystones to the ground floor windows became scrolled. The two-storey addition that Holland made to the west soon after he became Surveyor to the East India Company in 1799 is not shown on [SM 13/6/3] and it seems likely that Holland's elevation was made before that date.

REPRODUCED. D. Stroud, Henry Holland, 1966, fig.118.

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).