Studies for His Mind

In 1877 the German classicist Adolf Michaelis had almost completed the research for his catalog of ancient Greek and Roman sculpture held in British collections. It was “irksome, mosaic-like work,” he reported—poring over the contents of museums and private houses, trying not to miss something important, at every moment likely to be “disturbed by the impatient noise of the housekeeper’s keys.” One of the final collections on his list was Sir John Soane’s Museum, a former private townhouse in Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London. It was not the kind of place to lift his spirits:

The collection,…consisting of the most heterogeneous curiosities and objects of art that can be conceived, is distributed over the rooms of the house, which are mostly very small and connected with one another in a strange way. A number of very narrow passages, very dark corners, and the like, impedes a steady investigation equally with the overcrowding of the rooms and the incredibly inconvenient mode in which a great part of the contents are arranged.

The lighting was dim; the layout was labyrinthine; nothing was displayed in a way that made sense. How was a scholar supposed to do his work? “I am…not sure whether I have been fortunate enough to discover the principal examples during my repeated searches through all the rooms,” Michaelis wrote acidly. “It is not too much to say that some of the better specimens can only be seen from the back.”

John Soane, a distinguished architect known for his work at the Bank of England, had been very clear about his vision for the collection. In the last decade of his life he produced three versions of A Description of the House and Museum on the North Side of Lincoln’s-Inn-Fields, the Residence of John Soane, Architect (1830–1835), a visitors’ guide to No. 13 that was also designed to freeze it in time. The roughly 40,000 items that made up his collection needed to remain exactly where he had left them, he explained: the overcrowded rooms and narrow passages that Michaelis deplored were choreographed as tightly as a ballet.

There was no systematic curation by historical period or segregation of objects according to provenance. Instead Soane’s groupings formed what he called “studies for my own mind,” expressions of or aids to an idiosyncratic understanding of the world. Since his death in 1837, the house’s curators have done their best to adhere to his often-baffling specifications. Unlike other private collections of the period, typically sold off or dispersed, Soane’s was protected by an act of Parliament in 1833 that bequeathed it to the public in perpetuity. It represents the rare survival of a collection that was more like an early modern cabinet of curiosities—flamboyant, overflowing, full of anomalies—than a nineteenth-century institution.

In the present-day museum, which receives more than 100,000 visitors a year, the “Dome” area (an arched, top-lit space on the ground floor) features a marble capital from the original attic of the Pantheon in Rome, early-nineteenth-century statuettes of Michelangelo and Raphael, and a grand bust of the collector himself. Downstairs in the basement, in a neo-Gothic chamber known as the Monk’s Parlour, is a desk that might once have belonged to Sir Robert Walpole, a collection of pre-Columbian Peruvian pottery, and a seventeenth-century German crossbow.

From 1813 until his death, No. 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields was Soane’s family home, the place where he lived with his wife, Eliza, and their two sons, entertained guests, taught his architectural pupils. He was not alone among Romantic-period collectors in living in a space that was a strange amalgam of private house and museum. Since the 1780s British and French antiquaries had experimented with turning their homes into monuments to the past. Abbotsford, Walter Scott’s country house in Scotland, “represented his imagination in three-dimensional form,” the historian Rosemary Hill writes in Time’s Witness: History in the Age of Romanticism (2021). It was fitted with oak paneling, an armory, stained glass, and a faux-medieval well that Scott fashioned out of “broken stones” from the nearby ruin of Melrose Abbey. (“It makes a tolerable deception and looks at least 300 years old,” he wrote to a friend.) At Goodrich Court, a mock-medieval castle in Herefordshire, Samuel Meyrick displayed weaponry used at the recent Chartist riots at Newport in 1839 and wooden horses with dead animals’ salvaged manes. Soane, with similar magpie-like instincts, decorated his Monk’s Parlour with stained glass that had been “removed” from a convent during the French Revolution.

