Ann Kuttner
Introduction*
This essay’s focus is chronologically the earliest of this volume: the resi- dences of Sir John Soane, architect (1753– 1837). One was his urban seat in London, at nos. 12– 14 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, houses purchased over a span of years (number 12 in 1792, 13 in 1807, 14 in 1824) that he joined together and remodeled. The other, Pitzhanger Manor, some nine miles outside London at Ealing, was a country house complete with a twenty- eight- acre park, purchased in 1800. He extensively built here while keep- ing a south wing erected in 1768 by his old master George Dance, but sold it in 1810 to reside thereafter only in London. Both houses vari- ously evoked the ancient Roman world (and a bit of the Greek too) by means of aspects of architectural form and space, decoration of facades and interiors, and displays of antiquities. With such elements in place, Pitzhanger Manor could naturally evoke the idea of a Roman villa; this essay discusses below how the young Soane first engaged with such evo- cations in a project for a wealthy patron’s country seat. Over his career Soane acquired fine artifacts and images— ranging from painted Greek
* I am very grateful to the editors of this volume, Elizabeth Macaulay- Lewis and Katharine von Stackelberg, for inviting me into this project, and for their sound and patient editorial responses.
I also owe special thanks to Miranda Routh for her learned support of my interest in John Soane architect and her affectionate toleration of my speculations. All faults here are my own. This essay’s image apparatus is necessarily brief; references are made to illustrations in print, but the reader is also invited to look to images on the open web, searching “Soane Pitzhanger Manor” and
“Soane House Museum” for photographs and period documentation.
vases and Roman urns to reliefs, statuary, and sculptural casts— and he assembled architectural elements, both actual fragments and a cast col- lection, in addition to models of ancient Roman buildings. Initially some of his holdings were displayed at Pitzhanger Manor, in the house and its garden conservatory; after the Manor was sold in 1810, all were at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where he had his office. Many were on show to visitors, as well as to architecture students, in designated areas of his residences, which Soane eventually came to think of as museum spaces.
That culminated in his successful plan to establish his London property under a board of trustees as a House Museum in perpetuity, winning in 1833 an Act of Parliament to assure this. In various ways both sites sug- gested that viewers think about Greco- Roman antiquity and the world of the Roman house and villa, in addition to any other pasts evoked (such as the medieval world or even, in the London residence, ancient Egypt too).
Any Classical fragments, decors, and documentation were, like contem- porary Neoclassical pieces, meant to assist design work that looked to Greco- Roman antiquity and form taste to appreciate it.
These two inventively fashioned sites are often discussed by those interested in the history of collecting and the early modern museum, in the age of the Grand Tour and the decades succeeding it, and of course by those interested in a major English architect, one whose style of expres- sion in public building closely engaged a distinctive Neoclassicism. The London House Museum draws the most general notice, because, well preserved and restored in a metropolis, it is so engaging in the inventive forms and light effects of many of its spaces, some of spectacular gran- deur, and in its character of being crammed with objects. Those include antiquities eclectically arranged in its public spaces, as well as many other works of art, architectural drawings, and artifacts, and a room of archi- tectural models too, archaeological as well as post- Antique. It has also the fascination of period rooms which preserve or reconstruct Soane’s domestic decors, in spite of alterations made in later eras and the need to house modern activities still. And Soane’s world emphatically exists in the digital realm: a fine website at once popular and scholarly1 catalogues Soane’s library, his working papers and sketchbooks, precious graph- ics made by associates like Gandy about his architectural projects (his residences included), and many of his thousands of objects and images
1 The site hosts a master bibliography for the House Museum and short references for Soane’s other major works, under Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, Soane Bibliography, http:// www.
soane.org/ sites/ default/ files/ downloads/ soane- bibliography.pdf.
