[1] Presentation drawing of the Bank as a cutaway axonometric, by J.M. Gandy, 1830

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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)
    - 1817-1833 Rebuilding of offices in the south-east and the façade, temporary office spaces and presentation drawings (221)
      - Presentation drawings, 1830-1831 (3)

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Reference number

SM P267

Purpose

[1] Presentation drawing of the Bank as a cutaway axonometric, by J.M. Gandy, 1830

Aspect

Aerial sectional view of the Bank of England from the south-east

Signed and dated

1830

Medium and dimensions

pen and watercolour (845 x 1400)

Hand

Joseph Michael Gandy (1771-1843)

Notes

Soane exhibited Gandy's watercolour at the Royal Academy in 1830 (RA No. 1052), towards the end of his 45-year career at the Bank of England. The view shows the the full extent of his work for the Bank and depicts the intricacy of plan resulting from the numerous building campaigns. It is also a poetic gesture of the building's, and the institute's, timelessness and monumentality. In the drawing, the Bank of England has joined the celebrated monuments of antiquity. As Daniel Abramson writes, 'The view inventively conflates conventions of the Renaisssance aerial cutaway perspective with the eighteenth-century Piranesian ruinscape to create an image of the Bank of England ambiguously both in ruins and under construction' (op.cit. p.222).

This drawing was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1830 under the title A Bird's-eye View of The Bank of England . It only became known under the colloquial title of The Bank in Ruins after Soane's death.

Literature

D. Abramson, 'The Bank of England' in M. Richardson & M. Stevens (eds), John Soane architect: master of space and light, Royal Academy of Arts, 1999, pp. 222, cat. 119
Visions of Ruin, Architectural fantasies & designs for garden follies, catalogue of an exhibition at Sir John Soane's Museum, 1999, catalogue 35 (catalogue entry for this drawing by Christopher Woodward)

Level

Drawing

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

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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).