Sir John Soane – A Romantic at heart ?

My first encounter with Sir John Soane‘s work was in 2001 on a visit to Lincoln Inns, London. My life-long passion for the long eighteenth century was further enriched by this ‘encounter’ and I became fascinated with Soane the man. Was he a Romantic, as his tastes and temperament indicate, or was he an Enlightenment product par excellence? How can one do justice to the magnitude of the public and private aspects of his architecture and career? How can one contrast the truly exquisite tension between his most remarkable architectural work (Bank of England, Tyringham) and his ‘domestic’ interiors (Lincoln Inns)?

Soane devoted his life single-mindedly to architecture and was in his time England’s most eminent architect, mixing with the rich and famous. His style was unique for although he used neo-classical forms, he was at heart a great Romantic. Indeed, at the centre of Soane’s style is the bubbling tension, an anti-clockwise violent rotation if you like, pulling at opposite ends his empirical Enlightenment mind against his Romantic inclination, namely a fascination with the picturesque, the Gothic and the sublime. At the centre of this tension are Soane’s private life and lectures, his architectural monuments (the public side), and Lincoln Inn Fields (the public and private).

It is almost impossible to fragment his work and career in “departments” since his creative work, career and personal life are closely interwoven. But a look at Gandy’s ‘Public and Private Buildings’ (see photo –>)  gives us a good idea of Soane’s fertile creativity, as well as an insight into the fine balance between the private and public aspects of his work. Gandy’s painting is bluntly explicit in its hierarchical placements of Soane’s monuments: for example, the Bank of England façade is given a dominant place in the painting, so is Tyringham given full status on the right while its Doric tribune is illustrated in the centre of the picture. Gandy’s selection is an amazing mix of Soane’s public state buildings and domestic ‘work’, and reads like a visual C.V. Soane explicitly prompted Gandy to contrast the astylar façade of No 13 Lincoln Inns with the more traditional Tyringham’s Ionic portico. This contrast springs to mind two thoughts: firstly, Soane’s style linking his much beloved theory of the orders and the rules of proportions to particular forms and functions and secondly, his preoccupation with marketing his image and attracting new commissions.

From the early days of his career and soon after he won the gold medal travel grant (1776), Soane seemed eager to build a network of contacts. During his two years spell in Italy, Soane cultivated a circle of collectors such as Borgia, and went on to meet Piranesi. Piranesi was a passionate advocate of Roman classical architecture, and he gave Soane four of his engravings that later found place in Lincoln’s Inn Fields (in the Breakfast Parlour). The network of contacts he built in Italy helped him obtain commissions on his return to England in 1780 and soon he counted among his clients and friends Samuel Bosanquet, director of the Bank of England. This friendship was to be instrumental eight years later when Soane landed the job that was to be the breakthrough of his career: overseeing the rebuilding and extension of the Bank. However, Soane grew increasingly frustrated by rivals such as James Wyatt who beat him to a series of appointments relating to the Palace of Westminster. Soane’s lobbying to secure contracts was not strictly transparent: he tended to lobby influential clients “through the back door” . This twisted behaviour came back to haunt him when Robert Smirke won the commission and rebuilt the Covent Garden Opera House. On his lecture to the Academy delivered in 1810, Soane turned his anger at Smirke and Dance and was duly and democratically- through a vote- prohibited (and professors who came after him) from criticizing the work of living colleagues. Indeed, his opaque and resentful character alienated his old friend Turner and even Soane’s two sons. Contrast this to Soane’s ability to have excellent relationships with his clients, overcoming difficult challenges with regards to their needs and dealing with the complexity of building work and accountability. He also had a positive relationship with the builders and craftsmen he employed, earning their trust and loyalty. It can therefore be argued that there was indeed a clear contrast between the public and private aspects of his career: Soane the Enlightened, craving self-improvement and dealing with clients and contractors in a constructive, rational manner and Soane the Romantic, ranting at rivals and indulging into spleen and victimhood.

