← In Our Time
In Our Time
Sir John Soane
00:53:25
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the influential English architect John Soane.
Loading summary
Transcript120 lines
- [00:01]
Melvin Bragg
BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts.
- [00:05]
Frank Salmon
This is in our time from BBC Radio 4 and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website. If you scroll down the page for this edition, you find a reading list to go with it. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello. The architect Sir John Soane, who lived from 1753 to 1837, was the son of a bricklayer, but rose up the ranks of his profession as an architect and saw many of his designs realized to greater claim, particularly the bank of England. Although his work there has been largely destroyed. He is now best known for his house in Lincoln's Inn Fields in London, which he remodelled and crammed with antiquities and artworks. He wanted visitors to experience the house as a dramatic grand tour of Europe in microcosm. He became professor of architecture at the Royal Academy, and in a series of influential lectures he set out his belief in the power of buildings to enlighten people about the poetry of architecture. With me to discuss John Soane are Francis Sands, the curator of drawings and books at the Sir John Soane Museum, Frank Summon, associate professor of the history of art at the University of Cambridge, and Julian Darley, a historian and Soanes biographer. Gillian, start with you. What do we know about John Soane's early life?
- [01:20]
Francis Sands
Well, we know really very little about the beginning of his life. And that's one of the strange things for a man who left a house, which is essentially his autobiography. Very Modest Beginnings, as you say. His father was a worker in brick, possibly a superior worker in brick. An artisan disappears from the picture quite early on. His brother William was literally a hod carrier, the man who goes up the ladder with the bricks and a little container. His education was in reading and it was just really almost like being fostered because he lived with the schoolteachers and the books that were very much part of that establishment, really made Soane the man he became. Well, he was an autodidact, if I can use that word. He just never stopped bringing in information for himself on every side.
- [02:19]
Frank Salmon
How did he enter the, let's call it, the architecture business?
- [02:23]
Francis Sands
I think he must have had an extraordinary application, which people seem to pick up on. So that a man called James Peacock, who was living in his area of the Thames Valley, which was where they were spotted him, and through James Peacock he became noted by George Dance Jr. Who, who was an extraordinarily nice and generous man, who was the city architect, the architect of the City of London. That wasn't a Bad way to start so that he was learning at the elbow of and living with the Dance family. Then he moved to another architect family, the Hollands and this was all the way through his teens and they must have seen something very particular and I assume essentially it was the driven ness of this boy that caught their eye.
- [03:22]
Frank Salmon
Thank you, Frank. Max Honour. He traveled widely in Italy as a young man. It's one of the scholarships he got. He started doing scholarships quite early on, didn't he? Won a minor scholarship, a major scholarship, then this two years abroad, Rome particularly, from which he learned a great deal. Can you discuss that?
- [03:40]
Melvin Bragg
Yes, absolutely. I think it's probably important to note that Soane became a student at the Royal Academy of Arts which had just recently been founded in 1768. He was one of the first students there and that provided an education for him in addition to what he was learning with Henry Holland and had learned from George Dance. And he was also able through the Royal Academy to win some awards. A silver medal for a measured drawing and a gold medal for a design. This attracted the attention of the treasurer of the Royal Academy, the King's architect, Sir William Chambers, who was just at that moment beginning work building Somerset House in London. And as a result of that Soane was sent on a travelling scheme scholarship to the continent. He said that was the most fortunate event of my life. And he celebrated the day of his departure for Italy almost like it was a birthday for the rest of his life. Now what was fortunate about that? Two things I think, I mean first it was a wonderful educational opportunity to go and see what he called the remains of departed greatness the ruins of ancient Rome and indeed some Greek ruins as well. He didn't get to Greece but he saw Greek temples at Paestum near Naples and in Sicily as well. And of course also the post medieval reuse of classical architecture in the Renaissance. It was a wonderful opportunity to experience the sorts of things that the leading architects of the day, not just Chambers and Dance himself, but also Robert Adam, the most fashionable architect of this period of time. They had the same experience of being to Italy. So it was a transformative moment for him.
- [05:15]
Frank Salmon
Just to give us a stare on him, can you outline his most important architectural achievements? The bank of England, the Pitshanger Manor and so on?
- [05:23]
Melvin Bragg
Yes, I mean Solman's extremely prolific architect. For example There are over 100 country houses he was involved in. 100. Over 100, yes. 18 new built I think is correct and very prolific but a huge office. He had over 30 pupils in his lifetime and another 20 or so assistant. So probably the biggest office of its time, I think. But as for the major buildings, well, as you mentioned in your introductory comments, the great ones are really gone. The bank of England sadly destroyed in the 1920s when the current building was built. The wonderful works at Westminster Law Courts that were nestled in between the buttresses of Westminster hall, demolished in the 1880s, I believe, and the Royal entranceway and Royal Chambers to the House of Lords, all gone in the Victorian age. I mean, if you are the architect of major public buildings, and it's the age before preservation societies exist and laws exist to protect ancient buildings, what went up fairly soon came down from the.
- [06:27]
Frank Salmon
Way you put it, it seems a meteoric rise. Did it seem that to everybody else?
- [06:31]
Melvin Bragg
I think it did, and it was aided by the connections that CERN was able to make on his travels. I don't call it the Grand Tour. I think that's what the aristocrats were doing. What he was doing was the journey for professional improvement, really. And the key person for this, really, was Thomas Pitt, later Baron Camelford, who was the cousin of William Pitt, the Prime Minister. Much of Soane's early work was for people he met on the Grand Tour and people he met through Thomas Pitt. And that includes his appointment in 1788 to be architect to the bank of England, which came through the Prime Minister, on whose house he'd made a few alterations.