Unlike the antiquaries’ castles and cottages, however, his house was not primarily a means of exploring his relationship to history. Antiquarian interiors, Hill shows, were made first and foremost “to be lived in”—sometimes, “if the occupant so chose, in complete privacy, in communion with the past.” From the beginning, Soane’s collecting was a public-facing activity, inseparable from his professional ambition. He designed No. 13 to showcase his architectural abilities, display his gentlemanly tastes, and forge alliances with the painters and sculptors whose work he purchased. From 1812 he opened his house periodically to students at the Royal Academy, where he was professor of architecture, to enable them to consult his drawings, plaster casts, and antique fragments. His great hope, with an eye on the future of the Soane line, was that his house-museum would become a kind of “national academy” of architectural history and practice, maintained by his sons and grandsons.

Houses are like palimpsests. Over the years they acquire the traces of human intentions, changing situations, decisions made and reversed. Bruce Boucher’s John Soane’s Cabinet of Curiosities, the first monograph on Soane’s collecting as opposed to his architectural career, studies the obsessions that shaped his transformation of No. 13. According to Boucher, an art historian and former director of the Soane Museum, the house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields was “autobiographical” in a distinctive way: it recorded, with a single-mindedness bordering on masochism, Soane’s misfortunes, disappointments, and failures, all the things he hoped and worked for that did not come to fruition. In 1815, just two years after the family’s move into No. 13, Eliza Soane died. The loss drove his collecting: it became compulsive, compensatory, “dictated by an emotional hunger,” in Boucher’s words. “I hope it will be long before you are satisfied,” his friend John Taylor wrote of one of his acquisitions in 1821. “The pursuit weans you from thoughts of a very different nature.” His sons, John and George, were another disappointment, both unsuited and unwilling in their different ways to carry on his architectural practice. After John’s early death in 1823 at the age of thirty-seven, Soane’s program of collecting and redesigning accelerated. He imagined his house as a kind of monument to past hopes, “his memorial and a symbol of his individual achievement,” in the words of his biographer, Gillian Darley: a dead site rather than a living one.

Soane, born in 1753, was the youngest surviving child of John Soan, a bricklayer or builder from the village of Goring-on-Thames in Oxfordshire. In adult life, he avoided mentioning his beginnings or did his best to hide them. (Around the time of his marriage, he added an improving e to his surname.) Little is known about his childhood; Darley has suggested that there may have been a period of precarity or “sudden downturn” in his father’s fortunes, which left its traces in the “terror of debt” Soane exhibited later in life.

From the age of eight he attended a local school (his fees perhaps subsidized by the schoolmaster), where he learned mathematics and Latin and developed a love of reading. He was employed briefly as a hod carrier for his brother, William, a bricklayer; then, in a fantastic stroke of luck, an acquaintance introduced him to George Dance, a rising City of London architect, who took him on as an errand boy in 1768. A year later, aged fifteen or sixteen, he was helping Dance with the remodeling of a country villa. In 1771 he won a place to study architecture at the Royal Academy schools.

Soane was preternaturally ambitious. His humble start in life, Darley writes, “made him precipitate, as if he had less time to achieve what others could take by virtue of their social position.” In 1776 he won the academy’s biennial gold medal, awarded to the best senior architecture student on the basis of a design competition. The medal made him eligible for a Grand Tour–style traveling studentship, in the gift of the king. The usual procedure was for the academicians to hold a formal election to decide who should receive the studentship; Soane didn’t want to wait and corralled Sir William Chambers, the king’s architect, into showing his portfolio to George III personally.

On his return, after two years studying classical ruins in Italy, he courted aristocratic and commercial patrons and was rewarded with an “explosion of work,” necessitating long journeys “by bone-rattling mail coach” up and down the country. When, in 1784, he married Eliza Smith, niece and heir of George Wyatt, a prosperous City developer, Eliza must have known she would barely see her husband. Any spare time that he had he spent tearing down and redeveloping No. 12 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the house that the couple purchased in 1792 after Wyatt’s death.

