Architecture · Classical & Renaissance
1753–1837 · English
Neoclassicism; the Picturesque
Sir John Soane, a bricklayer's son who became Architect and Surveyor to the Bank of England for forty-five years, stripped classical architecture down to lines, shallow domes and top light. His interiors are lit from above through concealed lanterns and coloured glass, their surfaces incised with grooves rather than mouldings. He left his own house in Lincoln's Inn Fields, crammed with antiquities, paintings and the sarcophagus of Seti I, to the nation as a museum on condition that nothing be moved.
Three linked houses in a London square, left to the nation on condition that nothing inside be moved, and holding an alabaster sarcophagus in the basement (1792–1824)
13 Lincoln's Inn Fields, London
His own house, kept under the Act of 1833; it holds Seti I's sarcophagus and Hogarth's A Rake's Progress.
A great windowless screen wall round a City institution, whose top-lit domed halls behind it were demolished in the 1920s (1788–1833)
Threadneedle Street, London
His work as Surveyor to the Bank; the destruction of his interiors has been called the greatest architectural crime in the City of London.
England's first purpose-built public picture gallery, lit from above, with the founders' mausoleum in the middle of it (1811–1817)
Dulwich, London
Dulwich Picture Gallery, built to house the Bourgeois bequest, with a lantern-lit mausoleum for Desenfans and Bourgeois.
A west London villa the architect rebuilt as his own country house and as an advertisement, complete with sham Roman ruins in the garden (1800–1804)
Ealing, London
Pitzhanger Manor, bought and rebuilt so his sons might inherit an architectural dynasty; they did not.
A Buckinghamshire house and its gate whose plain incised stonework strips classical ornament almost to nothing (1792–1800)
Buckinghamshire, England
Tyringham Hall for William Praed; the gateway is the purest statement of his stripped manner.
A London church of 1823–25 in Walworth, its shallow vaults and top light carrying his manner into a parish church (1823–1825)
Southwark, London
St Peter's, Walworth — one of his three 'Commissioners' churches built under the Church Building Act of 1818.