John Soane, and the light of his life
By Simon Tait The London Magazine, April/May 2011
There is something, well, almost fraudulent about the tranquillity of the Sir John Soane Museum, about the delight in knowing that this unfathomable live-in folly of a residence with its hidden passages and sliding panels actually belongs to us. Something disingenuous about the glowing warmth of the place, put together as it was by an obsessive, self-absorbed martinet who left this structure and its extraordinary contents to the nation to spite his son, partly because he refused (or wasn’t good enough) to follow his father’s profession and become an architect.
Poor George – “a gaunt, sad man, earning a precarious livelihood as a minor poet and playwright” recalled George Sala at the end of the 19th century – was a victim of his father’s devotion to the next generation of architects. When the “Act of the Settling and Preserving of Sir John Soane’s Museum”, introduced by the radical MP John Hume, became law four years before Sir John’s death, his son protested that his father had been “improperly importuned and persuaded” to take a step “which would leave himself and his family destitute”. William Cobbett presented a petition in the House of Commons, saying it was morally wrong “for a man to divert his estate from his family”, and Sir Robert Peel thought he should let the whole thing go to the British Museum to save the nation the burden of its upkeep.
But the Act of the Settling and Preserving of Sir John Soane’s Museum went through, George and his children did not starve, and we became the heirs to the most extraordinary, delightful and aesthetically confused private home in London, which is about to yield to us probably its last secrets.
It is not so much its physical obscurity in a terrace on the north side of Lincoln’s Inn Fields that makes Sir John Soane’s Museum “London’s best kept secret” any longer – 120,000 find it each year – as the mysteries within, and the £7m renovation which started in February and will take three years will reveal many more.
We know Soane through his home now, but in his day he was not only the pre-eminent architect of his day he was enormously influential, taking his role as professor or architecture at the Royal Academy with great punctilio – his pupils were expected to be at their drawing boards for 12 hours a day. He continued to be an influence long after his death, and his own tomb at St Pancras was the inspiration for Giles Gilbert Scott’s red telephone box of the 1920s.
Soane was also a fanatical collector, of architectural drawings for the benefit of his students but also the nick-nacks of art and curiosity that tickled his insatiably inquisitive fancy, with which he at first packed his home and then had to rebuild the residence around. Many of his objects were acquired for the benefit of his students for whom he created a drawing studio (in such a way as to make it either visible or audible from any part of the establishment, forestalling mischief), and they were expected to stay diligently at their drawing boards for at least 12 hours a day.
He had bought antique marble sculptures, Hogarth’s series The Rake’s Progress, Canaletto’s The Grand Canal, a 13th century wooden boss from Westminster Abbey, a Roubiliac medallion portrait of Handel, Sir Robert Walpole’s desk, a Turner, a Reynolds and other paintings by friends and contemporaries, and the entire architectural library of his hero Robert Adam. Everywhere are the wildly extravagant architectural fantasy drawings Soane got Joseph Gandy to draw in their scores. In 1823, when the British Museum unaccountably turned it down, he had snapped up the Belzoni Sarcophagus, the coffin of the Egyptian King Seti I. He seems to have had little idea about what he had paid the enormous sum of £2,000 for, writing about it “This marvellous effort of human industry and perseverence is supposed to be at least three thousand years old”.
When he died in 1837 he left the three houses – because by that time he had added Nos 13 and 14 Lincoln’s Inn Fields to No 12 – to us with the proviso of giving free access “to Amateurs and Students in Painting, Sculpture and Architecture”, and the trustees have kept everything that Soane collected, the director, Tim Knox, told me. “We’re cleaning, restoring and redisplaying hundreds of objects left to the nation, and we’ll recreate the rooms and spaces that Soane carefully designed”.
One of the first acts of the trustees after his death was to strip out the private apartments at the top of the house, including Soane’s bedroom and bathroom, his wife’s drawing room and their private oratory, to become offices. Working to paintings of the rooms Soane had had done in the 1820s, these rooms are all being restored to the way he knew them, the colours and fabrics all exhaustively researched. Added to that Tim Knox is installing a new exhibition gallery and conservation studios, a lift to allow full disabled access at last. The work will be completed in 2014, the bicentenary of the building of No 13.
Over the last 160 years successive curators have added elements and made mostly discreet alterations, and at one point No 14 was sold and let. Seven years ago the museum was able to buy it back, then four years later a lease ran out so that it came under the director’s control, and now it gives the museum the space to return to Soane’s vision once again.