Early on, as an apprentice in Dance’s office, Soane had recognized that the architectural world turned on connections. In the small, jealous environment of the Royal Academy in particular, much of the work lay in becoming known. The academician Joseph Farington, purveyor of gossip par excellence, first bothered to mention Soane in his diary less than a week after he and Eliza had moved into their Lincoln’s Inn Fields townhouse. Soane, for his part, knew the importance of being talked about. In 1802 he purchased—with much fanfare—the eight paintings in Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress (1733–1735) series at auction, then organized a dinner party for a select group of academicians to show them off.

Objects, to him, were inextricably linked with people. As he saw it, the Hogarth paintings weren’t just Hogarths, they were also the former property of the eccentric Gothic novelist and collector William Beckford. A work’s provenance, in Soane’s collection, counted for almost as much as its antiquity or aesthetic qualities: he seemed to see everything he possessed as if it had an invisible name tag attached. Some of the notes in his Description of the House and Museum read like entries from the society pages: “To the right and left are two beautiful China Jars, given to me by the late Viscount Bridport.” He targeted objects that had been owned by or were associated with his heroes. He kept a strand of Napoleon’s hair coiled in one of his rings; he had the celebrity actor John Philip Kemble’s copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio; he splashed out for Hogarth’s The Humours of an Election series (1754–1755), formerly the property of another celebrity actor, David Garrick. (He would stretch a point for anything Garrick-related, once purchasing a presentation copy of Hogarth’s prints that had been owned by Garrick’s doctor.) The fact that another version of a Reynolds painting he wanted was in the collection of Prince Potemkin was an irresistible attraction.

An astute networker, he could also be his own worst enemy. “He was irritable, impetuous and untractable—he could not bear contradiction—and opposition induced in him the idea of personal hostility,” Thomas Leverton Donaldson, president of the Institute of British Architects, remarked in an unusually frank obituary address. His instinct under provocation was to take people to court, as he did unsuccessfully in 1799, after a rival circulated a poem calling his pilasters at the Bank of England “scor’d like loins of pork.” (At the trial the poem was read aloud “to general amusement.”) In 1810 he was so vicious in a public lecture about the work of one of his former pupils that he had to step down temporarily as professor of architecture. (“One can never be prepared for the insanity of such venomous malignity,” the academician Thomas Lawrence remarked.) He was, he wrote of himself in the third person in an autobiographical fragment, “a mere child in the world,” terminally “indiscreet,” driven by a pure love of his art to speak his mind, “until at last he had raised a nest of wasps about him sufficient to sting the strongest man to death.”

No. 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, which he purchased in 1807, was a kind of architectural act of revenge. In its design and curation, Soane found ways to chew over and relitigate years of perceived unfairnesses and slights. Its façade, which he redesigned and completed in 1813, projected over a meter beyond those of the other houses in the terrace, in a manner that the district surveyor claimed was illegal. It was clearly visible from the opposite side of the square, which happened to be the site of the new headquarters of the Royal College of Surgeons, a building that Dance had been working on since 1800. Dance and Soane had fallen out dramatically: Dance, stung by the disloyal manner in which Soane had intrigued to replace him as professor of architecture in 1805, would no longer work with him. Soane, characteristically, felt he ought to have been given the Royal College of Surgeons commission.

On top of his façade, he mounted a pair of stone caryatids in draped Grecian dress, which mocked the male figures in tunics—he called them “two old men with Greek names on their skirts”—on the portico of Dance’s building opposite. There was a suggestion that one of the female figures was supposed to be Dance. After the front was finished, he instructed his longtime collaborator, the artist Joseph Michael Gandy, to produce a watercolor of Nos. 13, 14, and 15. In the picture, all three houses—two of which were not his—feature the same audacious, caryatid-splashed façade.

