A Maze without a Plan? Display in Sir John Soane’s Museum by Bruce Boucher FSA

hello and welcome to the Society of antiquaries of London lecture today I'm really pleased to welcome Bruce Boucher who's going to talk to us about sjn son Bruce was director of the S John son's Museum from 2016 to 2023 uh and he is a fellow of the Society of antre he's published numerous books on art and architecture and sculpture and he's currently working on a book about yakob Burkhart the 19th century Swiss cultural historian his latest book is John Z's Cabinet of Curiosities Reflections on an architect and his collections which was published by Yale University press in 20124 thank you Bruce and over to you thank you anusa I've called my lecture amaz without a plan which is a reference to um Alexander Pope's poem an essay on man which begins with an invitation to the reader to expatiate free or all this scene of man a mighty maze but not without a plan and it seems an apt way to begin a discussion of display in s John son's Museum there is no doubt that the subject is fraught and as with son's architecture in general it is an experience that could never be described as neutral ever since the museum first opened its doors visitors of all kinds have tried to make sense of it or at least to let it wash over them and when I first came to the museum as director I'd known it of course but I was struck by the fact that there have traditionally been no labels um the juxtoposition of Works Greek Roman medieval non-western even uh is uh often uh baffling uh and provocative and I remember um Mark block the French historian once said that it's always useful to explore the history of a word and I think one can expand this to the history of an institution so for my own satisfaction I wanted to try to unpack what was what I could find behind the uh display in the sewn itself of course John son said that it was um everything was arranged as studies for my own mind but he never divulged what he meant by that so it's as if he withheld the key and over the years people have been trying to understand what he meant by this and also try to uh make sense of the phenomenon uh of the Zone Museum and I think one way of um exploring this is by looking at three different reactions to it by all three of them German uh in the 19th century the first is the great architect and contemporary of son's called Friedrich shinkle who saw son's house in London in 1826 and was baffled by it he wrote in his travel diary like all private houses in London this is small but it contains a great number of casts fragments of antique statues and buildings vases sarcophagy little panels and bronzes all exhibited in the riskus manner in small spaces lit from above and the side often spaces only 3 ft wide medieval antique and modern works are intermingled at every level in Courtyards resembling cemeteries in Chapel likee rooms in catacombs and drawing rooms ornamented in herculian and Gothic Styles little deceptions everywhere clearly he wasn't impressed and shinkle also felt the same way about Bank of England which was son's greatest architectural achievement which he toured during his time in London perhaps shinkle was also surprised that a collection which foregrounded architectural casts and fragments did not incorporate a developmental approach to the history of the discipline and indeed son was professor of the history of architecture at the Royal Academy and he was certainly well aware of the Arc of civilization although this was not the focus of the display in his house Museum the second observation uh I want to uh allude to is by the great German art historian and founder of the Berlin museums Gustav vagen who published in 18 38 um a work on uh the art and artists in England which was like a kind of guide book to public and private collections this was a year after son's death sorry the uh what he says is the rooms are small and such an immense number of uh works are crowded together in three different stories so that it is the work of some hours to gain even a suff superficial view of them I observe that the whole not withstanding the picturesque fantastic charm has in consequence of this an arbitrary mixture this AR mixture of heterogeneous objects something of the unpleasant effect of a feverish dream it is he concluded a splendid example of English whimsic as the organizer of the Berlin museums vagan would have had little appetite for the jumbled presentation of son's Museum which ran counter to the principles of the nent discipline of art history next and finally uh in 1882 the German archaeologist Adolf miches was even more damning in his assessment of what he saw known molam said molter not much but many appears to have been son's motto in collecting for there is something of everything along with a few Choice specimens of high value or at least of considerable interest there is an immeasurable chaos of worthless fragments of all types from all countries of all kinds of art original and copies mixed together all this is crammed into the narrow limits of a private house and is arranged in so ingenious a manner that no Corner however dark is left unoccupied in this respect the architect has achieved Marvels nevertheless this Labyrinth stuffed full of fragments is the most tasteless Arrangement that can be seen it has the same kind of perplexing and oppressive effect on The Spectator as if the whole large stock of an old clothes dealer had been squeezed into a doll's house then again the impression conveyed by so wild a confusion of promiscuous fragments is necessarily bewildering and fatiguing to the V visitor so all three of these comments fasten on the what we would call today information overload that