Sir John Soane's Museum
Richard Cavendish explores a classical curiosity shop - The Sir John Soane Museum in London.
A museum is a respectable articulation of collecting mania. In one direction lie lunatic accumulations of old newspapers, used light bulbs and obsolete mousetraps. In the other looms all the majesty of the British Museum. The collection on view in Sir John Soane's Museum, displayed as he organised it in the rooms he himself designed, lies somewhere between the cabinet of curiosities and the museum proper.
Soane was an odd fish, said to have looked like a picture on the back of a spoon. Born in 1753, the son of a country bricklayer, he made his way by his own talents to the top of the tree as an architect. Marrying Elizabeth Smith, a rich builder's heiress, he rebuilt three houses on the north side of Lincoln's Inn Fields as his family home and office, and to display his treasures. Always conscious of his humble origins (his elder brother remained a bricklayer all his life), Soane was vulnerable and demanding, irritable and easily upset. Architect to the Bank of England for many years, he was knighted in 1831 and died in 1837 aged 83.
Soane was an odd fish, said to have looked like a picture on the back of a spoon. Born in 1753, the son of a country bricklayer, he made his way by his own talents to the top of the tree as an architect. Marrying Elizabeth Smith, a rich builder's heiress, he rebuilt three houses on the north side of Lincoln's Inn Fields as his family home and office, and to display his treasures. Always conscious of his humble origins (his elder brother remained a bricklayer all his life), Soane was vulnerable and demanding, irritable and easily upset. Architect to the Bank of England for many years, he was knighted in 1831 and died in 1837 aged 83.
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