Sir John Soane���s danse macabre

By MIKA ROSS-SOUTHALL

Sir John Soane ��� like his house (now a museum in Lincoln���s Inn Fields), his architecture and his writing ��� is peculiar and perplexing. Without him the Dulwich Picture Gallery wouldn���t look like it does, nor phoneboxes: the family tomb Soane designed and built for his wife Eliza, after her death in 1815, in St Pancras Old Churchyard (one of only two Grade I listed monuments still standing in London; the other is Karl Marx���s tomb in Highgate Cemetery) apparently inspired Sir Giles Gilbert Scott���s design of the British red telephone box.

A fanciful, colour-washed painting (above) of this monument (alongside original drawings created by Soane���s architectural office) is on display in a new exhibition, Death and Memory: Soane and the architecture of legacy, at the Soane Museum. Obsessed with funerary architecture, Soane didn���t simply make the tomb a memorial to his wife; it also commemorates his favourite architectural motifs. Here we have a square-based shallow dome, incised pilasters, an abundance of ancient death symbolism.

Other architectural drawings, selected by the curators from the 30,000 in the museum���s archive, show circular mausoleums, obelisks honouring Battles at Trafalgar, Waterloo and Blenheim, and a plan of an unexecuted monument to George Washington ��� this hangs below a beautiful, minimalist interpretation of the plan from the 1970s���80s (circles within squares, and a delicate row of twig-trees in the corner, like a Sol LeWitt illustration), neatly suggesting that Soane���s funereal influence continues. And, thankfully, disproving that architectural drawings and models are dull or nonsensical to an amateur. (If you���ve been to the Royal Academy���s Summer Exhibition over the past few years, you may have noticed a change in the architecture room: almost-impenetrable computer graphics are now overshadowed by dynamic designs that are painted, photographed or inked; there���s even an award for the best model, partly based on architecture, partly on the execution of the model itself.)

Plan of a mausoleum by William Chambers from the Soane collection

For me, one item in Death and Legacy is particularly fascinating: a cork model of an Etruscan tomb collected by Soane ��� the roof gapes open to reveal a comical skeleton lying on a plinth, huge ceramic vases, and stucco pigs and dogs on the walls, all of which are slightly off-scale and archaeologically inaccurate. This is much like the inside of the Soane museum itself, with its sombre catacomb-like basement, relics, altarpieces and Egyptian-mummy cases placed in every crevice.

Henry James picked up on this motley, unique collection in his short story ���A London Life��� (1888):

 ���The heterogeneous objects collected by the late Sir John Soane are arranged in a fine old dwelling-house, and the place gives one the impression of a sort of Saturday afternoon of one���s youth ��� a long rummaging visit, under indulgent care, to some eccentric and rather alarming old travelled person.���

Preliminary design for the Soane Museum, by James Adams, 1808

Soane was so preoccupied with ruins, remains and shaping memory through architecture that, as well as making his house an ���academy��� of design and a personal legacy, he left behind sealed receptacles (a sort of time capsule) a few months before his death with instructions for them to be opened on the fiftieth, seventieth and eightieth anniversaries of his wife���s death ��� as though their contents had some cosmic significance. Instead, we find a pair of his masonic gloves; false teeth; a small, round piece of glass from Sudeley Castle; correspondence relating to his wayward son George (who refused to become an architect, constantly badgered his parents for money ��� he was a novelist ��� and wrote critical reviews of his father���s buildings, which Soane ��� disappointed, saddened ��� framed and displayed in the house, labelling them as his wife's ���Death Blows���); and a bizarre manuscript, Crude Hints Towards an History of My House in Lincoln���s Inn Fields, now republished by the museum to accompany the current exhibition. In the guise of an antiquary, Soane here imagines his house as a ruin in the future being inspected by visitors who speculate about its origins and function. Was it a Roman temple, a burial site, a monastery, a magician���s lair? The manuscript is written in a single column down the right-hand side of the page, leaving plenty of space for marginal notes ��� of which there are many, mostly challenging the haughty voice in the main text (���is it possible Architecture might have been better understood . . . in Italy than in Britain ��� in the succeeding times the Britons were designated ���barbaros Brittannos������). On seeing a fragmentary inscription ���et filii filiorum���:

���What an admirable lesson is this work to shew the vanity of all human expectations ��� the man who founded this place piously imagined that from the fruits of his honest industry & the rewards of his persistence [and] application he had laid the foundation of a family of Artists and that the filii filiorum of his loins might, smitten with the love of Art and anxious to shew their gratitude for the benefits & care & comfort they derived from it, dwell in this place from generation to generation ��� Alas poor man he flattered himself that a race of Artists would have been raised up whose efforts from the advantages they set out in life with . . . would have raised Architecture to its meridian splendour ��� Oh man, man, how short is thy foresight.���

Although, there are, of course, three alternative endings. The third one is the most whimsical, dark and, incidentally, my favourite, its final line being: ���Oh what a falling off do these ruins present ��� the subject becomes too gloomy to be pursued ��� the pen drops from my almost palsied hand . . . ���. Fingers fall away from keyboard doesn���t quite have the same effect.