can make visiting the sewn and uncomfortable experience if there's a common theme underpinning them it is uh eclecticism which was and still still is an issue both with son's architecture and the display of his own collections elements of his display can find points of comparison in other collections of the period yet there is much about the son Museum that is Sous and this can be explained because it is a rare Survivor of a kind of Private Collection that was common in the London of his day nevertheless the fascination of the S Museum also reflects its place on the cusp of the shift from the Renaissance cabinet of curiosity towards the post Enlightenment Museum and looking back uh one can see the prototypes for the way in which SE composed a situation like the wall this wall in the dome area the very heart of the museum it was both a reference library visual reference library for himself and uh his pupils uh but also it was the kind of thing that he would have seen in other collections of the day this is a watercolor of the entrance hall of Charles townley's house on Park Street um which was crammed with uh rare classical uh marbles uh and was a tourist attraction uh long before it ended up in the MU British museum in the early 1900s as the town Le collection indeed a special BR group of uh galleries was built for the townly collection in the old British museum uh in the first decade of the 19th century so it wasn't uh it was typical of the kind of uh collections that son would have seen Thomas Hope's collection which we know he visited several uh times and with whom he corresponded also was um a virtual Museum in an era before um museums really became took hold on the public conscience and again when SE formulated the idea of leaving his house and collection to the nation it wasn't as unusual as it may seem now because of course in 182 4 the National Gallery opened in uh palmel in the house of John Julius angin and this is a view of uh the Interiors around 1830 and of course there were complaints about the fact that um Paris had the Lou but uh London only had a small townhouse undistinguished townhouse in uh the West End so so this was not an unusual thing and of course bear in mind that after son's death the um National Gallery moved into its new premises in travala square and of course in these in the same years the late 1830s 1840s the British museum was rebuilt from the old 17th century monague house into the great neoclassical Temple that we know today and here I'm showing you another view of the house as it appeared in 1825 SE had a number of watercolors uh done particularly by his emmanu Enis Joseph Michael Gandy who is a undistinguished architect but quite a great um watercolorist and really with s's hand um presenting to the public his ideas and you can see the view of the monks parlor and looking above the Vault with the light shining into the picture room recess it um was a type of uh experience which SE really conceived as a kind of mood Journey you go and you still go from large Open Spaces to small spaces you encounter as um shinkle noted uh little spaces um with um deceptions that uh really manipulate uh the The Spectator it is in in many ways a a total work of art and the source of this goes back really to the way in which works of art particularly uh classical reliefs were displayed from the Renaissance onwards here one's looking at the Garden facade of the Villa medich the um French Academy now uh as it would have looked in in s's day and of course um the reliefs and statues on the facade had come from earlier collections notably the plazo de laal which had a courtyard with many of these reliefs uh displayed in the 16th century where people like Michelangelo uh saw and copied them and one can see uh this in private houses plazo corini in Florence also has a wall which has Roman inscriptions embedded in it and if we look at the drawing office um really the earliest surviving architectural uh Studio in uh the UK um which son created in um the early 1820s um the plastic casts on the wall uh were meant to be um study uh objects for his pupils who would uh copy them uh at various times of of the day um it didn't matter so much to where they came from and there is mixture there are some that are even medieval but the idea was to be able to capture the three-dimensional quality in uh two-dimensional drawings SE like Thomas sanby who is his predecessor as a professor of architecture at the Royal Academy believe that it was much better for students to copy a three-dimensional object rather than a two-dimensional drawing or engraving because the um drawing or engraving would essentially flatten out the physical nature of the work itself you'll also notice in this which was uh really the last major part of the museum to be restored it was restored between 2021 and 2023 um some of son's models he was very keen on models as touchstones for buildings and also you can see a um cork model of an at truscan tomb on the left we'll come back we'll touch on this uh again later um these were very popular in the 18th uh century and by Son's day had largely um waned in in in popularity so SE um as you probably know originally um made pitanga Manor which was his country house that he owned between 1800 and 1809 uh the focus of his experiments with uh display of this kind and creating a medieval monks dining room and uh Folly of ruins classical ruins uh but he and his wife decided uh in 1809 to focus on Lincoln and field where he had his first house um which he uh built in 1792 on the North side and then in 1808 he negotiated the purchase of number 13 the house next door um you can see on the right hand screen the um plan as it is today and it really