Inside there were more pointed references. The Monk’s Yard, next to the Monk’s Parlour, featured a curated display of medieval masonry taken from the Houses of Parliament, where Soane had lobbied unsuccessfully to lead renovations since the 1790s. It was as if he’d chosen to frame his job rejections. (He was finally given a project at the Palace of Westminster in 1820, after the accession of George IV.) In the dining room, hanging prominently opposite each other, were two Gandy watercolors, Public and Private Buildings Executed by Sir John Soane (1818) and the elaborately titled Architectural Visions of Early Fancy in the Gay Morning of Youth and Dreams in the Evening of Life (1820). Public and Private Buildings depicts completed works of Soane’s: the remodeled Bank of England, the Dulwich Picture Gallery, Eliza Soane’s monumental tomb. Architectural Visions, by contrast, is like a photographic negative. In an unreal, dreamlike landscape, it features large-scale public projects—a new British senate, a royal palace—that Soane designed, labored over, solicited, but was never invited to build.

In the Picture Room, an ingenious gallery that he constructed on the ground floor in 1824, Soane showed drawings of the imaginary palace, “a Triumphal Arch, forming the entrance into Downing Street,” and a “grand Western Entrance into the Metropolis,” also never commissioned. It was his way, Boucher argues, of shadowing his career with visions of what might, or ought to, have been. “This palace was proposed to have been constructed on a most elevated and salubrious spot,” he wrote of his design in the Description of the House and Museum. “It is worthy of remark, that the basement would have been above the level of the attics in the palace since erected at Pimlico.” This was a smack at Buckingham Palace, formerly plain old Buckingham House, which had been expensively remodeled by John Nash, George IV’s architect and one of Soane’s loathed rivals. The novelist Barbara Hofland, a friend of Soane’s enlisted to pad out his commentary in the 1835 Description, was huffily outraged on his behalf. “What that unfortunate pile of building has cost, and must cost, before…it is rendered a dwelling for a king—(a suitable one it never will be)—it is perhaps better that we should never know.”

In his Royal Academy lectures, which he gave between 1809 and 1832, Soane dwelled on the spectacular side of his art. He was fascinated by “the splendid effects of architecture, and its power to affect the mind,” the way a building or interior could “dazzle,” “surprise,” or “tire” a beholder. He admired the medieval architecture of Westminster Abbey and Salisbury Cathedral for its “blaze of effect,” the “delirium” it was calculated to produce in spectators. He was particularly interested in what light, or its absence, could do in a building, noting the “aweful and pleasing gloom” of sacred spaces, their way of “admitting light as it were by stealth.” At Pitzhanger Manor in Ealing, the country house he owned until 1809, the long gallery was, he wrote, ideally to be “seen by moonlight,” its urns, statues, and vines “producing a succession of beautiful effects.”

The lighting at No. 13 was theatrically choreographed. Its purpose was to make successive spaces distinct from one another: dark and bright, claustrophobic and open. On the ground floor the dimly lit, “solemn” Colonnade opened unexpectedly into the bright, sky-lit Dome, where Soane assembled some of his most significant classical fragments. Downstairs, the atmospheric Monk’s Parlour was kept in partial shadow, a yellow-tinted skylight filtering light down from above; the color lent what Hofland called a “mellow lustre” to Soane’s Gothic relics and manuscripts. In the library and breakfast room, there was mirror glass laid ingeniously into recesses, inside sliding shutters, behind vases, between bookshelves. Small convex mirrors in the ceiling distorted portions of the floor, creating what Soane called “fanciful effects.” The result, Darley has observed, was a different kind of space from the fashionable mirrored drawing rooms designed by Robert Adam, which reflected Georgian society brilliantly back to itself. Soane’s mirroring was more complex and self-involved: “unsettling, illusionistic,” like a three-dimensional trompe l’oeil.

The dramas of his house were narrative as well as visual. On the library ceiling, a set of paintings by the artist Henry Howard depicted, with gloomy symbolism, the story of Pandora’s box. (“In the midst, Jupiter, attended by Victory and Nemesis, holds the fatal vase, fraught with so much mischief to mankind,” Soane wrote lugubriously.) In the Monk’s Parlour he constructed a stylized, faux-medieval interior of the kind that his contemporaries would have recognized from potboiler Gothic novels: stained glass, escutcheons, carved stone grotesques. He had experimented with Gothic scenery before—there was a Monk’s Dining Room in the basement of Pitzhanger Manor—but this was on a larger scale and in a more self-conscious style.