- [07:06]
Frank Salmon
Thank you, Francis. Hans, did he have a guiding vision of what he wanted to do with buildings?
- [07:12]
Julian Darley
Certainly. He was quite strict, actually, in his intentions, particularly when he was speaking to his apprentices and his students. And his intentions were threefold. Firstly, they had to be financially responsible. He got very cross when contemporary architects did not adhere to the quotes that they'd given to their patrons, and Soane felt that was very important. Secondly, Soane felt very strongly that his building should be structurally sound. Of course, structural engineering was not a profession in those days, but Soane himself took structural engineering extremely seriously, even designing new materials, for example, fireproof bricks for the bank of England when required. And he would send his apprentices to building sites whilst buildings were under construction so that they could see the inner workings of the fabric. And then thirdly, and I think most importantly, this thing you've mentioned, the poetry of architecture, that a building should be fit for purpose, both physically and aesthetically. The building had to do what the patron required. For example, a house needed adequate plumbing, but it also needed the ornamental repertoire that was appropriate to the building at hand. For example, Soane got very Cross, when traditionally religious ornamental motifs were used on non religious buildings.
- [08:23]
Frank Salmon
Where did he draw this aspiration from?
- [08:27]
Julian Darley
Well, I mean, he was himself an intellectual maximalist and he said as such to his students and he felt that people really had no business designing anything in their own personal signature style if they'd not yet first investigated everything that came before. Because indeed, how can you discount something that you don't know about? So I think that he was a voracious reader. We know that from the fact that he had 7,000 books in his collection in his home. And he was also, as Frank has intimated, extremely fortunate to have traveled on the continent and experienced so much that many people at the time would never have had the opportunity to. To do.
- [09:05]
Frank Salmon
Is it a bit crude or is it useful to pop in that? He married an heiress, which gave him access to funds to buy a lot of the things that we see in the museum.
- [09:13]
Julian Darley
I do think that being financially independent was extremely helpful to Sohn.
- [09:18]
Frank Salmon
He had two financially affluent.
- [09:20]
Julian Darley
He was financially affluent. He had two very large income streams. Firstly, he married for love, but conveniently to an heiress named Eliza Smith. She inherited a great deal of money from her property developer uncle, George Wyatt. But Soane was also, of course, hugely professionally successful. So he had an enormous income from his professional practice. So these two income streams were extremely beneficial to his ability to acquire anything that took his fancy.
- [09:46]
Frank Salmon
Well, let's turn now to this unique and amazing gem in the middle of London in Lincoln's Inn Fields, this house. There three houses put together to form the most concentrated and brilliant museum imaginable. Really, isn't it?
- [10:00]
Julian Darley
I quite agree. I've worked there 15 years. So the Soane Museum is composed of numbers 12, 13 and 14 on the north side of Lincoln's Inn Fields. And Soane essentially bought each house sequentially as he ran out of space as his collection grew. He started in 1792, shortly after the inheritance from his wife's uncle, buying number 12, Lincoln's Innfields as a family home. It wasn't a salubrious area of London, but it was a convenient one for working at places like the bank of England and elsewhere, and also near to Highhobon, where he could hire a carriage to get out of London to other architectural projects. The buildings were on that side of the fields, originally, 17th century. Soane each time would knock the building down and rebuild his own designs. He ended up buying number 13, the central house, in 1807, and then finally number 14 in 1823. And each time he would rebuild and create this extraordinary laboratory of architecture where he was experimenting both as an architect, but also creating a home for his collection of artworks and antiquities, which functioned as a piece. You know, the building and its contents are a complete work of art, a Gestampkund work, as the Germans would have it.
- [11:12]
Frank Salmon
And his extraordinary ingenuity. I mean, I was in the other day. You just can't believe that a wall switches around and there's many paintings on the back of the walls. On the front of the wall, you look down and there's another floor below. You can see the sarcophagus and things. You look up and there's a dome bringing in a particular and absolutely relevant type of light or shade of light, and on it goes. It is crammed with stuff. And it doesn't seem to be claustrophobic.
- [11:36]
Julian Darley
Absolutely. Well, some people do find it claustrophobic, but I'm glad that you didn't, Melvin. But Soane was a great genius with space. He would utilise every square inch and as you mentioned, he had these incredible movable planes where walls would open and create further surfaces for hanging works of art. In frames, there are apertures both above and below. He's very clever with light. He refers to lumiere mysterias, mysterious light, because he felt that both bright light and pools of shadow were incredibly important for the emotive effect of the interior of a building. So quite often you can be standing within his home and you can't quite work out if you're looking through a window or perhaps at a reflection, or perhaps into a different space, or indeed, looking at a reflection that makes you think you're looking into a different space. It can be quite confusing, but not, I think, in an overwhelming way, rather in a. In a exciting way that I think Soane was quite deliberately trying to get people to wonder at how on earth he'd managed to create so much within a small footprint and how much.
- [12:37]
Frank Salmon
How he managed to get hold of so much.
- [12:39]
Julian Darley
Yes, indeed.
- [12:40]
Frank Salmon
So many objects in it throughout.
- [12:43]
Julian Darley
Absolutely.
- [12:43]
Frank Salmon
That was perhaps where the Heiress came in.
- [12:45]
Julian Darley
Certainly. I mean, I think that financial independence was incredibly useful. But do bear in mind that the vast majority of the collection, the artworks, the antiquities, the books, the drawings, were acquired in quite a piecemeal fashion and within London. So really, it wasn't that Soane was sending people out to acquire specific things, he was simply acquiring the cream of the crop from what was available on the art market at the time.