composes three buildings but what I wanted to focus on first was that around 1810 when he was building um beginning to build uh number 13 He conceived of a totally different plan which was to turn the ground floor of 12 and 13 into something like a coherent uh Museum as we would recognize it um with Library um plaster casts galleries uh gallery for drawings and prints so on so forth um an area in which he would in part live there was an eating room which could double also as a as a picture display as at um pits hanger but presumably like thas hope he would live on the floor above and this would be given over to a museum however as it turned out he did something much more interesting if complicated because he decided that he couldn't really afford to um keep both uh merge both numbers 12 and 13 so he swapped leases with his uh tenant in number 13 and he took from number 12 the area or kept from number 12 uh the area at the back of the building which was his architectural office and added it to number 13 and what one notices when one looks at the plan of uh the building today after he bought number 14 to expand his collections in uh 1822 the old yards of the houses um on this 17th Century Square were turned into a series of interconnecting galleries top lit uh much like uh dulich uh itself and another point one might make while we're looking at these um plans is that in s's mind there was no clear distinction between there was a distinction between the house and the museum or the academies he referred to the area in the back of the house which was where he kept most of his collections but gradually over the years as his collection expanded this um was eroded and here I'm showing you another one of the Gandhi uh views um it was displayed like virtually all of Gandhi's major work for zone at the Royal Academy summer exhibition where it would have been seen by tens of thousands of people and uh this was displayed in 1822 it merely says it was a townhouse in London but it would have been fairly clear to most people that this was son's townhouse you could if you've been there you can recognize the library dining room which occupies the center space the facade which was much attacked when it was built in 1812 it was considered an eyesa and in fact s got into trouble for projecting it in front of the line of the other houses on the Terrace um eventually he he was taken to court but he won the uh the case and so today we as we see the son Museum it really calls attention to itself on the North uh side of the museum and then you see the plan which is like an inverted L and this is before he added number 14 uh in 1824 which made it more of a t-shape as I said and in the lower right hand corner one of the most celebrated and imitated of the rooms the uh breakfast room what zone um liked in terms of collecting was what one of the things that interested him and also reassured him was provenance he bought from collections which in a sense had already vetted these objects and I'm showing you a famous example a double double scarium which he bought at the sale of the Earl of bestboro in 1801 along with a number of other marbles um he spent over 200 pounds 211 if I remember correctly and this one would have been particularly interesting to him because of the fact that it had belonged to bartalo cavi was one of the first great restorers of Roman uh sculpture in the middle of the 18th century and then pesi whom he actually had met and this particular scarium had been the subject of an engraving by pesi dedicated to one of his English patrons so works like this or indeed the Diana of Ephesus one of the major classical sculptures which may have come from The Villa Julia and certainly was in the collections of cardinal Rio Rolo P DPI and again the Earl of bper um these Works would have attested to st's position as a man of means but also a man of discernment um a conosur much like uh Robert Adam who in many ways was uh his role model here going throughout the house uh to a large degree the marbles are intermingled with plaster cast which was typical of 18th century collections you can still find it today in places like newbie Hall in Yorkshire but this view of uh Roman floral fragments which was arranged in son's little study um really part of the house as opposed to what he would call The Academy of Museum um was kept together exceptionally it was put together by Charles heathcot taam who had been the architect of Thomas Hope's uh galleries in uh the his house in the West End uh he' collected them in Rome for Henry Holland for whom son worked um early in his career uh he collected them between 1794 and 1796 and then had to sell them and Son acquired them from Holland's heirs but uh he put them together very much as they were engraved by taam in a book that he published on this collection um in I think about 1812 and it was arranged according to motifs like floral motifs or the anthemion and you can see here that what son often does throughout the building is to take a visual theme and put works together whether or not they belong to the same uh period or indeed the same uh culture to show a kind of kinship across the ancient world and this is something that he had uh imbibed from the writings of the um French theoretician um amateur archaeologist the baron daville he knew dunville's Works donaville had catalog the townly collection of marbles and he Advanced rather daring ideas that suggested that the um there was one un common religion in the ancient world from east to west and that was why images turned up uh across cultures from Greece and Rome to India and finally to uh to Japan the apery of son's collecting in this area was really the acquisition in 1824 of the