Sir John Soane's Museum: The House Its Owner Froze by Law

No other great house in London was assembled quite like this one. Sir John Soane did not inherit 13 Lincoln's Inn Fields, and he did not build it in a single campaign. He bought the house at No. 12 in 1792, demolished it and rebuilt it as his home and office. In 1807 he bought No. 13 next door and moved in, building his museum and drawing office at the rear first and then, in 1812, rebuilding the front behind a projecting facade of Portland stone. In late 1823 he acquired No. 14 as well, rebuilt it in 1824 and 1825, and pushed a new Picture Room out behind it. Three terraced houses became one instrument, tuned over thirty-three years to hold a collection that would not stop growing.

Soane built himself a house, then a museum, then a law, and the law is the most durable of the three.

Soane, who lived from 1753 to 1837, was the fourth son of a bricklayer who rose to become Professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy and architect to the Bank of England for 45 years. Collecting was the other career. By the time of his death the house held thousands of objects, Egyptian antiquities and Roman sculpture among them, together with casts, architectural fragments and models, a fine library and more than 30,000 architectural drawings. The rooms were arranged as arguments about architecture itself, and the arrangement was the point. Nothing in the house is merely stored. Everything is placed.

Light, let down from above

Soane's signature device is top light, the trick he had refined in the banking halls of the Bank of England, and the rear of No. 13 is a miniature demonstration of it. At its heart sits the Dome Area, a top lit space layered with casts, urns, busts and fragments, where a marble bust of Soane by Francis Chantrey presides. From the Dome the eye drops through an opening to the Sepulchral Chamber in the basement below, so that the house reads vertically as well as room by room. Nearby, the Breakfast Room gathers its daylight into a shallow saucer dome and multiplies it with mirrors, more than a hundred of them by the museum's count.

The Picture Room solves the opposite problem: too many pictures, too little wall. Built in 1824 and 1825 as an extension to No. 13, it holds over 100 works, including paintings by Hogarth, Canaletto and Turner, in a space far too small for them by ordinary hanging. Soane fitted the walls with large moveable planes, hinged like the doors of a great cupboard, so that one wall does the work of three. The planes are still swung open for visitors today, at published times, each reveal doubling the room again.

The sarcophagus in the basement

The centrepiece of the whole house is not English at all. In the Sepulchral Chamber rests the alabaster sarcophagus of the pharaoh Seti I, discovered by Giovanni Belzoni in the king's tomb in the Valley of the Kings in October 1817 and carved inside and out with the text of the Book of Gates. The museum records what happened next with unusual directness. When the Trustees of the British Museum decided in 1824 that it was too expensive for them, Soane paid 2,000 pounds for it, had part of the back wall of the house taken down to admit it, and set it in the basement beneath his Dome, where it remains. The stone is translucent, and in 1825 he held three parties to show it lit by lamplight from within, the carved figures glowing through the alabaster.

A collector who buys a sarcophagus through his own back wall is not planning to let posterity rearrange the furniture. In 1833 Soane negotiated a private Act of Parliament, dated 20 April 1833, which settled the house and collection on trustees for the benefit of the public, to take effect on his death. The Act funded the museum with an endowment of 30,000 pounds in government stock together with the rents of No. 12, required free admission, and instructed that the arrangement Soane left be preserved, altered only in cases of absolute necessity. Later orders, most substantially in 1969, have updated the machinery of the trust, but the founding instruction still sits underneath them.

Frozen, and therefore alive

Soane died in January 1837 and the Act took effect. The museum, listed at Grade I since 1951, now occupies Nos. 12, 13 and 14 and draws more than 100,000 visitors a year through the original front door of No. 13. Entry remains free, as the settlement requires. The museum calls itself the smallest of the national museums, and the description feels less like modesty than like accuracy, because the interiors are narrow, the capacity tightly limited, and the density unlike anything else in London.

Most house museums are reconstructions of an intention. This one is the intention itself, protected by statute and kept by its own terms. Soane built himself a house, then a museum, then a law, and the law is the most durable of the three. Walk the Dome Area at midday with the light falling past the casts to a three thousand year old sarcophagus, and the freezing does not feel like death. It feels like the longest held breath in British architecture.