[91] Presentation drawing of the near-final design for the front elevation (N1, N2)

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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
  - London: National Debt Redemption Office, Old Jewry, City of London: designs, working drawings and drawings for exhibition, 1817-18, 1819, 1823 (100)

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Reference number

SM 48/2/7

Purpose

[91] Presentation drawing of the near-final design for the front elevation (N1, N2)

Aspect

Perspective

Medium and dimensions

Pen, raw umber, sepia, blue, Indian red and green washes, shaded with single-ruled and sepia wash border on wove paper (495 x 684)

Hand

? Henry Parke (1790-1835, pupil 1814-1820)

Notes

It is probable that this drawing, SM 48/2/25 and SM 48/2/27 were made for final approval by the Bank of England's building committee.

A comparison with the very small front elevation reproduced in Soane's Designs for public and private buildings, 1833, plate XLVIII**** shows that it corresponds with 48/2/25 (variant design N1) except that the published design has pediments over the projecting end bays (as with variant design K) and not a single one that spans three bays in the centre as here. The Greek key ornament and antefixes are not shown in the published design. Other designs (variant designs C1, C2 and E) have a central pediment spanning a single bay.

This drawing is closest to SM 48/2/21 though without pediments over the end bays. The perspective is without the pediment and antefixes shown on SM 48/2/25.

This final or near-final design is more reticent than some of the earlier ones. It keeps the projecting bays 1 and 5 of the first and second storeys that appear on several previous designs as well as the 'loggia' form of the ground floor that occurs early on and the string course design has been used before. The decision about entrances and the treatment of the marginal elements at each end and in particular, the left-hand side (now almost invisible) has been decided.

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).