are catalogued (Egyptian and Greco- Roman antiquities included).2 By contrast, most of what Soane executed at Pitzhanger after he bought the property in 1800 is gone, either having been altered right after he sold the property in 1810, or having been heavily reconstructed; though fur- ther restoration plans are underway, the site is since 1987 a function- ing art museum. Besides the main house structure, some documents and precious visual testimonies do exist, in addition to physical remains, to witness aspects of what Soane developed there. It’s worth visiting both again for this volume, to set off by analogy and difference my colleagues’
explorations of what it could mean to revive the Roman landscape and the Roman domus in the course of the long nineteenth century and after, and to think about what could make a “Classical house” in early mod- ern and modern Britain. This essay has thoughts on that project and its social contexts as they frame both Soane’s residences; an exploration of Soane’s young encounters with the archaeology of the Roman house and his engagement with recreating it for an eccentric patron (the Earl Bishop of Derry); a discussion of Pitzhanger Manor in its Neo- Roman charac- ters that include an archaeologically informed evocation of Roman house painting; and a closing section on the evocation of that Roman exemplar by displaying its illustrations, in the London house.
By the mid- to- late eighteenth century, the formative period of Soane’s youth and early career, English elites had enthusiastically taken to living with ideas of Rome that were suggested to them in two ways: the first—
physical and visible— through the architecture, landscapes, and artifacts that they owned; the second through willed recall of ancient Roman texts about life in house and villa (some of it easily read as exemplary, some fascinatingly not). Living with ideas of Rome, though, did not entail the visual suggestion of Roman domestic architecture as such. Almost all that was built and decorated to classicizing effect in the house of the eighteenth and earlier nineteenth century drew heavily on an eclectic range of remains of Roman (and some Greek) public architecture. Life with Roman artifacts as well as with new classicizing objects was an important expression of Neo- Antique tastes; there was certainly awareness that Romans privately collected art, since actual or imagined Roman house and villa sites in Italy were the source of so much statuary like that which British tourists and dealers brought home in Soane’s era. The grand Renaissance and later
2 Cornelius Vermeule updated in 1973 the Catalogue of the Classical Antiquities at Sir John Soane’s House Museum that he wrote between 1951 and 1953; ten copies of the typescript were made then, ten more in 1975, held variously at libraries in the United States and Europe.
Italian gardens and mansions which Grand Tourists could see, packed with ancient stuff, endorsed that model further, a well- known narrative to schol- ars. For the educated, Roman texts also had telling descriptions of art- collecting practices (and of sharing of public collections too). The actual Greek and Roman artifacts that Soane and other collectors owned might easily come from public, religious, and funerary contexts, not residential ones. Yet texts and antiquarian and archaeological knowledge could make the very actions of collecting and domestic display exemplary of Roman practice. Insofar as this post- Antique culture valued “Greek” art, as it did, to esteem it was good Roman practice, as the material and textual evidence enforced. To live like a Roman by any of these means could be taken either in the sense of a sociocultural or sociopolitical commitment, as an adher- ence to meaningful canons of Roman aesthetics or (also) in the sense of recreating key material and visual elements of Roman domus and villa.
How perfectly aware Soane was of the Classical package, as it were, and when, is debatable, but he could have picked up a good deal of it in his working life, starting young, and the signs are that he worked hard, even exuberantly, to show that he understood its codes.
Soane lived and worked at a very interesting cusp, right at the begin- nings of much more copious knowledge about actual Roman decorated domestic interiors, thanks not just to chance excavations at Rome (as at the Villa Negroni) but especially to excavations of the Vesuvian cities, to supplement remains at Rome long known like those of the Domus Aurea.