sarcophagus of the Egyptian pharaoh C the first which was installed in the Crypt in 1825 we're looking here at an illustration of it as it first appeared in uh the museum uh from uh an unusual but very interesting book uh by John Brittain an antiquarian and uh something of a kind of Lackey of sons he often did Sons bidding for him at auction and things like that um it was called the union of sculpture architecture uh in um and basically the focus of it was son's house in um Lincoln's INF field and it was an early attempted a guide book it wasn't a great success and in fact it prompted son to write his own privately printed descriptions of the house um but what's interesting about this is that se is created in the in the Crypt which was Under the Dome the very heart of the museum an area where he wanted the um a great showpiece um and he tried many different things before he found the right one with the sarcophagus he he referred to the area as a crypt because in his mind and in terms of the things that were shown there it was associated with death burial uh funerary uh earns and the like and here he's put together as you can see in the illustration a um plaster cast of a head of a pharaoh which had come from the collection of Samuel Rogers and to the right of the illustration you can see a black marble Egyptian Capital uh which he had acquired in 1818 from the collection of Robert Adam when he acquired the bulk of Robert Adam's drawings and a number of books and uh Marbles and so he he's really creating here a kind of Nexus of pieces of Egyptian art uh including the the wooden sarcophagus which was on the floor but what's in what I find really striking is that he acquired with the sarcophagus about 16 pieces of the lid which had been broken open in the Middle Ages when the tomb was rifled and he simply puts them underneath as if the tomb has just been been broken open uh it's a kind of poetic touch which needless to say when the museum turned into a um Public Museum had to be uh tidied up and then on the right you'll see eventually he was constantly changing where works of art uh were placed according to his fancy right up to his death in January of 1837 and what's telling I think about the where the Egyptian Capital ended up in the Cor or outside the picture room is that it's stacked uh between a rosette that is a copy of rosette from a Roman triumphal Arch and above it is a plaster cast of the Corinthian capital of the Temple of the Cil at um tily which had a very distinctive sunflower in the uh in in its Center and it was a kind of motif that um SE used in his own architecture particularly in the in the Bank of England so he seems to be suggesting that the Egyptian Lotus Motif and these uh floral motifs in Roman architecture are somehow uh kindred spirits and I mentioned earlier uh cork models he collected uh a number of these um and he was he began collecting them really at the time when their value was falling into in terms of uh the market they origin of these was the Neapolitan uh nativity scenes the preap where the architecture sometimes imposing architectural backdrops were created out of cork which had the ability to be of course easily carved but also it could mimic uh the effects of weathering of brick work so on and so forth and SE in the 1820s put together um what he called the model room which was in a way a kind of conspectus of architecture classical and later architecture initially was on the uh third floor of the number 13 um and then uh he brought it downstairs to the second floor to what had been his wife's bedroom um in the 18 mid 1830s but what's noticeable here as you can see on the top level you've got in the center the round Temple of the cilet tiv flanked by two replicas of the Greek Doric temples at pum and then down below on the main level uh is a large model of Pompei as it appeared in 1820 which he acquired from the estate of one of his early um pupils and then there was a cupboard beneath that in which he kept drawings which went back really to um the 16th 17th century England and contained drawings by Adam and um Chambers Chambers and other uh Architects so it really was a kind of conspectus and then Below on the bottom was were models of son's own architecture so he insinuates himself into as the often does in the building into the uh discussion you can never be very far from a reminder of SE and on the wall are illustrations of architecture which um again was to give you a more rounded view um of the models that you were looking at and the idea for this was not uncommon um other people had collections John Nash's rival had a collection of architectural models but I think one of the ones that spoke to him particularly was the architectural Museum of Louis franois Casas in Paris son owned the catalog of this and was quite interested in it and he would have seen it when he went to Paris in 184 uh and again in 1819 but what was interesting about cass's um collection was that it contained these uh plastic cast reconstructions of ancient works and watercolor showing their actual State um so this was The Germ of the idea that eventually filtered into Stone's treatment of such uh of of this part of his his collection now we think of the Zone certainly I did before I uh became director it's largely devoted to archaeological specim to the classical world but in fact um son was very heavily invested in what we would call or what would have was then modern British art and this was because he was an intensely political animal and having become a an associate Royal academician in 1795 and then a full academ mission in 1802 he um used his money and I should say I haven't me mention the fact but he was not only a successful architect