- [13:08]
Frank Salmon
Gillian, he uses light very effectively. Can you give us a brief description of that?
- [13:14]
Francis Sands
I can I mean, it's partly a function, I think, of working on extremely restricted space from the beginning. But he's hardly settled into Lincoln's Inn Fields. Then he got the job at the bank and he was actually dealing with the same constraints writ super large, so that his entire focus was how do you bring light into a very constricted site? And at home that could be through attractive reflective surfaces. I mean, I think somebody has counted up the number of mirrors that are in the Golden Breakfast Room alone, and it's, it's in the hundreds. I think it is over a hundred.
- [13:56]
Julian Darley
Gillian.
- [13:57]
Francis Sands
Yeah, and so it's just this richness of a very theatrical scene.
- [14:02]
Frank Salmon
One must keep remembering it's just a house because ingenuity gives an example, a feeling of not so much space and density, but variety and the amount of stuff there is there without it being, as I alluded to earlier, Crowley. Can I turn to you, Frank? He was born in the Georgian era and died in 1837, the year that Queen Victoria came to the throne. How does his work fit in with the stars, different styles of those two times?
- [14:28]
Melvin Bragg
Well, not very much, actually. I mean, Soane is a unique figure. He's derived his own style of architecture, partly, it must be said, based on what he learned with his master, George Dance the Younger, but when we think about the period in which he's primarily working, let's say from 1788 or 1790 to his death in 1837, as you say, that carries us through the period that leads up to the accession of Victoria, and it's really the period that broadly conceived, we would call the Regency in architectural history. Now, when we think about other buildings that are going on in that period of time, it is a period of time when the great architectural historian described as really a time of fancy dress, you could have whatever style you wanted really in this period of time, and that was the joy of it. Let's think of a building like the Royal Pavilion at Brighton by John Nash, who, along with Robert Smirk, was one of the three so called attached architects to the Office of Works, the effectively the public body of works in this country from 1814 onwards. Indian exterior, Chinese interior. The other architect attached to the works, Robert Smirk, let's think of him. Greek Revival architecture. The British Museum would be a good example. There we've got the Gothic Revival starting up. Think about King's College in Cambridge, not the Chapel, but all the rest that you see on King's Parade, or nearly all of it is Gothic revival from the 1820s. You could have Egyptian Shop fronts, if you wanted to. Soane described them as poultry. Not appropriate use of historical precedent in the way that Fran was responding to it. So Soane's construction of his own style was really unique, a unique thing.
- [16:02]
Frank Salmon
How do you illustrate unique in his case?
- [16:04]
Melvin Bragg
I think that perhaps the best way to think about that is to realize that Soane would have seen himself as a classical architect. But whilst he said that, to quote him, art cannot go beyond the Corinthian order. That's the ornate third of the orders of the Greco Roman world. He didn't use the columns and the orders that much, actually. And he doesn't quote buildings that we recognize very much in his architecture, unlike some of the architects he admired, like Robert Adam, for example, who puts the Triumphal Arch of Constantine into the back of Kedleston House, a building that Soane thought was superb. Soane doesn't do this very often at all. A familiar moment might perhaps be on the Tivoli corner of the bank of England, where Lothbury and Princes street meet, where we see the little round temple from Tivoli outside of Rome, worked into the London streetscape to get us around an awkward corner of the building. But generally speaking, Soane's language of architecture was a language of planes, often of brick walls with arches set into them, rather like bringing the interior of the house to the exterior Chelsea stable walls. For example, at the Royal Hospital in Chelsea, he has a simple elevation of brick with three entranceways in it, but each of the entranceways has three relieving arches over it, rather like a Russian doll, I suppose. One thing would do another thing would another thing. The interior conception of space brought to moderate this outside wall.
- [17:21]
Frank Salmon
Thank you. Francis Soane described his house as an academy of architecture. What did he mean by that?
- [17:28]
Julian Darley
Well, in 1806, when Soane was 53, he was made professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy, and he took his teaching career extremely seriously. Unfortunately, however, the majority of his teaching took place during the Napoleonic wars, when his own students weren't able to travel. So in order to combat that great fracture in their architectural education, Soane invited his students on the days before and after each of his lectures, to attend his home, Lincoln's Inn Fields, and observe his collection of artworks and antiquities, as you mentioned, as a grand tour in microcosm, the idea being that they would be able to see things that would normally only be available to them on a grand tour or travelling around the continent. So suddenly, a collection which had been designed for Soane's own architectural inspiration and personal Enjoyment took on a pedagogical element. It became a teaching collection. And that meant that Soane was collecting all the more heavily. He wanted an object to illustrate everything he wanted to teach about. And of course, it meant that his museum became more and more full of objects. And why we ended up with three houses crammed full with all these wonderful.
- [18:34]
Frank Salmon
Things he either bought directly or bought from people who'd been to these countries and brought stuff back or bought from the auction room. So he had three main sources of plunder.
- [18:45]
Julian Darley
Yes, well, I mean, I wouldn't refer to it as plunder. Soane is quite sensitive to the notion of theft, but he is acquiring his collection principally in London, either through art dealers, auction houses, in the sale of other people's collections, or very largely at antiquarian book dealers. He was particularly, particularly keen on Mr. Boone on the Strand. So he is buying things at a remove from the Continent. But he is being quite careful to adhere to the narratives within his museum and the themes that he's creating within the different spaces.