When designers and patrons in the eighteenth century wanted to know how to decorate the surfaces of a domestic room in the way in which a Roman would have, the corpus to inform them up to this point was piti- fully small. This is one reason that a rather finely painted extensive domus excavated at the Villa Negroni in Rome in 1777 made such an impression, including on Soane’s early patron and on Soane himself. In Soane’s youth the excavations at Pompeii, Herculaneum, and other Roman sites buried by Vesuvius at the Bay of Naples were still in their early stages, and the Bourbon court fiercely guarded physical access and visual documenta- tion, but Soane (who visited Pompeii as young man) bought up what he could get. An important source for knowledge of the decorated Roman interior, whose motifs began quickly to be imitated, the eight volumes of the massive Le Antichità di Ercolano esposte were published between 1757 and 1792 to document the Bourbon excavations around the Vesuvian sites. It is very telling that Soane managed to acquire a set, even if we don’t know when (the binding is nineteenth- century). He also acquired many more of the great publications of Pompeii and Herculaneum that
emerged throughout his life,3 and by the mid- 1780s had the means to buy books steadily (not all copies have a date of purchase inscription), as well as archaeological prints. An idea of archaeological authenticity was in the air: Soane’s country house at the turn of the nineteenth century was among a series of domestic projects in Britain and Ireland in the Neoclassical period that knowingly took elements of archaeologically retrieved Roman residential wall decors as a guideline to design, in ways slightly differ- ent to what had been confected as a “Pompeian” or “Etruscan” room by the generation before Soane in the circle of Robert Adam and others. At the same time Soane imitated predecessors and contemporaries among the well- to- do, and other established architects, by living with the Romans by means of their collected material remains, as well as by eclectically apply- ing elements derived from Greco- Roman public forms to his residences.
Soane’s varied aims for his impressive dwellings included an evidently fervent wish to earn social standing for his profession and himself. Son of a bricklayer, Soane had whatever formal education he received cut short by entering at age 15 into an architect’s office under George Dance. There is no evidence that he was exposed to Latin (let alone Greek) in anything like the rigorous immersion in ancient Roman language and texts of upper- class education in his era. That immersion aimed to inculcate fine literary and rhetorical taste but also an approach to Greco- Roman antiquity as giv- ing suitable models for thinking, acting, feeling, and living. It’s a truism that gaining the polish of acquaintance with Classical letters was a key means of asserting social standing, a code for bonding with one’s caste, elevating one above the level of mere farmer, artisan, shopkeeper, or mer- chant. From the Renaissance onwards, a wealth of translations, too, helped European and British elites and would- be elites to indulge engagement with Greco- Roman antiquity for pleasure and learning. Soane, grown to adulthood, was passionate about educating himself when he built over the
3 Soane owned William Gell’s Pompeiana: The Topography, Edifices and Ornaments of Pompeii, published 1817– 1819; earlier works, on discoveries at Herculaneum by Venuti (1748), Bayardi (1755), and Piranesi (1783); Piroli’s French engraved multi– volume edition (1804– 1806), Antiquités d’Herculanum, of the Antichità d’Ercolano, which included the other Vesuvian sites too; the Accademia Ercolanese publication (1796– 1808) of graphic records of Pompeian walls and mosaic floors; Piranesi’s Topographià della Fabbriche scoperte nella Città di Pompei . . . sino al 1792; and architect John Goldicutt’s 1825 Specimens of Ancient Decorations from Pompeii. He had two copies, the first bought in 1831, of Wilhelm Zahn’s fascinating 1828– 1829 project to illustrate, in accurate color, records of wall painting at Pompei as he had noted them in the excavations of 1825– 1827, contained in Die schönsten Ornamente und merkwürdigsten Gemälde aus Pompeji, Herkulanum und Stabiae nebst eingen Grundrissen und Ansichten nach den an Ort und Stelle gemachten Originalzeichnungen von Wilhelm Zahn. Bibliographic data for Soane’s library comes from the catalogue of the online House Museum site.
