The Proximity of Art and Death: Dulwich Picture Gallery and its Mausoleum

The Director of Sir John Soane’s Museum Tim Knox, describes Soane’s fascination with funerary architecture and its place at Dulwich Picture Gallery.

Exterior of the Mausoleum (photo Martin Charles)

The lugubrious collections assembled by Sir John Soane in his house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields demonstrate his fascination with the funerary architecture of antiquity. The Egyptian sarcophagus and the displays of altars and cinerary urns attest to his enthusiasm for dramatic funeral scenography. Soane’s obsession with the architecture of death can be traced throughout his career – especially in the crypt-like apartments of the Bank of England – but it is most forcefully expressed in the singular ensemble of picture gallery, almshouse and mausoleum he built at Dulwich from 1811-14.

In 1811 Dulwich was bequeathed a magnificent collection of old master paintings by Sir Francis Bourgeois, a wealthy painter, art collector and friend of Soane. The collection had been assembled by the marchand-amateur Noel Desenfans for Stanislas Augustus, King of Poland, who abdicated in 1795, leaving his agent with the pictures on his hands. Desenfans had left the collection to Bourgeois with instructions that he should bestow the pictures upon an institution which would preserve and exhibit them to the public.

Bourgeois left £2,000 to fit up a gallery in the existing buildings of the college and for the erection of a small mausoleum adjacent to the chapel. He hoped that Soane might be employed to carry out the work. But Soane recommended an entirely new building and persuaded Desenfans’ widow to contribute an additional £6,000 towards the cost of a gallery for the pictures and a receptacle for the bodies of Bourgeois and Desenfans.

Of the disparate functions Soane was asked to accommodate in the new building, he undoubtedly found the mausoleum the most interesting. As Sir John Summerson observed,

‘Since the dead do not require air, light and warmth, but only shelter and veneration, the mausoleum is a theme round which the imagination can freely play.’

The picture galleries are a simple arrangement of interconnecting rooms separated by bold arches, top-lit by means of glazed lanterns let into the roof, adopted by Soane as a cheap and practical setting for the pictures.

Serpents of Eternity

More imposing was the mausoleum: the ornamental character of its architecture underlined the solemn and sacred nature of its employment. It was the focus of the west elevation and was the College’s ‘show’ front. Soane believed that ‘magnificent buildings in honour of the dead inspire the soul’, and made a road before the mausoleum in imitation of the ancient ‘practice of placing tombs and sepulchral buildings on the sides of our public roads’.

The exterior of the mausoleum takes the form of an antique Roman patrician tomb. The ornamentation is idiosyncratic – the three solid ‘doors’ with tapering jambs which project from the niches may be ‘spirit doors’ and inspired by Egyptian funerary architecture. The sarcophagi which surmount the cornice declare the purpose of the mausoleum and correspond to those inside: in early designs they were inscribed with the names of the donors. The square lantern bears a roof in the form of a capstone of a Roman altar laden with canopic urns.

Interior of the mausoleum (photo Luxmoore)

The stained glass panels of the lantern cast an amber light upon four severe sarcophagi which repose on the shelves below – each painted to resemble imperial porphyry as are the massive Doric columns which describe the sunken, circular chapel beyond. Christian symbols are absent from this burial chamber, although serpents of eternity occupy the spandrels of the tomb recesses and victories decorate the vault.

Soane particularly appreciated the contrast between the light-filled picture galleries and the gloom of the mausoleum, which opened directly off them. On one occasion he found the connecting door shut and vigorously remonstrated with the college authorities, complaining that by closing the mausoleum, they were ‘destroying its relationship to the whole’.

On her death Mrs. Desenfans bequeathed her best furniture to the Gallery as well as a service of plate to be used for an annual dinner, given on St. Luke’s day to Royal Academicians. These festivities, served by footmen wearing the Desenfans livery, were magnificent occasions. Soane himself, imagining one such banquet in the Picture Gallery, mused upon the startling proximity of death and art in his singular creation:
‘How gratifying to the reflective mind must such a repast be, surrounded by some of the richest treasures of the pencil! To increase the enjoyment of this splendid scene we have only to fancy the Gallery brilliantly lighted for the exhibition of this unrivalled assemblage of pictorial art – whilst a dull religious light shows the Mausoleum in the full pride of funereal grandeur, displaying its sarcophagi, enriched with the mortal remains of departed worth, and calling back so powerfully the recollections of past times, that we almost believe that we are conversing with our departed friends who now sleep in their silent tombs.’

More by Tim Knox - ‘Sir John Soane, his home and his Gallery’