The restorers have been immeasurably helped by the chance discovery on the shelves of the British Library eight years ago of a book of 144 prints, drawing and watercolours paintings bound into a quarto-size book with 101 pages of text devoted to the buildings that delighted him, including the Lincoln’s Inn Fields buildings. Most of the illustrations had been unknown to scholars but give a unique insight into how Soane planned the buildings closest to his heart – his Lincoln’s Inn Fields house, his country home, Pitshanger Manor (which Soane always spelt ‘Pitzhanger”) at Ealing, and Soane’s wife’s tomb.
Many of the illustrations were made using the then latest technology of lithography which had taken the place of engraving in Soane’s office and may have been introduced to Soane by his last pupil and later assistant, Charles James Richardson, who was to become an eminent architectural historian himself. Richardson had been given the task of copying objects and drawings by Soane or Gandy, but everything he did and the items from which he worked were meticulously filed away by George Bailey, Soane’s senior assistant and later curator of the museum. Fittingly, it was found by an architecture student studying for a master’s degree who discovered the slim volume while researching Pitshanger Manor. It appears to be a companion to another, larger, collection of drawings and commentaries about Soane’s public commissions which is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum and has long been familiar to scholars. The British Library version is a much more personal record.
A small toilet is being returned to the use Soane had given it, as a small sculpture gallery, and a room added in the later 19th century is to become a “cabinet of curiosities” with some of the oddities Soane had, such as the brooch Charles I wore at Naseby, Mrs Soane’s jewelled gloves, and a mummy’s head.
The house is full of invention, with an obsessive attention to light quality which was so admirably brought put in the 1999 Royal Academy exhibition devoted to Soane, co-curated by MaryAnne Stevens and Tim Knox’s predecessor Margaret Richardson that the chose to entitle John Soane Architect. Master of Space and Light. The light channels running from the roof he used to illumine the interiors are being restored, and a hitherto undiscovered basement tunnel has been discovered which will provide a new link between collections storage space and a new court.
One of Soane’s greatest delights was his picture gallery, an ingenious small salon which is enlarged by screens folding out of the walls revealing more and more pictures, of varying quality. The Rakes’s Progress, all 12 paintings, are concealed under one fold; on the opposite wall the screens fold out twice to reveal a recess which contains the model of the building Soane considered his masterpiece, the Bank of England, demolished in 1937. Pride of place goes to the Canaletto, and above it, barely visible, is a small undistinguished painting of A Hen Defending Her Chickens. The artist is Sir Francis Bourgeois who commissioned Soane to build the Dulwich Picture Gallery, and the genial Sir John would have acquired as a gesture to his friend rather than an example of Georgian fine art. “Some of them are works of art, some of them are just curiosities, some of them are really rather dull,” says Simon Jervis, chairman of the Soane and former director of the Fitzwilliam Museum. “But they’re all Soane”.
The architect was Sir John Soane who was a fanatical collector of art and architectural artefacts, and who left his Lincoln’s Inn Field house in London to the nation as a museum, one of the most popular of its size in the country attracting over 100,000 visits a year.
The find was 144 prints, drawings and watercolour paintings bound into a quarto-size book with 101 pages of text. Most of the illustrations have been unknown to scholars but give a unique insight into how Soane planned the buildings closest to his heart – his Lincoln’s Inn Fields house, his country home, Pitshanger Manor (which Soane always spelt ‘Pitzhanger”) at Ealing, and Soane’s wife’s tomb built at St Pancras.
Many of the illustrations are made using the then latest technology of lithography which had taken the place of engraving in Soane’s office and may have been introduced to Soane by the young Richardson – 46 of the 51 prints are lithographs.
The unexpected discovery of the book and its contents is revealed in the latest edition of the respected monthly art publication Burlington Magazine which celebrates its centenary this month.
Bianca de Divitiis, an architecture student studying for a master’s degree and now qualified, discovered the slim volume while researching Pitshanger Manor last year.
It appears to be a companion to another, larger, collection of drawings and commentaries about Soane’s public commissions which is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum and has long been familiar to scholars. The British Library version is a much more personal record.
The house was eventually three houses in the terrace which was not only home for Soane and his family but an academy of architecture for promising young draughtsmen – Soane was also professor of architecture at the Royal Academy – and the drawing office they occupied for 12 hours a day is still to be seen.
Soane changed the face of his house, and the book has an intriguing elevation showing Soane’s early thoughts in 1812 on how the first house, No. 13, might look, with balconies, a balustrade above the loggia which characterises the house, and caryatids supporting the roof.