but uh he also married successfully he married an ays and he used her money uh as well as the money that he gained from his salary at the bank of England in private commissions to um create a lifestyle and a collection which was um would have been improbable uh otherwise and in 18 199 he decided to create the first picture room we're looking at an engraving of it um by pugan in fact uh which was published in a book by John Brittain about collections in uh London in 1820 which was published in 1825 um and what it stood on the site of what had been son's architectural Studio behind number 12 Lincoln INF field um what you can probably make out are certain Elements which are familiar from the museum itself the chairs are the Chinese um export uh Rosewood chairs which are now in the drawing room we don't know when he got them but um on the right is a window which has Stained and colored glass which eventually was moved down to the uh basement and is uh features in the monks parlor on the left uh one can make out the panels of the re's progress which son bought in 1802 when he had become a full academ mission um Again part of this strategy to um impress other people and probably himself with the fact that he had arrived above them uh is a long horizontal landscape which he commissioned from Augustus cat fellow academician and what um I discovered that almost without exception the paintings that he Acquired and also sculptures were by fellow academicians so he would use his patronage as a kind of Leverage within the academy itself um the gallery that he was creating um here um were really created during the period um almost side by side with dich college picture gallery uh so that he could benefit from experiments in both areas to achieve a kind of series of toplit uh galleries this one as Britain notes uh in the text that even as he was writing it was being demolished because s was creating a new picture Gallery which is the one that we know today which is on the opposite side of the back of the museum at the end of this sequence of galleries um he built it in 1824 and I think it was uh probably prompted by the fact that he just acquired some very large pictures um he had of course the canaletto uh the big can which you see above the fireplace here but also he had Acquired and you can just see on either side uh half of four of the great hos of the humors of an election which he acquired in 1823 from the estate of the Widow of the painted the um actor David Garrick uh for um over 1700 pound it was the second most expensive thing in his collection after the set the sarcophagus of Siti the and um he went pull out all the stops in creating uh this room um for instance the floors are oak trimmed in Mahogany the dwarf cabinets are mahogany with uh ebony inlay you have uh a very elaborate marble fireplace which is comp has a mixture of Gothic and classical elements its own like to mix and of course the um the ceiling with these uh vaults was a mixture of classical and um English Gothic um what you can also see and I've put on the left a drawing by sanb uh of the East wall of the great room of the Royal Academy as it was in Somerset house in those days where uh he is proposing a hang for the summer exhibition and you can see that it is very dense and it goes right up to the sky and um it's the kind of thing that son would have seen and em bibed and replicates really in the picture room in the museum and you can also see that again the sandby here of course the prominent place above the fireplace is given to the president Benjamin West you have The Usual Suspects hopner OPI um beachy um Morland Etc um in prominent positions um and then less prominent ones below the line and of course as as I said these exhibitions were tremendously important for selling uh not only for painting but also for sculpture and uh two degree architecture uh architectural advertising the the canaletto the big canaletto he acquired in 1807 from um William Beckford Beckford was selling the contents of his father's house fontil splenden um in preparation to create fontil Abbey his Gothic folley he bought it for 150 ginies which was less than he paid for paintings by kulat or uh certainly Turner and some of his uh and Henry Howard other of his contemporaries who are fellow academicians it wasn't the first caletto he' bought he acquired two small ones which are above it as you can see from the um Earl of butes collection uh notable collection already in 1796 he had bought these before either when he was living in number 12 and again it was part of this strategy to create um a sense of wealth and well-being and you can see either side of the large caletto a couple of the over 20 gaches by claro the French architect who taught architecture in uh Rome at the French Academy and also collaborated with Thomas Jefferson among others on architectural projects um which he began buying in the 17 90s the room is a small room it's a parks approximately 14 by 13 by1 19 ft um but with the use of the famous picture planes um son was able to create the uh effect of a much larger room which would have been 25 by 40 ft as he notes in his private descriptions um the picture planes were not an invention of SES they had uh been uh in use for many years George dance his his early Mentor had created in the Shakespeare Gallery in palmal a series of these and Samuel Rogers among other private collectors had um planes like this uh which were to enable you to view paintings in different lights and from different uh angles um what you see here again is a conjectural display probably not ever uh actually uh created as such but one of Gandhi's um studies which s used to consider the impact and you've got in the center