years the large library preserved at the House Museum in London. Very much in it is about architecture, but some of it engages Roman texts, as well as antiquities. One of Soane’s early book purchases, revealingly made in 1780 when the young designer had recently come back from his travel- ing architectural fellowship in Italy, was Robert Castell’s influential The Villas of the Ancients Illustrated, first published in 1729. Soane bought it again in 1813, 1818, and 1823. Its text had translation and commentary for the famous letters of Pliny the Younger describing the villas he built at Laurentum and Tuscum (Ep. 2.17 and 5.6), as well as for Varro’s descrip- tions of fine and useful villa architecture including a complex of piscina, aviary, and decorated lodge (De re rustica 3.5). Castell used these and other Roman texts for an overview of Roman practices for designing the house and villa; large folio plates gave marvelously detailed reconstruc- tions of plans for these structures and gardens.4
Soane accumulated over the years the trappings (usually in translations, English and some French) of a Classical education and reference appara- tus: Vitruvius’s treatise on architecture, naturally, in multiple editions (both translated and in Latin); the younger Pliny’s Epistles (with letters about Pliny’s villas and his style of living there); Plutarch’s Lives (some, like that of Lucullus, describing house and villa); Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars (with their asides on emperors’ residences); Horace (with important villa poetry); and Cicero’s works and Letters to Atticus (which included letters about designing and stocking a villa with statuary). The poetry of Virgil, Ovid, Propertius, Catullus, Tibullus, and more, as well as Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, gave additional elements of Classical culture. Soane’s labor to teach himself French to read the important literature on design is described eloquently by David Watkin;5 well past school age, he worked to give him- self the same classicizing cultural frame of reference as his more educated clients among the gentry and aristocrats on whom he depended for com- missions and support. In addition, his determined acquisition of the major modern works on Roman antiquities and structures let him share a bond not only with fellow professionals but with any of the antiquities- minded and Grand Tourists, who could comprise important clients and patrons.
4 The text was republished in 1982, with small images of only some of the illustrations and picturesque in- text vignettes and emblems. It is very well worth examining the original with its graphic project, which deserves an extended appraisal, see Levine 1999, 207– 208. Soane also bought a book describing a hypothetical grand Roman aristocratic house of the Late Republic by Charles Francois Mazois, Le palais de Scaurus, ou description d’une maison romaine: Fragment d’un voyage fait à Rome, vers la fin de la république, par Mérovir, prince des Suèves (Paris 1819).
5 Watkin 2000a, 26.
This taste for books, including Roman house and villa texts, is paral- leled by the intense self- fashioning that Soane exercised by means of his own authorship about his life as an architect and about his houses, some as straightforward narrative memoirs or guidebooks, some playing with other genres like epistle, essay, and history. Soane’s houses should be similarly understood as aspirational. In the Roman as in the post- Antique world, to construct a house, a domestic landscape, an interior was to construct a self, and Soane’s projects were no exception. That’s not a new observation, but for this volume’s project it bears reflection. It was and is clear to post- Antique readers that the reason that the Roman house, palace, villa repeat- edly appeared in Roman texts as it did was because Romans embraced the premise that one’s dwelling expresses one’s persona in communal as well as in private terms. Vitruvius’s On Architecture 6.5 famously makes the point that houses’ design and elegance should suit social status: a large atrium fits those over middling rank, elegance and spaciousness for hos- pitality befit lawyers and men of letters, but for the noble, princely vesti- bules, lofty atria, in the country groves and garden walks, libraries, and picture galleries are all necessary for elite magnificence. By those rules, Soane’s residences with their grand facades well befit a person of culture and elegance. His library in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the “Picture Gallery,”
his sculpture gallery so like a soaring atrium (the “Dome”) further mark him as nobilis. As architect and owner Soane aspired to show off what he could do to his private taste, at dwellings which were designed for hospi- tality, sometimes on a very broad scale. At Pitzhanger and then especially at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where he had his offices, he treated much of the space of his collections as quasi- public space not only eventually for his architecture students from the Royal Academy (where he lectured from 1806 to 1836), but also to welcome the genteel public as much as they liked to visit his gallery- like rooms and halls. These residences with their exuberantly impressive fronts printed an image of Soane’s status and taste on countryside or urban streetscape;6 they were determined bids for social standing— for himself as much as for his profession— using the wealth gained by his talents, and also by legacy from his wife’s family, to turn him into a man of visible propertied standing, talent, and culture. Soane’s near- mania for acquisition of casts and fragments of Roman architecture and antiquity was partly shared, as far as architectural elements were con- cerned, by other architects of his era. (His architectural casts and fragments
6 See Jackson 1992, for the emphatic intervention in the London streetscape by Soane’s elaboration of a facade for the house complex in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.