Sir John Soane’s Museum

Sir John Soane’s name doesn’t trip off the architectural tongue today but in his day he was Britain’s most influential and prolific architect – a classicist some of whose work is startlingly modern. For instance every major gallery built today is “top lit” to give an even quality of light on the paintings whilst protecting them from direct sunlight. Soane came up with this solution first for the Dulwich Picture Gallery and the architectural consensus is it has never been bettered. He designed the imposing edifice of the Bank of England in the City of London whose solidity was to speak to us of the solidity of the British currency at the height of Empire. Why he even inspired the Red Telephone box! So much of what he designed has been either demolished; altered or not built in the first place that is importance could be overlooked if it was not for London’s most amazing Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields which he bequeathed to the nation in 1837.




Dulwich Picture Gallery

This is not like any conventional museum for it is an amazing cabinet of curiosities for he filled his house with a most amazing and eccentric collection. Not only did he fill his house he also bought the houses on either side and even then he had to extend the lot and then again had so many items that he even designed folding displays to fit more paintings in. So this is a cabinet of curiosities on steroids for nowhere will you see such an amazing treasure trove on display, from the sarcophagus of Pharaoh Seti I to Hogarth’s “The Rake's Progress” to Greek Sculpture and more, much, much more.


Sir John Soane 1753 - 1837


Sir John Soane's Museum

Soane was born in 1753, the son of a bricklayer, and died after a long and distinguished career, in 1837. Soane designed this house to live in, but also as a setting for his antiquities and his works of art. After the death of his wife (1815), he lived here alone, constantly adding to and rearranging his collections. Having been deeply disappointed by the conduct of his two sons, one of whom survived him, he determined to establish the house as a museum to which ‘amateurs and students’ should have access. Now this unique place is to be enhanced further as the private apartments of the Sir John Soane are to be opened to the public for the first time since his death more than 170 years ago, after a £7million restoration which will take three years. Because of the genius of Sir John in getting Parliament to pass a special Act to protect his collection all this is there, as he intended, to see and enjoy FREE!


Library


Dining Room


Dome

Soane began his education in the architectural office of George Dance, one of the leading Neo-classical architects of the day. In 1771, he enrolled in the Royal Academy Schools where he won a gold medal for his design for a triumphal bridge (1776) and a scholarship to study in Italy (1778-81). In 1788, he was appointed Surveyor to the Bank of England. Many other public and private commissions followed, among them Dulwich Picture Gallery (1811-14). The security of this position allowed him to develop his highly idiosyncratic architectural vision. He gave his house and important works of art to the nation as the Soane Museum.


William Hogarth's "The Rake's Progress"


In 1833 Soane negotiated an Act of Parliament to settle and preserve the house and collection for the benefit of ‘amateurs and students’ in architecture, painting and sculpture. On his death in 1837 the Act came into force, vesting the Museum in a board of Trustees who were to continue to uphold Soane’s own aims and objectives. A crucial part of their brief was to maintain the fabric of the Museum, keeping it ‘as nearly as circumstances will admit in the state’ in which it was left at the time of Soane’s death in 1837 and to allow free access for students and the public to ‘consult, inspect and benefit’ from the collections.



The Bank of England


Sarcophagus of Pharaoh Seti I

Thanks to the recent restoration of No.14 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the Museum can now restore an entire 2nd floor of No.13; comprising an ensemble of exquisite and intriguing rooms. These include Soane’s private apartments: bedroom, bathroom, oratory, book passage and Mrs Soane's Morning Room and the Model Room above. Other spaces include the Tivoli and Shakespeare recesses.



The restoration, called Opening Up the Soane, will let visitors see private rooms including the bedroom and bathroom. Part of his original bed was recently discovered in museum stores and is to be rebuilt. The work will also include the re-creation of the Tivoli Recess, Britain's first public gallery of contemporary sculpture. This will permit, for the first time since Soane's death in 1837, the display of 80 architectural models he used for teaching students at the Royal Academy.



Other rooms, including the Catacomb where Soane housed his collection of Roman funerary urns, are also being returned to their original use, having been adapted for visitor lavatories at the end of the 19th century. Watercolours of the apartments, painted in 1825 by Soane's pupils, are being used to govern the restoration. In addition to designing the house, he also directed the design of its furnishings and decorations, showing the finished result to interested parties including his Royal Academy students.


Soane's Bedroom


Soane's Model Room where he used c. 80 models to teach students

The museum's director, Tim Knox, said: "The restoration will help to address the problems caused by 110,000 visitors a year in a house which was built as the private residence of a great gentleman architect in the Regency era."The museum will not close during the works, which start next month and are due to be completed by 2014.

Today the Museum is housed in three fairly modest-sized interconnected and expanded houses house not a palace, so it really shouldn't take long to stroll round. Except that almost every inch is crammed with mouldings, architectural features, sculpture and art from the 18th and 19th centuries and back through antiquity. Some of the lighting in 'the crypt' is so low that you sense the almost life-size statuary rather than see them as they stand guard close to a painted stone sarcophagus from ancient Egypt. Everywhere there are lanterns and squints to allow daylight down into galleries, mezzanines and tiny dark corners. And then there is the famous gallery room where the walls covered with paintings open up like barn doors to show painting on the inside, and then, magically, they open again to finally reveal a hidden day lit space and the odd Turner or Canaletto. Oh yes, and there are the complete original oil paintings of Hogarth's 'The Election' and 'The Rake's Progress' which that artist created to promote sales of his engravings. All astonishingly restored and exhibited by the staff in such a low-key manner. For this is no conventional museum and even after all these years and despite its priceless contents you still feel you are being invited into Sir John’s personal space to view his idiosyncratic and slightly out of control collection.



There is a postscript for this great Architect would no doubt be happy to know that his tomb inspired one of the 20th Century’s great design icons, the Red Telephone Box. St. Pancras Old Churchyard is today somewhat forlorn set in the lee of the railway tracks behind Kings Cross and St Pancras Stations. Indeed as an apprentice architect the writer Thomas Hardy was involved in the controversial clearing of part of the churchyard to build the railway tracks.

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2007/11/st-pancras-reborn.html



Soane's mausoleum which provided the inspiration for the design by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott of the iconic red telephone boxes.



But this is historically one of London’s oldest churches named after the Roman Saint; St. Pancras and containing many graves of the good and great, the composer Johann Christian Bach and the sculptor John Flaxman. It is also the burial place of William Franklin, the last colonial Governor of New Jersey and illegitimate son of Benjamin Franklin. There is a memorial tomb for philosophers and writers Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, she being a famous reformer and mother of Mary Shelley. Here Sir John Soane designed a tomb for his wife and himself in the churchyard, which is now Grade I listed. This mausoleum provided the inspiration for the design by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott of the iconic red telephone boxes.




The website for the museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Holborn is;

http://www.soane.org/

For the wonderful enclaves which are the Inns of Court around Sir John Soane’s Museum see;

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2009/04/inns-of-court-london.html


For DC’s RLT (Reduced London Tour) which deftly avoids overpriced tourist traps see;

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2007/09/day-in-london.html

For more on the Red Phone Box and other British design icons see;">For more on the Red Phone Box and other British design icons see;

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2009/01/great-british-design-quest.html




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