- [19:17]
Frank Salmon
Julian. It contains some remarkable paintings. Joseph Gandhi, Canaletto, Hogarth, Massif, Hogarth, Piranesi. What was his relation? Let's pick out Gandhi as perhaps the least known of those names. What was important that he work with Gandhi?
- [19:31]
Francis Sands
Gandhi is the lens you see, sewn through what we know of the thinking that went into the design for his beloved wife's tomb in St Pancras that was worked out dozens of times by Gandhi. So Gandhi was a perspectivist or visualizer of all these things.
- [19:53]
Frank Salmon
Can you, Frank, can you tell us what you think is distinctive about his own style and about what he created around it?
- [19:59]
Melvin Bragg
Well, we talked about that a little bit already in terms of the effects of light and colour and mirrors and indeed coloured glass as well. But we haven't perhaps also talked about is his very distinctive approach to producing domes. Not the domes of the Pantheon in rome or of St Peter's or St Paul's in London, but the very low saucer shaped elliptical domes that often come down to very delicate points of the corner of a square or a rectangular dome space. They have an opening at the top called an oculus, but very often there are windows outside of the curvature of the dome, but still inside the building, so that the light, as Gillian was describing, can filter down from hidden sources. And that is one of the great sort of marvels of Soane's works and one of the things that appeals to architects today, I think.
- [20:44]
Frank Salmon
Francis, you want to come in?
- [20:45]
Julian Darley
I think the key to Soane's Architectural style is attenuation. He was, as Frank says, working in the classical style, but he would take classical motifs, traditional classical motifs, and pair them back to the absolute bare minimum. And that very severe attenuation, of course, is in the most basic sense what the modernists were doing during the 20th century. So for that reason, Soane is often hailed as the father of modernism. He was doing something entirely innovative in its time and which was hugely influential a century later over the great architects who pared everything back as much as possible.
- [21:18]
Frank Salmon
He gave lectures. Was there a theme to these lectures? Always he gave him the lecture when something new turned up in the museum.
- [21:25]
Julian Darley
Certainly Soane gave a series of 12 lectures at the Royal Academy and then a paired back series at the Royal Institution for the public as well. The lectures deal with the history of architecture across the entirety of history, from the Neolithic to Soane's own contemporaries, and indeed across the geography of the entire world. As I said earlier, Soane was a great intellectual maximalist and felt that one needed to understand everything before you could ignore it or discredit it in any way. So he was giving lectures which explored world architectural history and then he would offer his opinions as to the good and bad examples of the architectural craft within world architectural history so as to guide his students towards what he felt were good practice.
- [22:12]
Melvin Bragg
There's a strange disjunction as well, isn't there, Francis? Between, on the one hand, this being the professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy, the person who's supposed to set up the. The theory of architecture that architects of his time should follow, and as I was saying earlier on the fact that, well, architects didn't really follow his lectures. They were ideas largely drawn from Soane's own youth and from the French education of reading that he had undertaken, probably under influence of William Chambers back then. So in some ways the lectures were rather a glorious anomaly.
- [22:42]
Julian Darley
And if you read them, though, they are packed full of useful information. They're very dry and they are at times repetitive. And I think the best thing about the lectures, and indeed Soane's teaching career, is not the actual text but the drawings that were created to illustrate those lectures. Soane, instead of paring back his office during the lean war years, decided to utilise his apprentices to create over a thousand large scale, colour washed, illustrative lecture drawings to show buildings from throughout time and across the whole world to illustrate these lectures, obviously providing a snapshot of these important buildings to students who would never have a chance to go to the far flung corners of the world. And the result is, we think, the earliest attempt at a graphic history of world architecture.
- [23:29]
Francis Sands
I would like just to drop in a mention for his fellow professor, who was Turner. And Turner's lectures, which were running concurrently, I think, for a while, involved aspects of optics and perspective and so on. So if you actually put those two things together, and the fact that the two men were firm friends and spent quite a lot of time fishing, very harmoniously meandering down the Thames near Goring, fishing away, perhaps occasionally discussing what they.
- [24:00]
Melvin Bragg
Might put up, I don't think they ever said anything to each other. It was all silent, I should imagine, silent fishing. They were both had a tendency to be morose personalities.
- [24:08]
Frank Salmon
Of course, if we're talking a bit more personally about him, he had a rather fractious relationship with his sons, didn't he? He did and did that. Is it worth feeding that into his status as an architect? What effect did it have on what we're talking about?
- [24:20]
Francis Sands
I think we certainly need to feed it into the story of the two houses. George, his younger son, had strong literary inclinations and he was quite soon doing adaptations of classics and working in the great theatres. But for Soane, this was a complete negation of the great dynastic project that he had hoped to start, because John, the elder son, was not very well, not very gifted, and in fact died relatively soon after adulthood. I mean, he had a child, but that was it. So the houses were sort of. Well, first of all, Pitzanger was going to be this center of the beginning of the Soane dynasty. It didn't happen. He was already thinking about getting rid of it about six or eight years after it all began. So that was finished. So hence the return to Lincolnton Fields as an. Absolutely. It was the sort of the core, the nexus of the whole project. And that, in a way drove him on and on and on. And Soane saw in the beginning of 1815, wasn't it in print, an anonymous denigration of his work at Dulwich and the bank, the cauliflowers on the roof. And he knew without question that the person who had penned this was his son with the literary abilities. George and his wife Eliza saw these lines and Soane said it killed her. Anyway, she died very soon after.
