Exhibitions

IN PURSUIT OF ANTIQUITY
Drawings by the Giants of British Neo-Classicism

An exhibition in the Soane Gallery from 1 February 2008 to 1 June 2008

An exhibition of drawings from the collection of Sir John Soane's Museum, curated by Jeremy Musson.

We can never underestimate the profound influence of the idea of the greatness of Classical Antiquity on British architects of the late 18th century. The perceived significance of the Ancient World was by then rooted in first-hand observation of the great surviving monuments of Ancient Rome, which architects, artists and patrons had seen on their Grand Tour of Italy.

By the later 18th century, these monuments, were, in their turn, better known and their very structure better understood, as a result of new measured surveys and archaeological excavation. This new knowledge was charged with a degree of excitement in the sense of scale and drama of architecture of the Ancient World (Roman and Greek) on the one hand, and in the potential for these remains to be the basis for formal, rational design on the other. These twin threads are the hallmarks of what has come to be called neo-Classical architecture - which dominated design in the later 18th and early 19th century.

This neo-Classical vision of the architecture was also fired by the key figures whom the young British architects encountered in Rome, such as the Italian artist and architect Giovanni-Battista Piranesi and the French architect and artist Charles-Louis Clérisseau. Drawings by these two form one section of this exhibition, while another explores the impact of Rome on British architects on the Grand Tour, with on-site sketches and survey drawings; another illustrates the different types of architectural drawing in this period.

Most of the sections of this exhibition are devoted to select architectural drawings of designs by Sir John Soane, Robert Adam, Sir William Chambers, James Wyatt and George Dance the Younger: they are the giants of British neo-Classicism. For them, Ancient Rome represented an ideal of monumental architecture as it could be realised in their own time. This attitude represented an alternative to the restrained Palladian version of Classical architecture, espoused by Lord Burlington from the 1720s, and drawn from the treatise and villas of the 16th-century Venetian architect, Andrea Palladio.

All these architects travelled to Rome and visited, drew, surveyed and studied certain key monuments and buildings - such as the Pantheon, the Colosseum, the temples and the triumphal arches of the Forum. They then returned to England determined to build to rival the glory that was Ancient Rome. As Robert Adam wrote home in 1755: 'In short I am antique Mad, or what they would Call in Scotland an Antick ... P'haps to be capable to invent a great thing ... that's my ambition.'

Sir John Soane himself is one of the key figures of this period, and his extraordinary disciplined architecture and brilliant sense of mood and light in an interior were defined by his idealisation of the Classical past which he had studied while travelling on the King's Gold Medal scholarship in 1778-80. He was following a well-known path but his later career demonstrated the profound originality that would arise from his individualistic pursuit of Antiquity as a model.

This exhibition is deliberately drawn solely from the Soane Museum's own collection of architectural drawings. This was assembled by Soane for a number of reasons: for pleasure, for his own professional reference as an architect and as sources for his lectures as Professor of Architecture to the Royal Academy given from 1809.

As Professor David Watkin observes in his introduction tohn Soane: The Royal Academy Lectures (2000), it was Soane's aim 'not only to describe and illustrate the masterpieces of antiquity and of subsequent periods but to point out what he believed were the universal principles on which they were based'. His collection of drawings was also a symbol of status, as it is in the tradition of great architects of the revived Classical tradition in Britain, collecting the works of others for reference. This tradition stretches back to Inigo Jones in the early 17th century, and Lord Burlington in the early 18th century and Soane had first encountered this tradition when he was a pupil of George Dance the Younger. In his Description of the House and Museum (1835) Soane himself wrote of his desire to illustrate: 'the union and close connexion between Painting, Sculpture and Architecture ... intended to benefit the Artists of future generations'. The architectural drawings stood at the heart of his project to create a museum, alongside architectural models and casts of architectural fragments and antique sculpture. Soane had begun to collect measured drawings of buildings which interested him during his years in Italy in 1778-80, and added his own drawings of Antique buildings done on site and etchings given to him by Piranesi.

From 1790, his wife's legacy from her uncle and guardian, the wealthy London builder, George Wyatt, allowed him to start to collect independently. In 1795, he acquired drawings by the Scottish architect James Playfair, and in 1797 he bought works by Clérisseau and Piranesi. From 1798, he began to employ Joseph Michael Gandy as a paid draughtsman to prepare his own designs for exhibition at the Royal Academy, to help secure commissions and for display in his own homes as works of art.

In 1811 he bought nearly 800 drawings by Sir William Chambers and in 1818 he added his first tranche of drawings from the office of Robert Adam, including drawings by Lallemand, Clérisseau, Pecheux, Piranesi, as well drawings by Sandby, William Kent and Adam himself. He also had drawings by Thorpe, Wren, the Talmans and Inigo Jones.

In 1833, after he had negotiated a private Act of Parliament: 'for settling and preserving the Museum for the Benefit of the Public', he purchased 54 volumes of designs and drawings, 9,000 in all, from Robert Adam's heirs. In 1836, he added the drawings from George Dance the Younger's office. Thus there was a sense of personal piety in the architects he collected, for he had been a pupil of George Dance the Younger, and he had known personally, admired and been helped by William Chambers and Robert Adam in the early stages of his career.

The extent and range of the some 30,000 architectural drawings which Soane brought together in his lifetime, is breathtaking, as is illustrated by the selection here. This is what makes this collection one of the two pre-eminent national collections of architectural drawings, alongside that of the Royal Institute of British Architects, now held at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

These drawings also reflect the priorities of the architects we associate with the neo-Classical style - the bold, monumental Classical architecture of the later 18th and early 19th century. They show how the experience and inspiration of the Antique world, and certain key monuments, informed their designs. Objects of visual beauty and interest in their own right, they also give us direct insight into the intellectual and visual sources of some most original and renowned British architects.

The drawings selected cover the finest detail of interior design, and beyond to the whole range of domestic commissions for both town and country houses, to freestanding mausolea and park buildings, and into the field of public buildings - from churches to theatres. They also show us the central place that skilled draughtsmanship has in the evolution and communication of a design - something from which our own age might learn. The neo-Classical era is undoubtedly one of the most heroic chapters in the story of British architecture and the vivid inheritance of this period is still all around us, in our towns and cities and our country houses. The drawings in this exhibition help us to understand how they came to be as they are.

This exhibition is kindly supported by Apax Partners .

Admission will be free. For more information and images contact
Dr. Jerzy J. Kierkuc-Bielinski, Exhibitions Curator,
Sir John Soane's Museum, 13 Lincoln's Inn Fields,
London WC2A 3BP. Tel: 020 7440 4246. Email: Dr. Jerzy J. Kierkuc-Bielinski