John Soane exhibited this watercolour by Gandy at the Royal Academy (no.1052) in 1830 to illustrate the results of his nearly forty-five years of labour on the Bank of England using the straightforward title 'A bird's eye view of the Bank of England'. It was accompanied by the quotation 'Je vais enlever les toits de cette superbe édifice national ... le dedans va se découvrir à vos yeux de même qu'on voit le dedans un pâté dont on vient d'ôter la croûte', from Le Diable Boiteux, tom. I, chap.3 [I want to lift the roof of that wonderful national building. The interior will be revealed to you like a meat pie with the crust removed'. The quotation is from a novel of 1707 by Alain René Le Sage (of which Soane owned 3 French and 2 English editions), in which an airborne devil carries the story's protagonist over the rooftops of a city to expose the human follies below. Soane had finished his Bank, 'the pride and boast of my life', and this view was exhibited at the Royal Academy to celebrate the completion of his masterpiece. Three years later he retired, 45 years after his appointment.

This drawing has often been referred to as 'The Bank in ruins' but in fact this is not a description used by Soane or Gandy. It is, in technical terms, a cutaway axonometric and it imaginatively conflates conventions of the Renaissance aerial cutaway perspective with the eighteenth-century Piranesian ruinscape to create an ambiguous image of the Bank of England both seemingly in ruins and under construction. Gandy's view aggrandises the institution and its building as imperial monuments and celebrates Soane's poetic genius as well as the professionalism of the Bank's fireproof structural systems. Their superiority over the flimsy brick and plaster construction so typical of Regency London is revealed for all to see.

As Daniel Abrahamson explains 'In this image - a combination of plan, section and elevation - the totality of Soane's achievement is represented: interior and exterior, construction and decoration, substructure and superstructure, all publicly revealed like a model on a table-top'. Soane must have expected viewers of this work, when they saw it first at the Academy in 1830, to interpret it as a visualisation of future ruin. It is inescapably reminiscent of the ruins of Pompeii and may well have been directly inspired by the cork model of those ruins acquired by Soane in 1826. When Soane placed that model in its final location in his new Model Room in 1834 he hung a plan of the Bank of England nearby - almost certainly to highlight the similarities between the two and to emphasize that viewed in centuries to come the ruins of his Bank would be, as he imagined it, as impressive and iconic as those of ancient Rome itself.

Executed by Gandy for John Soane in 1830.

Daniel Abrahamson, PhD thesis 'The Building of the Bank of England', (Harvard, 1993), pp.425-9.
Margaret Richardson & MaryAnne Stevens (eds), John Soane Architect: Master of Space and Light, exhibition catalogue, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1999, p.219 and cat.119 (p.222)
Visions of Ruin, exhibition catalogue, Sir John Soane's Museum, 1999, cat.35, p.49
Christopher Evans, 'Megalithic Follies: Soane's 'Druidical Remains' and the Display of Monuments', Journal of Material Culture, 2000, 5: pp.348-349, fig. 1.

Metropole London 1800 bis 1840, Villa Hügel, Essen, 6 June - 8 November 1992
Visions of Ruin: Architectural fantasies & designs for garden follies, Sir John Soane's Museum, London, 2 July - 28 August 1999
John Soane Architect: Master of Space and Light, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 11 September - 3 December 1999; Centro Palladio, Vicenza, April - August 2000; Hôtel de Rohan, Paris, January - April 2001; Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, 16 May - 3 September 2001; Real Academia des Bellas Artes, Madrid, October - December 2001
Ruin Lust, Tate Britain, London, 4 March - 18 May 2014