- [26:02]
Julian Darley
I think that Soane's youngest son, George, was embittered by the fact that when he'd been thrown into debtors prison in 1815, his father, John Soane, had refused to bail him out, wanting George to finally be financially independent. He'd always been reliant on an allowance from his wealthy mother, Eliza. So when he did get out of debtors prison, he got his revenge by writing these two articles in a newspaper called the Champion, now long defunct, in which, as Gillian has said, he was criticising Soane's architectural output but also his collecting and even his working class background. And Soane was completely heartbroken by this. But worse still was Eliza's reaction because she was a very fond mother and she was suffering from gallstones at the time and being so heartbroken, she essentially gave up the will to find fight and she went to her husband and she said, George has dealt me my death blows, I shall never hold up my head again. And she took to her bed and she died six weeks later. And Soane felt that it was entirely George's fault and as a result he was disinherited.
- [27:01]
Melvin Bragg
And we have the museum.
- [27:03]
Frank Salmon
Yes. Can we go back to the work? Take a deep breath, Frank. Can you tell us more about his interest in classical ruins?
- [27:13]
Melvin Bragg
Yes, I think it goes right back to his time in Italy actually. And you mentioned earlier on Piranesi, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, the great Italian architect and printmaker. Soane met Piranesi in the last three months of Piranesi's life in 1778 and was given some prints by Piranesi. And he seemed to have a complete fascination with the extraordinary imagination that Piranesi we know had. In fact, for a period of time, I believe he even slept. Soane slept in his bedroom with Pyrenees on the wall, including the drawings of the Greek temples at Paestum that Soane had acquired later on. So he was surrounded really by this Piranesian vision. And Gandhi, who we've spoken about earlier on, was a man who had graphic skills that Soane could only dream of and was able to transform Soane's ideas of his own architecture into such a vibrant image as would attract the eye of people at the Royal Academy exhibition who of course were looking at paintings and sculptures. Architectural drawings are for the non expert, a little bit dull perhaps, but Gandhi was able to bring them to life in this extraordinary way. Now in 1798, Gandhi makes a drawing of the rotunda, the central round room of the bank of England. So in the bank of England, which had just been completed, and Ganni makes a drawing of it in ruins with vegetation growing out of it, as though it was some sort of Roman imperial bath complex or something like that. And this seems to have sparked off a whole, a whole kind of debate in Soane's mind about the nature of ruins in relation to the present and the past and the future. Because in 1812, just when he's building number 13, Lincoln's Inn Fields, he writes an extraordinary manuscript published in the 20th century called Crude Hints towards the History of My House, in which he imagines himself as an antiquary in the future, coming back to Lincoln's Inn Fields and asking what this building could be. Is it the house of an enchanter? Is it a Roman temple? Is it a convent of nuns even? And he finally says, no, it should be seen to be the house of an artist, perhaps an architect or a painter. And really the whole notion of ruination comes from that. And in 1820, Gandhi makes an extraordinary cutaway aerial perspective view of the bank of England just approaching completion as a ruin, in the way that we see in Piranesi's engraving the bars of Caracalla in Rome from the same angle as well.
- [29:39]
Francis Sands
I think that really illustrates the relationship between Gandhi and Soane, because in many ways there must have been conversations between them when Soane had the germ of an idea and Gandhi had the outline of a kind of rendering of that idea. And that those two put together in some cases, I think, were the genesis of some of Soane's greatest buildings, the greatest parts of the bank that they caught.
- [30:09]
Melvin Bragg
Indeed. And of course, as I mentioned before, Soane's trip to Italy was to see departed greatness, and perhaps the depiction of his own buildings in ruination was future departed greatness, as it were.
- [30:22]
Frank Salmon
Can I come back to something we have mentioned, but just to try to get the listener even closer to it, what sort of impression? If you walk through one of these doors, what would you most be mostly struck by?
- [30:35]
Julian Darley
I think that the most striking thing at the Soane Museum is the combination of extraordinarily small and complex architectural space spaces, but which are very densely packed, filled with objects, many of them sculptural, some of them framed, some antiquities, some interesting items of furniture, a great many glazed bookcases full of all sorts of magnificent volumes. And then underneath objects, people often don't look down, but if you look down underneath, there are drawers, and the drawers are packed full of drawings, 30,000 of them, ranging from late medieval up to Soane's own contemporary period. So I think that the impression that one gets when walking around the building is one of awe, perhaps being slightly overwhelmed, but in a positive way. And I think of curiosity and the desire to know more.
- [31:25]
Francis Sands
And there's one other thing I think that it took me a long time to realize that when moving around those three houses that actually quite often you find yourself you're in the back of the one next door, but nothing is actually indicated that you've moved from one house to the other. It's sleight of hand. I mean, it's extraordinary spatial reorganisation, which you can own. I mean, you can see them on plan, but it's still more than you can really easily comprehend.
- [31:55]
Frank Salmon
Is there any sense you wish it was lived in as a normal house by Soane and his family?
- [32:00]
Julian Darley
I think what we have to remember is that the collecting became more and more frenetic as Soane aged. And when Eliza died in 1815, the collection was an awful lot smaller than it was at the end of Soane's life. So the building would have functioned in a much more domestic capacity. And indeed the rooms on the second floor, the private apartments of bathrooms, dressing rooms, bedrooms, would really have been very domestic indeed. It's really in the last 10, 15 years of Soane's life, when he's collecting so heavily, that you end up with this sort of horror vacui of spaces that are so full that you really can't even function or use them in a traditional domestic manner.
