Sir John Soane – His Home And His Gallery – by the director of the Soane Museum

Tim Knox, director of the Sir John Soane

I am Tim Knox, Director of Sir John Soane’s Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, one of the strangest and most idiosyncratic of all London’s museums.

The Soane Museum is the house of the great Regency architect, Sir John Soane (1753-1837), architect of the Bank of England, a score of country houses – and the Dulwich Picture Gallery.

The son of a humble bricklayer, Soane rose to the height of his profession as architect, and built – assisted by a fortune inherited from his wife’s uncle – a very splendid townhouse for himself in the heart of fashionable London. Here he arranged his collections of books and drawings, ancient marbles, paintings, and plaster casts, partly as a showplace, and partly as an educational resource for his students at the Royal Academy, where he was Professor of Architecture. As well as amazing architectural drawings and books, his treasures include no less than 12 paintings by William Hogarth (including the famous Rake’s Progress) and the 3000 year old sarcophagus of an Egyptian king.

Dome area of the Soane Museum

Soane’s eccentric, piled up arrangements and cunning use of light, darkness and mirrors, made his house famous even in his own lifetime.

Soane quarrelled with his two sons, and in 1833 made arrangements that after his death his house was to become a Museum. He left three strict wishes which are still faithfully respected to this day – his Museum had to be free, it had to be kept exactly as he had it, and it had to be an ‘Academy of Architecture’.

I have been curator of this unique and much-loved Museum for just over three years, before that I was Head Curator of the National Trust.

I’ve always loved Dulwich Picture Gallery, where you can enjoy the unique experience of seeing a first rate collection of old master pictures in a perfect, gem-like, little art gallery specially designed for it by one of our greatest architects – Sir John Soane.

Dulwich Picture Gallery, with its combination of picture gallery and mausoleum for its founders, was a perfect commission for Sir John Soane – combining his interest in top lighting and the display of works of art with a fascination for death and with funerary structures.

My talks on Thursday evening at the Dulwich Picture Gallery – ‘The Proximity of Art and Death: Dulwich Picture Gallery and its Mausoleum’ – will explain some of Soane’s ideas and influences in his masterpiece in Dulwich.

The top photograph shows me outside the Cathedral at Raphoe, Co Londonderry, next to an inscription put up by my ancestor Andrew Knox – a rather dreadful person who was made Bishop of Raphoe by James I in 1611 and rebuilt the Cathedral there.

Tim Knox is giving talks at the Late opening at Dulwich Picture Gallery this Thursday 18th September at 7pm, 8pm, and 9pm.