one of the site of four Anglo Indian or Indian uh Ivory chairs and an ivory table on suite and on top of that uh you have uh the model of the Temple of Vesta tiv which probably never uh stood there but it was a kind of Suma summarum of all of the things that uh meant a great deal to son and you get a good view here of the uh ceiling what he called arched canopies which again is this Fusion of classical and and Gothic which SE relished uh and was much criticized for in his own time because it seemed a flagrant um disavow of uh classicism and on the left you see the nymph by um West mcot which um he makes a focal point of the picture room recess which is uh as you open the several panels it suddenly comes into view in this Extended space it's a kind of Catra uh and interestingly enough West mcot it was a bit of um transactional uh dealing because West mcart either gave him or sold him the chair and the table and in return son um gave West mcot a great position in the um in this uh display and of course by the 1820s people realized that s was creating a museum even though it was at that point not uh formally acknowledged he had he only went to Parliament for a bill to preserve his house and collection in 1833 but already by this date the death of his wife 10 years earlier in 1815 and his disappointment with his sons uh affected uh determined him to uh preserve the collection there are some strange elements in the collection uh which can only be explained Again by personal associations for instance he obviously uh revered Reynolds Reynolds was the first president of the Royal Academy and Reynolds had presented the young johnone with the gold medal for architecture in 1776 and at the presentation he prophesied such great future forone that one of the people who was there said that it was worth more to Zone than the medal itself um he couldn't find Space he couldn't accommodate one of reynolds's great um portraits a fulllength portrait uh but this Painting came from reynolds's niece's collection um and he acquired did from her estate in 1821 it's um one of his fancy pictures and it is uh certainly of a of a size that you could accommodate over a fireplace and indeed it had a specific focal point it was a specific focal point in the picture room in the 1820s and then laterally son moved it to the library dining room where it sat behind his seat in uh the library dining room facing uh his Portrait by the third President of the Royal Academy Sir Thomas Lawrence so sitting between the two of these he could commune with these figures in his uh past and present likewise uh the painting um he has a number of paintings by Bourgeois who was uh a mediocre painter at best and this is one that's in the picture room recess in a rather prominent position it's a painting of kemell in a scene from Cory elanus and again son was loved acting loved the theater he was uh he collected memorabilia of Garrick he was a Founder member of the Garrick club and buir was important to him because when bis died in 1811 he uh left his collection of paintings to dich P dich College on the condition one the stipulations was that son be the architect of the Galleries and uh which turned out to be the case Bourgeois was also part of a a clack that supported son in his efforts to unseat George Dan as the professor of architecture and then when s uh was in dispute with the Royal Academy itself and was threatened with expulsion rallied round and supported him uh bis and beachi in particular um there are very few paintings by Foreign artist in the collection uh which is unusual at the time when there were certainly collections of Dutch Masters um French paintings and the like one exception is this painting by vatto uh the marriage contract or La du Village uh which he acquired in 1802 too um from auction I suspect that this may have been a painting that had been sold by Bourgeois um to uh accommodate himself I suppose in the years when he was stuck with this collection of paintings which he and his colleague no desant had put together for the um king of Poland and then after the partition of Poland were it was on their hands uh in any case it's an unusual uh work for for son and I suspect that uh he bought it on the recommendation of bis uh in he bought it in 1802 and he paid 40 guine for it which was a considerable sum of money but it was more than he paid for uh 40 vases uh Greek vases that he acquired from the state the estate of James clar the same year 1802 um I think there was a great deal of Acquisitions in that year because that was the year that he became a full ra and again this was a way in which he could um set the seal on his arrival in the great world another um aspect of the the song which is quite U puzzling is the fact that there are two areas which are devoted to uh one is devoted to Shakespeare it's called the Shakespeare recess and the other on the uh floor above is the tiv recess they're really Pockets off the staircase um leading up through the center of number 13 and he could achieve these because the boundary line between number 12 and number 13 wasn't uh a straight right angle it was um an obtuse angle because the boundary between 12 and 13 reflected uh one of the medieval boundaries in the pieces of land that constituted Lincoln in fields uh in the Middle Ages so son could take advantage of the fact that the plan of of number 13 was shaped rather like a funnel to create these areas which were initially used for storage you can see that behind the Shakespeare recess it was a China cupboard which he used as a China cupboard uh the tiv recess was um almost from the beginning given over to uh celebration um soon was very much taken with the idea of of Great British worthies