- [32:36]
Melvin Bragg
Yes, and we also have to bear in mind, don't we, Fran, that it was a working space. I mean, the back of the house where the museum is was the workshop, where up to eight or nine or 10 assistants or pupils could be working away at any one time. And indeed, so precious was the space, or so much pressure was on the space, that Soane had to construct a drafting office in a kind of mezzanine level on columns within the space of the museum itself.
- [33:02]
Frank Salmon
Did the museum take off immediately to something approaching the popularity it now has?
- [33:07]
Melvin Bragg
By no means after Soane's death, his. His style was ridiculed by many people. It was a very different thing from the way that Victorian architecture started to develop towards big neoclassical buildings initially, then the Gothic Revival. So Soane was. Was largely a neglected figure, and the museum was rarely open, I think it's fair to say, in that period of time. Very rarely open, and really just the place that connoisseurs of particular kinds of antiquity and paintings.
- [33:36]
Julian Darley
It was certain days of the week during the season, if the weather was.
- [33:39]
Francis Sands
Fine, and it drew out of Henry James one of the most wonderful little. It's a novella called A London Life, and it consists of a desperate dramatic drama around the sarcophagus, which was the absolute jewel in the collection, latterly bought under the nose of the British Museum, who Failed to get it. Belsoni's trophy from Egypt, right down at the bottom of the museum. So if you cut a section through the building, that's what you see. And some of the Gandhi visualizations do it wonderfully in a way you couldn't see it where you're standing there, so at the bottom and lit in a very theatrical way. And so the Henry James story, so written 30 years after the museum has been open to the public, in the theory, almost entirely dark, hardly ever open, dusty, dirty. But anyway, there's an assignation and this sweet girl goes wandering around with her American friend. They're just having a little chat and lo and behold, there is somebody's sister or brother having an assignation. I can't remember which way. Anyway, it's the perfect place for a romantic assignation in a very Gothic sort of space.
- [34:58]
Frank Salmon
So when did his reputation turn and start to go up? And then went up and up and up.
- [35:03]
Melvin Bragg
Coming back to the point about the weather that Fran raised earlier on, there's a wonderful cartoon, I think, in the Daily Star newspaper in 1924, in which two men are caught in the rain in Lincoln's Inn Field and decide to go into the museum to get out of the rain. After looking at a few things, including the sarcophagus of Seti, they come out again saying, I think we've done the weather rather a disservice. The numbers were very small in the early part of the 20th century, ironically, just when Soane's reputation was starting to rise again. The numbers of visitors to the museum really only starts to pick up in the 1960s and 70s. So if the museum itself was relatively little visited, Soane's reputation was starting to build again in the 1920s onwards.
- [35:43]
Francis Sands
But when it fell, the centenary 1933, questions were being asked in the House. What are we doing supporting this sort of moribund cultural item? It's not really until John Summerson takes over in 45, straight after the war, that things begin to mesh. I think I'm right in saying it.
- [36:04]
Melvin Bragg
That's right. But in the meantime, Soane's reputation amongst architects has already started to rise. And it's an interesting moment around about 1920, we've got the conservative or academic branch of architecture, represented by Sir Albert Richardson, later president of the Royal Academy, starting to look at Soane as one of the great architects of the 18th and indeed the 19th century, classical traditions holding him up as a model academic architect. And then we have Roger Fry coming in and giving a lecture at the Riba The Royal Institute of British architects in 1921, looking at Soane as a primitivistic architect and comparing him to post Impressionist artists and attracting the attention of, as Fran said earlier, modernist architects towards Soane's legacy and possible influence. And then what happens, I think, in the period when Summerson becomes the curator after 1945, is that architects start to take an interest in specifically the sort of forms of what Soane is trying to do and the fragmentations of what Soane is trying to do. So we're looking about postmodernism at this point in time. And then people like Philip Johnson in America or Rafael Moneo in in Madrid start to utilize some of Zane's very distinctive forms.
- [37:20]
Frank Salmon
It's curious that none of you have mentioned the attention zone paid to the construction, to the engineering behind the collection.
- [37:29]
Julian Darley
Well, I think that because he was so interested in the structural engineering of his own architectural designs and indeed that his apprentices and students should be conversant in safe structural engineering, he was extremely careful about the arrangement of his collection. So, for example, the sarcophagus of Seti, which we've talked about already, is in the basement. You know, it's not on the first floor. It's an incredibly heavy object, so it is set safely, located somewhere where it can't do any damage. Objects are very carefully placed. So, for example, we have some beautiful 1st century AD composite urns within the dome area of the museum. They look like they're placed very precipitously around a hole looking down into Soane's crypt where the sarcophagus is located. But actually Soane placed these rather clever metal rods up the inside so they can't possibly move. So everything is very carefully considered and very safely located.
- [38:25]
Melvin Bragg
And the act of parliament that created the museum provides that the museum should be preserved as far as is practicable in the state it was when Soane left it that did change in the 19th and 20th century. But it's been the work of a number of curators in the last three or four decades to put everything back to where it was.
- [38:43]
Julian Darley
And Soane did his very best to ensure that everything remained as he intended. He left a legacy for the support of the museum, but that unfortunately ran out just as the Second World War was beginning. Which is one of the reasons why, as Julian was saying, it was in the 1930s, that there was a public conversation about what is this place and what should we do to support it.
- [39:04]
Frank Salmon
What lasting impression do you think Soane and that museum has had, as Frank.
- [39:09]
Julian Darley
Has said a great many of his great buildings are now lost to us. There are a few wonderful examples that people are able to visit. The Soane Museum itself, Pitshanger Manor, is open to the public. Soane's country house in Ealing and his great triumph in Dulwich, the great picture gallery at Dulwich College. But I think that the lasting impression and reputation that Soane has given us is one of philanthropy, education and curiosity and a love of all the arts. He was an architect, but he valued all the arts equally because he felt that it was important to understand the entire arena in order to really excel in any one area. So he's really prompting us to question and better ourselves.
