[2] Presentation drawing for the Bank as designed by George Sampson, 1732

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Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
- Bank of England
  - Bank of England, City of London for the Governor and Company of the Bank of England, 1788-1834 (1356)
    - 1788-1793 Initial assessment of existing buildings and minor alterations (74)
      - Existing building, 1731-34 and 1764-88 (8)

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Reference number

SM 1/1/10

Purpose

[2] Presentation drawing for the Bank as designed by George Sampson, 1732

Aspect

Elevation of the Hall facing the courtyard

Scale

bar scale

Signed and dated

1732

Medium and dimensions

Pen and wash, within double ruled pen and wash border, on wove paper (322 x 533)

Hand

Sampson office

Watermark

[Turkey] Mill Kent

Notes

Sampson's Threadneedle Street front is probably modelled on the Queen's Gallery at Somerset House, believed at the time to have been designed by Inigo Jones. Sampson would have known the building first hand from working as a Clerk of Works at Somerset House. The variation in treatment on the façade indicates the function of the rooms within: the ground floor was more for utility whereas the principal storey contained the public, and lavishly decorated, transfer halls.

The public rooms of the Bank were towards the front of the site as the more private offices were around the administrative quadrangle towards the back. Transfer offices were on the first floor of the entrance building. The Pay Hall occupied a prominent position facing visitors as they entered the front court. Daniel Abramson states that the temple-like front of the Pay Hall resembles popular country house architecture of the time and yet the principal storey was on the ground floor, recalling the 17th century classicism of Wren and his followers.

The drawing shows, in pencil, the figure of Britannia upon the pediment. Robert Taylor (1714-88) executed the carving in the 1740s.

Literature

D. Abramson, Building the Bank of England, 2005, pp. 48

Level

Drawing

Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

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).