[19] Presentation drawing for the diminished frontispiece on Lothbury Street, July 1805

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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)
    - 1799-1810 Expansions north-west and rebuilding of existing offices (487)
      - Screen walls on Princes and Lothbury Streets, 1803-1807 (21)

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Reference number

SM 12/2/6

Purpose

[19] Presentation drawing for the diminished frontispiece on Lothbury Street, July 1805

Aspect

Elevation and plan

Scale

to a scale

Inscribed

Design for the centre of the North Front of the Bank of England

Signed and dated

July 8^th 1805 / C. Malton

Hand

Charles Malton (Soane pupil 1802-9)

Notes

Soane's ambitious frontispieces has been flattened and diminished, consisting of twin pilasters between antae raised on a socle and framing a semicircular niche and a caduceus relief panel. The caduceus, a staff entwined with two serpants, is carried by Mercury, protector of merchants.

This drawing shows the final design and was possibly exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1806 under the title 'A view of part of the Bank of England'.

See SM 12/2/7 for a Royal Academy Lecture drawing for a variant design that includes an attic with a pedimented pedestal between panelled pilasters and fronted by urns on plinths.

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).