John Soane’s Cabinet of Curiosities (Yale University Press, $45) certainly lives up to its title. For starters, it’s a visual delight, leading readers through the haunting, eclectic maze of a London relic: a house museum, frozen in amber since 1837, that displays its trove of forty thousand objects in arrangements fixed by the architect and collector who bequeathed it to the nation.
Author Bruce Boucher proves an excellent guide to the art, which includes Hogarth’s original oils for A Rake’s Progress, an abundance of antiquities and neoclassical sculpture, Gothic glass panes, a splendid Turner seascape, and many oddities—from a quartet of carved ivory Indian armchairs to an aerial view of Soane’s biggest architectural project, the Bank of England, shown as if it were already a ruin in a period watercolor by Joseph Gandy.
“This collection is a rarity,” Boucher said in a phone interview. “It’s the sole, intact survivor from a period when British antiquarians opened their private collections for like-minded visitors. It predates modern notions of what a museum should be.”
To craft his book, Boucher tapped into years of archival research and his experience as a recent director of the Sir John Soane Museum. Yet this deftly told narrative goes deeper than conventional art historical books, letting readers see that the most curious aspect of the museum just might be the Georgian architect and collector at its center. Who else builds an urn-cluttered crypt in his basement and later breaks through an exterior wall to add a pharaoh’s carved limestone sarcophagus, all while battling his estranged younger son in print and running a busy architectural practice amid the dust of a vast, decades-long home remodeling project?
Portrait of John Soane [1753–1837] by Christopher William Hünneman (1755–1793), 1776. Photograph by Andy Johnson.
Soane spoke of his home’s crowded art installations “as studies for my own mind”—and it’s clear that a life of dramatic changes left him with much to ponder. This bricklayer’s son had risen to be one of Britain’s most celebrated architects, had married well, had joined the Royal Academy, and had come to know artists as different as Turner and Piranesi. He cultivated the lifestyle of an eighteenth-century gentleman, but was anything but conservative in his work, eschewing the placid neo-Palladian manner of his contemporaries to forge a fresh personal style. His surviving work includes such London landmarks as the Dulwich Picture Gallery and his own family tomb in St. Pancras Gardens.
Soane Office, Section Through Museum and Breakfast Room by Frank Copland (d. 1818), 1818. All objects illustrated are © Sir John Soane’s Museum, London; all photographs courtesy of Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut. Photograph by Geremy Butler.
Still, for all Soane’s success, his controlling personality led him to mount indecorous counterattacks when faced with minor professional slights. Worse yet, Soane sank into choleric gloom during long years as a widower, and his estranged adult children added to his woes. The elder, John, died early, leaving a young family; while the surviving son, George, landed in debtors’ prison and attacked his father in a devastating newspaper screed. Soane blamed the latter’s behavior for his wife’s premature death.
Boucher speculates that Soane’s obsessive collecting became a kind of substitute for the family he had lost. He couldn’t compete with the period’s wealthiest cognoscenti—men like Charles Townley and Thomas Hope—who opened their house museums to the London public. But Soane had a visionary ability to combine lesser material—casts, fragments, watercolors from his architectural office—with a host of masterworks, creating a totality that transcended its parts.
As a collector, Soane didn’t just rely on his eye. He also focused on provenance as an assurance of quality. He acquired an edition of Shakespeare that still bore the bookplate of star actor David Garrick; purchased his major Canaletto from Gothic novelist William Beckford; and sought out works that had passed through the hands of his older architectural mentors, including George Dance and Henry Holland. In addition, Soane purchased works created by Royal Academy members such as Turner, Reynolds, and Lawrence.
View of the East and South Sides of the Picture Room by Joseph Michael Gandy (1771–1843), 1825. Butler photograph.
Soane exemplified the private passions that often burned in the marble precincts of neoclassical art. Like many eighteenth-century architects, he felt the stylistic and intellectual impact of the excavations at Pompei and Herculaneum, tapped the emerging taste for Gothic design, and shared the period’s delight in ruins, both real and artificial. But he went further. This British visionary was as odd as Jean-Jacques Lequeu, Étienne-Louis Boulée, and other French contemporaries whose unbuilt projects smack of surrealism. In his saturnine fashion, he rode the gathering wave of private sentiment and sublime horror that would drown Enlightenment optimism—a current that became a tsunami among nineteenth-century romantics. That’s why his namesake museum is more than a pilgrimage site for connoisseurs of neoclassical art. In 2023, the house at 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields was visited by 135,000 museumgoers, including hosts of architects and interior designers seeking inspiration from Soane’s fruitful, syncretic approach. Boucher’s new book is a perfect, accessible guide for all those visitors.