At Pitzhanger, for theatrical effect, he had pretended to his dinner guests that a nameless mythical “hermit” dwelled in the underground rooms. (Presumably the hermit disappeared at mealtimes.) For No. 13 he invented a fully fleshed-out character, a medieval monk called Padre Giovanni who served as a kind of occasional alter ego. The Description instructed visitors to picture the padre as they entered “his” apartments. He was a man of great piety and mysterious sorrows, Hofland wrote, who had “retired from a world he was fitted to adorn” for a life of prayer and reflection. His subterranean suite, meticulously arranged by Soane over a period of years, was like a permanent stage set. The Cell, his austere little bedroom, featured a crucifix and a vessel for holy water (the room doubled, handily, as sleeping quarters for one of Soane’s servants); next door was his parlor, teeming with Gothic props.

Outside, in the Monk’s Yard, Soane built the padre a tomb. “All things fade away—even the creatures of our day-dreams, and poor Padre Giovanni is no more,” Hofland wrote, in an attempt to explain Soane’s having made his alter ego both alive and dead. The tomb was a macabre labor of love: to frame it, Soane constructed impressionistic monastic “ruins” and an intricate, tessellated pavement, supposed to have been laid piecemeal by the monk himself. In 1820 it became a real tomb, containing the bones of Eliza Soane’s favorite lapdog, Fanny.

Soane had long been fascinated by the architecture of death. When he visited Pompeii as a student, he made a beeline for the Via delle Tombe. He mounted sarcophagi on the perimeter wall of the Bank of England and tried to convince aristocrats to let him build them private mausoleums on their estates. In 1824, during the frantic year of collecting that followed the death of his elder son, John, he purchased—for the fantastic sum of £2,000, or about $285,000 today—the giant sarcophagus of the Egyptian pharaoh Seti I, which he maneuvered into No. 13 by bashing a hole in the rear wall. Benjamin Robert Haydon, the painter and diarist, gleefully described the three-day party that Soane held in March 1825 to celebrate its installation in the basement. The cream of London society, Haydon wrote, was plunged into a ghoulish, candlelit underworld:

It was the finest fun imaginable to see the people come into the Library after wandering about below, amidst tombs and capitals,…with a sort of expression of delighted relief at finding themselves among the living, and with coffee and cake. Fancy delicate ladies of fashion dipping their pretty heads into an old mouldy, fusty hierogliphicked coffin.

When Eliza Soane died in November 1815, No. 13 became bound up with death in a more private way. Two months earlier, George, Soane’s unstable, estranged younger son, whom he had refused to save from debtors’ prison in 1814, had published a pair of articles on architecture. They were anonymous, but Soane knew at once who was behind them: they attacked the house at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in a manner that was bitterly personal. “It looks like a record of the departed,” George wrote. “Considering himself [Soane] as defunct in that better part of humanity—the mind and its affections—he has reared this mausoleum for the enshrinement of his body.” Eliza read the pieces and remarked, “Those are George’s doing. He has given me my death blow.” Shortly after her funeral, Soane framed them, titled them Death Blows Given by George Soane, and hung them in his drawing room as a form of perverse interior decor. He preserved her bedroom intact for almost twenty years; at the dinner table, he made sure to keep a vacant chair for her.

He found echoes of his tragic situation in literature. Throughout the house, there were references to and objects associated with Shakespeare, whose plays he had loved since he was a young man. On a small angled landing leading up from the ground floor Soane constructed what he called his Shakespeare Recess, a kind of secular shrine, displaying a plaster cast of the bust on Shakespeare’s funerary monument in Stratford-upon-Avon and a painting by Howard of Lear cradling the dead body of Cordelia. King Lear was Soane’s favorite tragedy, principally because he saw himself in it. Like Lear, he had lost the person who loved him most in the world; like Lear, he had been betrayed (as he saw it) by ungrateful, viperish children. In the Description, when he touched on Howard’s picture, he quoted the old king’s lament (“Howl, howl, howl, howl!…/O! she is gone for ever!”) as if it had been written to be chiseled into his wife’s tomb.

