Sir John Soane’s Museum is one of London’s most eccentric buildings, containing a riot of classical fragments, paintings, architectural models and plaster casts jammed in to overflowing narrow galleries packed into a Georgian town house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Soane viewed it as a reflection of his busy intellect, ‘studies for my own mind’, he said, and Bruce Boucher’s new book reveals how the architect, famous for designing the Bank of England, put together the remarkable collection that visitors can still see today.
The author was director of the Soane Museum from 2016 to last year, and his privileged access to its archives ensures we get an insider’s view of the quirky institution and its more than 40,000 eclectic objects. Describing it as ‘one of the most intensely autobiographical statements conceived in three-dimensional terms’, Boucher reveals how Soane (born ‘Soan’) emerged from a very humble family of bricklayers to win a Royal Academy Gold Medal for his skilled architectural drawing and a travel scholarship for a Grand Tour of Italy. Taking two years, it was the beginning of his exposure to classical culture.
But it was only after his marriage in 1784 to Eliza Smith, the heiress to the City Surveyor of Paving, that he had the considerable funds to buy properties in Lincoln’s Inn Fields and fill them with an enormous range of objects. Eliza shared her husband’s passions and together they acquired art and statuary. Her death in 1815, only two years after moving into their renovated home, determined Soane to ensure his collection should be as much a memorial to her as a record of his career and influences.
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