he'd worked at Stow at the beginning of the uh 1800s um designing the gothic library and he would have known the Temple of British worthies there and the idea obviously struck struck with him because he um as I said created this um Temple this alter piece almost to Shakespeare which included a uh plaster cast of the bust in uh the Tomb in U Stratford um and uh two paintings relating to Shakespeare the drawing on the left shows an earlier creation which uh has a large painting by William Hamilton another um not particularly distinguished Royal academ of the arrival of Richard II at Milford Haven uh and then above a scene of Leah and Cordelia on the uh beach at the end of uh King Leah um it was later replaced by another painting uh which we see today which was Shake exper inspired by the muses more interesting um is the way in which this is linked with uh the original display of the tiv recess called The tily Recess because the freeze on the wall which we'll see better in a photograph in a a few minutes is taken from the Temple of Vesta ATIV but originally in 1830 this was a shrine to se himself you'll see on the lower left on a monop Podium um chantry's bust of sewn above the cupboard in the back is Son's first teacher and Mentor George dance and then surrounding the bust of son are works that s uh executed while he was at the Royal Academy which won him the silver and the gold medal it um was um in 1833 this was rethought because in 1833 soon secured the survival of the museum with the act of Parliament that turned it into uh a museum but and so at that point the bust his bust of of himself was moved down to the Dome area uh and the bust of dance was moved elsewhere and it was turned into um a display of British sculpture which I'll come on to in a moment but I just wanted to show you briefly this painting by Henry Howard uh one of two that se um commissioned uh from Howard this was before the Shakespeare recess was created and then after the Shakespeare recess was created he created a a a painting of Shakespeare Seated on a rock surrounded by the uh Muses um the interesting thing about this is I mean who is Henry Howard Henry Howard was the Secretary of the Royal Academy he occupied an important position and also he was a goet between SE and the academy in the years in which son refused to give his lectures on architecture and was almost um excommunicated as it were by the academy and then in the 1830s when son's eyesight was it was Howard who read his lectures on architecture and also Howard facilitated the arrival of some of the pieces of sculpture in the collection he's been called uh flaxman in color and that is perhaps uh a good way to describe him and certainly son repeatedly employed his um Services um most notably in the paintings in the ceiling of the library dining room the classic inspired uh paintings the tiv recess as I said once the museum was turned into a um a national museum became a repository of what would be described as contemporary British sculpture you can see on the left a Banks's um one of Banks's reliefs no two of banks' reliefs I'm sorry and then in The Recess at the end um below the freeze of the Temple of vest atively uh plasticast of flaxman um Shield of Achilles um chantry's sleeping child and then Cupid and psyche Again by um flaxman um I think when people realized that son was creating a museum that was not going to be dispersed uh they became interested in giving works of art and this was one of the few places uh in the early 19th century where you could see um examples of British sculpture so um John flaxman sister-in-law uh gave him a large number of reliefs by flaxman which helps to explain the fact that there are so many there today um these came from his studio and she was very res in trying to um find a good home for all of these pieces a number of them went to University College London but you can see that uh one thing you the chapel like nature of this area and because it was off the house it could be top lit uh on this floor so it it it gives it a wonderful atmosphere and it would have been enhanced originally or was enhanced by a copy of the Stained Glass by Reynolds of Charity from the chapel of new College Oxford which calls quite a stir when it was unveiled in the late 18th century I mentioned vases and finally I want to uh touch on the display of vases particularly in the dining room end of the library dining room um if you've been to the museum you will know that um there's a suite of vases Chinese 18th century Chinese vases Italian Stone vases and then in the center a great volut crer um from Southern Italy um which belonged to the baron cardor and was acquired by S from uh the cardor sale of, 18800 for 68 pounds it was a considerable amount of money um but these kind of vases were very fashionable in the day you see them often in paintings from the late 18th century onwards um they largely came were found in southern Italy so they were often called A truscan and S continued to call the atrasan right to the end of his life even though there was ample evidence that they were Greek in origin for the most part um but what is interesting here is the again this idea that there is a kind of connection between these vases from Asia through um the Mediterranean Basin and in addition to this either side of this Suite of vases above the Chinese vases sewn placed these pieces of Ash which had been struck by lightning and it formed a kind of sinuous design that I think he's suggesting is comparable or maybe an inspiration for the first ceramists who created Pottery so in other words it's a reference to the idea that art imitates nature and there are only two vases of any particular importance in the in the