- [39:51]
Frank Salmon
What's your view on the lasting impression, Julian?
- [39:53]
Francis Sands
I think the thing that I took away from my years with Soane, so to speak, was his respect for his fellow workmen, tradesmen, artisans and so on. And I can only think that that comes from right back from his own mysterious origins. And it's a two way business because he knew when he was really busy, when he was beginning his country house years, he could say to somebody who did plaster work, do the breakfast room in Somerset like the one you did in North Norfolk, you know how to do it, we did it there. And that plain speaking between the professional and the hands on team is, I mean, I think it's a lesson that every architectural student should think about.
- [40:45]
Melvin Bragg
Well, I would agree with that. And Gillian, your wonderful biography of Soane is subtitled John Soane, An Accidental Romantic. And when I'm talking about him with my students, I discuss whether that's a good way of thinking about him or whether we might call him a worldly romantic because there's this wonderful combination of romance, the poetry of architecture, as you said, Melvin, in your opening comments, is one of Soane's favorite phrases for what architecture should be. And of course the practical and the professional. This is a man who on the one hand could fish with Turner or arrange an evening for the launch of the acquisition of the sarcophagus of seti. The house is filled with candles and Turner is there and Coleridge is there and Prime Minister is there. And then the next day could be actually compiling accounts for clients who deeply respected him and having lunch with those clients or dinner with those clients a mile away from the Hod carrying bricklayer from Goring by Streetly who started out in 1753.
- [41:45]
Frank Salmon
Well, thank you all very much indeed. Thank you, Francis Sands, Frank Salmon and Julian Darley. Next week, Catherine of Aragon, Henry VIII's first wife whose refusal to agree to an annulment of their marriage led to the creation of the Church of England. Thanks for listening.
- [42:02]
Francis Sands
And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.
- [42:10]
Frank Salmon
What would you like to have said that you didn't get time to say, Frances?
- [42:14]
Julian Darley
My particular interest in Soane is the extraordinary collection of architectural drawings within his institution. People often assume that the architectural drawings we house at the museum are merely. Well, I say merely, they're fabulous. The drawings from his own architectural practice, those in and of themselves number 8,000 items, but we have another 22,000 architectural drawings that Soane collected because he really felt that the power of architectural drawing was the magic that an architect was able to wield. If they could draw well, it meant that they would be much more likely to be able to design well. And he went to some length in his lectures to talk about the power of architectural drawing. He cited Sir William Chambers as being a particularly great master at drawing. So by collecting this enormous array of architectural drawn matter, he was forming something which at the time was entirely unique, a comprehensive overview of architectural matter on the page, and something which has inspired. Inspired later collections. For example, the magnificent collection now at the Royal Institute of British Architects was inspired by that at the Soane Museum. So it's incredibly important to think about Soane not just as an architect and a teacher, but as a collector. And the fact that his collecting had such a huge impact over the world as we know it, too.
- [43:33]
Frank Salmon
Gillian, would you like to say what you wanted to say?
- [43:36]
Francis Sands
I know you asked if it was the only house like it, and I'm sort of in between our conversations. I've been trying to think, where is the nearest equivalent? And I suspect it would be more likely to be one of those houses of American sculptors in the Hudson Valley where you would go to a house in a glorious. The landscape being part of the story in that case, and the work and the person's life. Is it Frederic Church? Have I got the right name? I remember going some time ago. It's that sort of feeling of the house and the work and the life being consonant, being all one moment. And it sort of does need to be something of that moment. You can't really. I mean, I suppose Willow Road, you know, modernist house, the National Trust, it's much easier.
- [44:33]
Frank Salmon
You're talking about the thing in Hampstead.
- [44:35]
Francis Sands
Yes, the thing.
- [44:36]
Frank Salmon
I mean, you're talking about the house in Hampstead.
- [44:40]
Francis Sands
Or maybe. Maybe some of the sort of St Ives, the Hepworth.
- [44:45]
Frank Salmon
You're struggling.
- [44:46]
Francis Sands
I am, I am, it's true.
- [44:48]
Melvin Bragg
Let me help you out. I rather like to think that Soane's visit to Piranesi, above the top of the Spanish Steps in 1778, to that workshop, encrusted with all the antiquities that Piranesi was selling on and so forth, two of which I think Soane subsequently came to own and entered his collection. I just wonder if what he saw there, meeting that great artist in that environment, put into his mind the idea of spaces that were crowded out with the detritus and the exemplars of past great detritus, the fragments, the broken down bits and pieces. We were talking about ruins at one point and one drawing that I think is very instructive is one made by Gandhi, who I think exhibited over a hundred works at the Royal Academy, only one of them in his own name and the rest under Soane's name.
- [45:45]
Frank Salmon
Why was that?
- [45:47]
Melvin Bragg
Well, he was employed by Soane and, you know, our ideas of autonomy and artistic freedom are not the same as they were in the early years of the 19th century. Gandhi was also notoriously bad with money. Soane had to bail him out of debtors prison, I think, on one occasion, unlike his son George. But I do wonder whether the Piranesian vision is what kind of stayed with Soane in that regard.
- [46:09]
Julian Darley
I think Soane was also hugely inspired by the imaginary interiors within Piranesi's work. Think of the diverse Maniere or the Carturi series, where similarly like the Piranesi workshop must have been, you have spacing which are just encrusted principally with sculptural material. And I think you very definitely get a flavour of that. In the dome area at the Soane Museum, Soane is creating a Piranesian three dimensional vision, top lit with light cascading down to create this very emotive effect.