He filled his house not only with instructive objects but with pieces he simply liked – an Egyptian sarcophagus, paintings by Canaletto, turner and Reynolds and Hogarth’s series A Rake’s Progress, a 13th century wooden boss from Westminster Abbey, a Roubiliac medallion portrait of Handel, Sir Robert Walpole’s desk.
Fortuitously the find comes just as the museum is embarking on a £1,3 million development with the third house, which has recently been re-acquired by the museum, being turned into an education centre with proper storage for the 9.000 drawings by Robert Adam, the neo-classical architect who created a whole lifestyle for Georgian England, collected by Soane and hitherto kept in an old wardrobe.
The book was not put together by Soane himself, says de Divitiis, but by his last pupil and later assistant, Charles James Richardson, who was to become an eminent architectural historian himself. Richardson had been given the task of copying objects and drawings by Soane or his favourite artist Joseph Gandy by the architect, but everything he did and the items from which he worked were meticulously filed away by George Bailey, Soane’s senior assistant and later curator of the museum.
“It’s obviously Richardson’s own project, but it’s full of documents which must have been taken from the house” says Margaret Richardson, director of the Sir John Soane Museum. “I would never accuse Richardson of purloining them, but Bailey was very strict about who saw the objects and drawings and what they did with them, and made sure they went back where they belonged, so how Richardson came by them is a mystery.”
There may also have been some bad feeling between Richardson and Bailey. When Soane assigned his house and collection to the nation by Act of Parliament in 1833, four years before his death, an Act in which all the contents without exception were to be included, Soane is known to have promised Richardson a role in the new museum, a job he never got it. The book was almost certainly compiled in the years immediately after Soane’s death, says Ms Richardson (who is not related).
Even so, it was known that Richardson had given material to the then South Kensington Museum, now the V&A, but not that he had disposed of material in any other way. The newly found book had been bought by the British Museum from an Oxford Street dealer in 1868, three years before Richardson’s death at the age of 65, and later passed to the British Library.
Some of the illustrations show Soane trying different arrangements out, so that there are alternative views of the Monk’s Parlour, for instance, with different decorations and furniture. The little drawing room, which Soane used as his office, complete with his own sink and toilet, is also seen in two different watercolours by Richardson.
The book includes some hitherto unknown paintings by Gandy whose work included fantastical realisations of Soane’s neo-classical architectural fantasies and who has recently been reassessed by art historians.
One of the most fascinating sketches serves as a frontispiece. According to a pencil note by Charles Richardson, the sketch is by Gandy apparently with suggestions for the background for the famous 1828 portrait of Soane that Sir Thomas Lawrence came out of retirement to paint. Whereas in the finished painting the background is missing and has only a dull red drape behind the seated Soane, the Gandy version identifies Sir John with the house by drawing the drapery aside to reveal a careful construction with the stained glass window panes of the dining room and beyond in the courtyard the Pasticcio, a 30 foot monument Soane made as a teaching device.
“The Pasticcio is especially interesting” Margaret Richardson says. “It was built over a well and had to be dismantled in the 1890s because it was in danger of collapse. We are currently recreating it as part of the development.”
But Soane’s house had an important teaching role, particularly after its creator became professor of architecture at the Royal Academy.
Soane built a drawing office for his pupils which appears to float above the main floor of the house where they would toil over their drawing boards for 12 hours a day surrounded by examples of good practice, with piercings in the walls at foot level making sure Sir John knew what they were up to.
Work was hard, but there was fun, too, and in one of the little courtyards Soane built a folly, “Monk’s Yard”, its floor decorated with the bottoms and tops of the port bottles the holy man was supposed to have comforted himself with, and an elaborate monument to the Soane family dog, Fanny.
In the other courtyard he built a “pasticcio”, an extraordinary 30 foot monument to “Architecture ancient and modern”. But he built it over what had been a well, and in 1896 it collapsed and a third of it was so badly smashed it was thrown away.
Now Sir John’s folly is to be recreated, thanks to drawings in Soane’s collection and the decoration on Fanny’s tomb, as part of a large-scale development for the Soane. Two years ago it acquired the house next door, also built by Soane but occupied by lawyers ever since. The museum at last takes vacant position in December, and a £1.3 million plan will turn it into an education centre to include space for Soane’s building models and the 9,000 drawings of the Adam brothers had collected – until now they have been stored in an old wardrobe.