collection um one was the cardoval which we saw in the last slide and here is the englefield barrel Amper which for which he paid um over 20 pounds in uh the sale of uh the englefield collection in 1823 and significantly he put placed it Under The Canopy that divides the library from the dining room in uh his house in Lincoln and field and it's facing the model of the Tomb that he created for his wife um in 1816 and as I mentioned earlier the death of Eliza s was a great trauma for him and um he fetishized her memory throughout the house there various illustrations of the Tomb throughout the ground floor so he was never out of eyesight of it and putting the englefield AER opposite it I think was can be explained because in the catalog by James Christie the younger who is something of an amateur uh classicist and archaeologist Christie described this scene that we're looking at as a woman seated in a tomb and on the back which you can't see in this image but is visible from a mirror that's own place behind it there is uh a young man running and Christie imagined that it was something like a V variation on eriche and orus that the young man was running to liberate the woman from the tomb so the juxtoposition of these two I think was had resonance for to se which um was that uh you had a a figure in a tomb and then uh the tomb of his wife opposite it and it's a kind of poignancy of uh of loss and longing that um one feels throughout throughout the house and in fact there is a letter by James Christie the younger ton in 1825 he he kept in with s because son was a good customer particularly for books uh but also for he had purchased vases and other um classical Antiquities and in this letter he says that there had been some a ship coming from the Mediterranean with vases and he he remarks quite tellingly that they're not particularly um significant but they're quite showy and he illustrates uh two of them with with these drawings but um son didn't really um respond to this so finally by way of conclusion I I just if you don't know the motivation for son's going to Parliament in 1833 it was largely down to his younger son George whom we see here in a bust by Thomas Banks who was a friend of of sons was made in 1804 and and Son kept it on display as he did with um many images of his wife and children um even though his memories were um tarnished by the fact that his Elder son John um who became an architect never amounted to much and died early um and George um was The Thorn In the Flesh he wanted to be a man of the theater but uh he wasn't um ever able to support himself entirely so he was constantly going back to his father for money uh and there are series of letters between the two uh George weedling and sometimes threatening suicide and things like that um son discovered In 1832 that George was living in a menaj ATA with his wife and his sister-in-law and had had a child child by the sister-in-law and I I think this was probably the final straw that led him to go to Parliament in 1833 and have a bill passed to allow the creation of the museum which was the first time that a national museum had been U put established in in such a manner the British Museum and the National Gallery had evolved uh over the years um and there was a debate about whether this was a sensible idea much along the line of the debates over the British museum in the 1750s who is the public what is this intended for and S um stuck to his guns even though um one MP said that it was unnatural to cut off your children and also insinuated that the money that was being used as an endowment for this Museum was in fact his wife's um dowy and therefore by rights belonged to to his surviving son but so knew that if George inherited um he would dissipate the fortune so um Sone prevailed the museum opened and I began by quoting the negative opinions of three German um Scholars and I just wanted to close by making uh quoting uh jacqu ignas hitov who was a Franco German architect of the 19th century who had visited the SE house and also seen the bank of England and wrote an appreciation of SE which appeared in a French publication in 1836 um and it was written in response to having seen a copy of the French edition of son's privately published description of his house and museum in 1835 that son had sent to the Society of soci De b um it the article contained a brief biography and appreciation of s's commissions especially the bank of England with its as hit off said calculated effects of light and perspective included concluded with remarks on son's house for its ingenious sequence of spaces magical treatment of light colored glass and mirrors as well as its enormous quantity of riches Hof concluded by noting that the son Museum not only contains all that could serve for the education of an architect but everything that could render it attractive such an ensemble would be very precious but it has an inestimable value in England where the elements necessary for the instruction of architecture are comparatively lacking in the only public institution the Royal Academy and this is an important point because uh painting always took pride of place in the academy since it offered more lucrative careers for budding Architects than did sculpture or architecture and tone was aware of this uh defect and therefore his threats at times to form his own um Academy were taken seriously by the uh academicians and it never happened but down to the late 19th century the son Museum was the only place where an architect a budding architect could find material that would enrich his knowledge of the architectural tradition so by conclusion I would say that if you want to learn more buy this book thank you very much