- [46:42]
Francis Sands
One of the places that he most treasured, and this is much later on, so the own house was already growing in complexity and so on, was the Ruslyn Chapel. And that is sort of semi unexplained, isn't it? I mean, it's the most extraordinary. It's sort of like something out of Portuguese Gothic or something. It's a very, very strange and elaborate, I don't know if you know it, it's quite extraordinary. Soane went there and Gandhi did a wonderful painting called Merlin's Tomb and it's lit from the middle, so it's like sort of this kind of glowing core and that's that, I think, sort of Sums up. It's another moment when you feel the two of them sort of connecting because, I mean, they both had sort of frantic imaginations and I mean, Gandhi did end up, you know, institutionalized. You know, it was a very, very sad end. So there were moments when you could argue he could have been institutionalized. That's a contentious view. But I think the pressure of circumstances and so on, you know, had a sort of visual release in some of these very, very contorted and very enriched and extraordinary places and visions of places. I just throw that in because I do think Rosslyn is terribly important and I can't really. I've never been able to quite work out where it, how much it echoed on.
- [48:28]
Melvin Bragg
Well, it's possibly there as well in the monk's parlour at the Soane Museum where some Soane liked to think of himself as Padre Giovanni, Father John down there in his Gothic encrusted grotto like space. May I make my pitch of what I take away from Soane, which I think Fran and Julian already had the chance to do. So because I am a teacher and because I run a centre for the study of classical architecture. My real takeaway, I think from Soane is the fact that when I take students to the museum, they are always completely captivated by Soane. He's one of the easiest architects to get students of either architectural history or modern day architects, indeed young people interested in. And I love the fact that that can still work, given that he connects us with the deepest histories, really right back to the Greco Roman tradition or indeed the Egyptian tradition. Before that he would have said himself. And what it shows us, I think, which I really love, is that the poetry of architecture, the creativity of architecture, is not about following styles that are fashionable. At the point in time, CERN was not a fashionable person. He carried on wearing silk breeches and stockings when the fashions are changed to long trousers and short jackets. I think he must have like a figure out of the previous century, a Georgian figure in Regency London. But for him, architecture was not about fashion, it was about expressing your own deep seated learning through the whole history of architecture. Everything was available to be, to be used. He even used Gothic ideas as well. Not so much Gothic forms that occasionally happens where circumstances demanded it, but in particular his incised linear ornaments that run right up an arch and over the top without any horizontal interruption. What his assistant George Wittick called the ramifying lines of his architecture. He produced extraordinary vision and it just goes to show us that it's not about style. It's about creativity and the poetic whilst also meeting the professional obligations.
- [50:38]
Julian Darley
Should we finally, I think Soane would be extremely pleased to hear that your students are finding him so alluring. He, of course, was so incredibly interested in architectural education, but also as a hugely philanthropic man, and I don't think people necessarily take that away from the museum on first sight. I think that he was quite a difficult man to deal with and of course fell out with his one surviving son, famously. But he was incredibly kind. He gave very generously to all manner of charities. And when one of his housemaids developed epilepsy, not only did he go down to the kitchens to see that everything was all right, something that the master of the house would just not do normally, he then funded her medical care for the rest of her life. So he was an incredibly kind and giving person. And I don't think that's immediately obvious from the museum. So the fact that his educational legacy continues to this day is hugely powerful to me as a curator.
- [51:34]
Melvin Bragg
And we should add as well, I think, that in 1834, when the institute of British Architects, subsequently the Royal Institute of British Architects, was being established and they lauded Soane as the great figure of his age. He was 80 then, 81. Then he gave £5,000, I believe, to set up a benevolent fund for distressed architects. That's a very large amount of money in the 1830s. So he was generous and we should counterbalance that, as you say, Fran, with the more neurotic aspects of his character that clearly made him difficult to deal with in other respects.
- [52:08]
Frank Salmon
Well, thank you all very much indeed.
- [52:09]
Francis Sands
Melvin, would you like tea or coffee?
- [52:11]
Frank Salmon
I would like tea or coffee. I can't decide which. I think tea will be fine.
- [52:15]
Julian Darley
Francis. Not for me. I'm not a caffeine person. I've still got water. Thank you.
- [52:19]
Frank Salmon
Hello, Victoria.
- [52:20]
Melvin Bragg
I'd love them.
- [52:21]
Frank Salmon
Enjoy that.
- [52:24]
Melvin Bragg
In Our Time with Melvin Bragg was produced by Eliane Glaser and It is a BBC Studios audio production for Radio.
- [52:31]
E
4 from BBC Radio 4.
- [52:33]
Francis Sands
They remind me of the beauty of the everyday.
- [52:37]
E
Illuminated is the home for creative one of a kind documentaries that shed light on hidden worlds.
- [52:44]
Francis Sands
You could hear the plants photosynthesizing.
- [52:47]
E
A place of audio beauty and joy with emotion and human experience at its very heart. You can see the people walking bewildered, absolutely bewildered. Nobody really knew what to think. The programs you'll find here explore the reality of contemporary Britain and the world. It's a chance to meet voices that are not normally heard.
- [53:08]
Melvin Bragg
You don't open your mouth if you tell one person.
- [53:12]
Francis Sands
That's it.
- [53:13]
E
Illuminated from BBC Radio 4. All human life is here, just waiting to be discovered. Listen on BBC Sounds.