Architectural Drawings: Hidden Masterpieces from Sir John Soane’s Museum by Dr Frances Sands
Batsford Press, £35, 159 pages
“We’ll make heaven a place on earth,” crooned the songstress Belinda Carlisle. I wonder whether she’s ever visited the Sir John Soane Museum, in the heart of London, where, for people like me, that process has already begun.
13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields was certainly the Regency giant John Soane’s heaven on earth; his castle on a cloud, where he gathered his famous antiquarian ephemera and planned his own architectural schemes. It is crammed to the rafters with the fruits of Soane’s labours, and one can’t move without coming face-to-face with something of interest and loveliness.
Surrounded by his carefully curated artefacts, Soane sketched out his plans for buildings; he was adamant that an architect’s first skill was draughtsmanship. To his own preparatory works and whimsical studies he added those of others; at his death he left behind 30,000 drawings dating from the medieval period to his own time.
Obviously, such a large body of material cannot be displayed in its entirety in any sane way. Praise is therefore due to Frances Sands, who has curated Hidden Masterpieces (which runs until 5 June) and has also put together its accompanying book, Architectural Drawings: Hidden Masterpieces from Sir John Soane’s Museum. Dr Sands has had the unenviable task of choosing what to include and—I suspect more agonisingly—what to leave out.
Where to start? In the exhibition, two pages of a beautifully illuminated sixteenth-century Book of Hours made in Flanders for Joanna of Aragon, the Queen of Naples show the building of the Tower of Babel and the corresponding lifting of its curse with the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. An extravagant design by Robert Adam for a state bed at Osterley Park could easily be adapted for a sanctuary, with the bed replaced by an altar and the rich drapery doing service as its baldacchino.
Other works, such as George Dance the Younger’s sumptuous plans for the now-destroyed library at Lansdowne House bring an element of pathos to bear, but among the stars of the collection must surely be the early 19th-century drawings from Soane’s Royal Academy lectures, executed by the apprenticed Charles Tyrrell to demonstrate comparison of scale. The poster-like piece on display shows Soane’s own Rotunda of the Bank of England set inside James Gibbs’s Radcliffe Camera at Oxford, which is itself set inside the Pantheon at Rome; above them towers St Peter’s Basilica at Rome.
The book is a huge, old-fashioned coffee-table volume that is simultaneously scholarly and sumptuous. An introduction to the history of Soane’s collecting habits, and to the history of drawing sets the scene for a totally indulgent journey through other pieces that remain “in exquisite condition as for almost two centuries they have lain largely undisturbed”.
A lavishly illustrated copy of Grimani’s Commentary of the Epistle of St Paul to the Romans from the first half of the 16th century shows the eponymous hero prone during the course of his conversion; in the background his horse gallops away. A roundel in the border shows Saul presiding over the stoning of St Stephen; in another he is preaching at Athens. For the rest the artist has let his imagination run wild; they are accompanied by a veritable scrum of people without clothes and clothes without people, with a couple of dragons thrown in for good measure.
A rough but very competent little sketch of St Michael vanquishing Satan turns out to be by Joshua Reynolds; from the curious but not unengaging Anglican clergyman William Stukeley, the antiquarian who realised that Stonehenge was aligned to the solstice, comes a plan of Noah’s Ark, drawn from the instructions laid out in Genesis 5.
Dr Sands and the Soane museum have surpassed themselves in the art of the small but perfectly formed.
The pieces on display take up no more than two rooms on the first floor, and the book presents less than 1 per cent of the museum’s holdings. A note observes that “these are merely the tip of the iceberg”, and just “a glimpse” of the whole. But what a glimpse!
Serenhedd James is Acting Literary Editor of the Catholic Herald.
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