Sir John Soane
b. Goring-on-Thames, 1753;
d. London, 1837.

Sir John Soane’s architecture is in a class by itself; original, mannered, with a brilliant control of internal space and light, and a fondness for shallow domes, repeated segmental arches, clerestories, linear ornament and colour. Whether or not it was his humble origin as the son of a Berkshire bricklayer which spurred him, Soane became undoubtedly successful. He trained under George Dance the Younger, and later Henry Holland, but entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1771. In 1778, on the King’s Travelling Scholarship, he left the Academy Schools for Italy. In Rome he became attracted to the service of Frederick Hervey, the Bishop of Derry, an ardent builder with whom he journeyed back to Ireland. However, no work ensued there and in June 1780 Soane returned, disappointed, to England. Then slow years building up a modest practice in East Anglia, but in 1784 marriage to the daughter of a wealthy builder; at his father-in-law’s death in 1790 Soane succeeded to money and property. Two years previously he had had the good fortune to be appointed Surveyor to the Bank of England, so he now had financial security and a good post from which to obtain further introductions to wealthy patrons. His practice grew, and became second in size only to that of James Wyatt. (His survivorship of the Bank of England was the “pride and boast” of his life; his work there included the Stock office 1792-3, now destroyed.) Finally, when the Board of Works was reorganized in 1814 Soane was one of the three architects appointed, with responsibility for public buildings, a post which lasted until 1832, when Soane retired and was knighted by William IV. There must have been pleasure in the Soane family when its head was elected Professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy. In 1809 he succeeded his former master, George Dance the Younger, who had failed to deliver the statutory lectures and had resigned. In the year of his election, by contrast, Soane started to deliver his lectures, and he continued to repeat them for the next twenty- five years. In his long life Soane was a great collector of drawings, models, casts, sculptures, paintings and a vast miscellany of objects. He had lived at Lincoln’s Inn Fields since 1812 and, obtaining an Act of Parliament in 1833, he left his house to the nation to be a museum “for the study of Architecture and the Allied Arts”. It remains so to this day, one of the most fascinating specialized museums in the world.