This contrast is replicated in Soane’s architectural style. His main stylistic concern oscillates between two aspects: balancing the basic conventions of orders (classicism/Enlightenment) against the ‘character’ of the buildings (Romantic). Influenced by Blondel, he maintained that a building with a ‘character’ had qualities of individuality, was true to itself and did not pretend to be something different. Soane’s the Romantic is evident in some of his Royal Academy lectures, as well as in his collection of books; we know that he filled notebooks with annotations and included his own translations from the French. Furthermore, Soane maintained contradictory views, ranging from Neoclassicism to the picturesque and the Romantic. Equally, Soane the ‘Enlightened’ owned the ‘Encyclopedie’ in 33 volumes and accepted the philosophes’ view that a successful architect must be an expert in many fields. His Enlightenment beliefs were apparent in his lectures: here we see him stressing the importance of reason in architecture and trying to explain the architectural ornament by using the ‘logic’ explanation as to its origins. Indeed, his lectures tried to decipher his complex architectural mind, but often fell into the trap of criticizing others (as with his criticism of Chelsea Hospital). Perhaps, after all, his lectures were of a limited value in themselves to understanding his architecture; note the similarities of his negative ranting with that of Rousseau. Soane responded equally to Rousseau’s emotional empathy with nature as well as to his paranoia .This is certainly visible in Soane’s ‘Crude Hints […]’ .Here, in the best Romantic fashion, Soane portrays his house as a ruin and portrays himself (in the third person) as “…but he went on from a pure love to promote his interests of Art, until at last he had raised a nest of wasps about him sufficient to sting the strongest man to death…” [Soane] . Pure Romantic vintage! Also, Soane seemed to have many Napoleonic relics (all at Lincoln’s fields): a case for Napoleon’s pistol and a print by Gerard in the Breakfast Parlour, a full bust of Napoleon in the Dining Room which raises interesting questions: could it be that Soane identified himself with Napoleon the self-made man and his rise of talent and vision? Or is it simply that Napoleon’s relics had a buoyant market at the time, more to impress Soane’s potential clients/visitors?

Soane designed Tyringham for William Praed, a banker connected to the Prime Minister’s family, the Pitts. The commission is an indication of the ‘aristocracy’ circle Soane moved in. Tyringham had all the hallmarks of Soane’s planning style: from the giant order of Ionic columns to the entrance hall’s Doric columns with the full entablature of designs and cornice: the vaulting spatial sequences and ornamental simplification are all present, as they will later be in 12-14 Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Soane had the knack to transform features of classical design into abstract patterns of lines, as in his drawings of the Bank of England.

Whether a pure innovative ‘genius’ or a fact born out of necessity when remodelling old houses, Soane’s inventive top-lighting was another of his genial trademarks and was used to perfection in both Tyringham and Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Perhaps a great contrast to his public and private architecture can be found in the latter: the abode was to serve three functions: a family home, an architect’s workshop and office and a storage and display mini-museum The museum was to be initially ‘shifted’ to Pitzhanger Manor that Soane bought in 1800 for £4500 , for he was now a wealthy man. He fronted the Manor with a portico of Ionic columns with the distinct and unusual entablatures ejecting from the wall. Classical (Roman) architecture was prominent in his style here, reminiscent of his earlier Bank of England’s Lothbury Arch, inspired by the Arch of Constantine in Rome. Here Soane was at his Enlightenment-best style: inspired by the classics and developing his style based in the empirical tradition’s approach to design. Contrast this to his picturesque interiors such as Monk’s parlour at Lincoln ‘s Inn Fields, design and contents both of which are picturesque and Gothic.

Another interesting contrast point is the contradiction between his theoretical position and his practice: he created the picturesque ruins at Pitzhanger Manor and did the same at Lincoln’s Inn Fields and was an avid collector of Gothic fragments. Soane’s friendship with both Turner and Fuseli as perhaps a Romantic influence on Soane. Soane was certainly an embodiment of the shift from Enlightenment era to that of the Romantics, and this is clearly illustrated in his architectural style moving on two parallels and simultaneous tracks. For example, Soane’s desire to echo glories of Ancient Rome by constructing great projects (the Senate Buildings, in his students days) go hand in hand with his search to rationalize the classical language of architecture while believing in the unique character of each of his buildings. As a classicist, he emulated the architecture of Rome, Greece and the Renaissance and looked down (in theory) on the Gothic style as an inferior phase in the history of architecture. And yet, with equal conviction and gusto, he resisted the Greek Revival fashion of the times since he believed that the liberal copying of forms was inappropriate in the design of secular domestic buildings (in practice). Here Blondel’s influence is visible, and Soane seem to have followed ‘the principle of convenance’: there are no set rules that must be taken from antiquity per se, and the architect’s common sense should prevail when designing contemporary buildings. Soane took this even further, believing passionately in the character of buildings, a romantic notion of individuality.

There was never anything obvious about Sir John Soane’s style and architecture, from his handling of space and light to the collector-mania side of his work. He was innovative in using the principal tools available to architects of the time, and he was a master at creating subtle and unexpected effects in the interiors of his buildings. His style was so original, personal and Romantic that he became a hard act to follow, and had no close followers. As we have seen, the contrast between his public and private work and career was at times interwoven, and often overlapped. His legacy must be how he shifted architecture to new ‘modern’ heights, catching the shift between the Enlightenment and Romanticism: torn between neo-classicism and the philosophes’ intake on Art on the one hand, and a reluctant Romantic on the other. If this had been a battle, the odds will certainly be on Romanticism winning the day.

(I have included where possible links instead of footnotes/biblio. as there are too many to list here. Was also unable to find pictures of Soane’s drawings online to include in this post. See Sir John Soane’s Museum for a list of publications/catalogues and take their virtual tour of the museum.)

Nada Cabani © 2010

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