Prospero, the magus in The Tempest, appears twice in the imagery of the Recess. Soane often identified himself, Boucher observes, with “individualistic creative spirits,” visionary, magical figures in particular. In 1832 he showed Architectural Ruins: A Vision (1798), one of Gandy’s early watercolors, at the annual Royal Academy exhibition. Below the listing in the catalog, for the benefit of hundreds of visitors, he quoted lines from Prospero’s “Our revels now are ended” speech in Act Four: “The cloud-capt towers, the gorgeous palaces,/The solemn temples, the great globe itself,/Yea, all which it inherit shall dissolve.” Architectural Ruins depicts the Rotunda of the Bank of England, one of Soane’s great early achievements, as if in a hundred or five hundred years’ time. Under a dark sky, the building sits cracked open like an egg, its shape just legible, broken masonry protruding and vines snaking out of the gaps. By 1832 Soane was an old man on the verge of retirement. Exhibiting Gandy’s watercolor was an extraordinary act of self-dramatization. Few could have missed the message: everything he made and was, he feared, would end up this way, as “baseless” and “insubstantial” as Prospero’s vision.

Ruins held a particular fascination for Soane. In the grounds at Pitzhanger, he built a semicircular “ruined” colonnade and a miniature archway, half-sunk in the earth as if in the early stages of excavation. His Monk’s Yard at No. 13 featured part of a cloister, supposed to be the fictional padre’s former home, with pointed Gothic arches in disrepair. Inside, as Michaelis observed, the house was jam-packed with fragments of ancient and medieval architecture, as well as cork models of famous ruins (Pompeii, the Temple of Vesta in Tivoli) and fantastic images of ruins by the eighteenth-century artists Piranesi and Clérisseau.

Those who took pleasure in ruins were drawn to them because of their incompleteness. The sublimity of a ruin lay in its disintegration, the space it left for imaginative conjecture. “Imperfection and obscurity are their properties; and to carry the imagination to something greater than is seen, their effect,” wrote Thomas Whately in Observations on Modern Gardening (1770), a book Soane owned. The poet Susan Stewart has called them architectural “non sequiturs,” forms that seem to cry out for “the supplement of further reading, further syntax.”^* In Soane’s hands, they could be the opposite: there was something fated, anticipatory, about the way he approached the idea of ruination, imagining it always on the horizon, as in the view of the Rotunda in Architectural Ruins. In 1830 he exhibited another ruins watercolor of Gandy’s, A Bird’s-Eye View of the Bank of England, in which much of the bank site is roofless, its columns missing their capitals, its arches like fragile loops, an uncanny, spectral light falling and separating it from the living city beyond.

Encoded in all his achievements was a morbid sense of their temporariness. As early as 1812, before he and his family moved into No. 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, he was imagining his new home in ruins. In “Crude Hints Towards an History of My House,” an unpublished narrative fragment that he scribbled in three weeks that September, he adopted the persona of a puzzled future scholar studying the site of No. 13 decades hence. The old house, the scholar tells us, has become a “picture of frightful dilapidation,” a mess of nineteenth-century masonry and salvaged fragments of ancient sculpture. Observers are nonplussed by it: “various conjectures” are made about what it might originally have been, but nothing seems to add up. Could it have been a heathen temple, a convent, a necromancer’s palace? Even the most curated collection, Soane knew, if displaced or misunderstood, could be taken for a jumble: a “strange and mixed assemblage of ancient works,” little more than a pile of stones. His great fear was that the work of which he was proudest would come to be impossible to interpret, the end of the line rather than the beginning.