Exhibitions 1
Soane and Death (Dulwich Picture Gallery, till 12 May)
For ever after
Ruth Guilding
St Pancras' Fields is an evocative spot, shut between the cliff-like walls of a Victo- rian hospital and the railway line. Redesigned as a public garden in the late 19th century, the former boneyard of St Giles-in-the-Fields also acquired wrought iron gates in the style of Jean Tijou, a coro- ner's office, flower beds and a gothic war memorial. The young Thomas Hardy was responsible for clearing most of the head- stones to the sides of the ground, and the tiny pre-Conquest church was comprehen- sively rebuilt in a neo-Norman style.
In the 1820s, the churchyard lay on the outskirts of London's northernmost devel- opment; last year housing estates nearby were the scene of race-riots. Of the handful of mausoleums which survive intact there, two are sites of pilgrimage. Around the base of one, masses of snowdrops, planted by the faithful, are pushing through the soil, but the vault steps of the other lie hid- den beneath dead leaves, ornamented by a discarded shoe. These are the last resting places of Mary Wollstonecraft and Sir John Soane.
Today Soane is most famous for his high- ly individual house-museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields, open to the public without charge for five days in every week. This was his temporary domicile to which he devot- ed an obsessive, detailed attention, but the domes aeterna was the theme running through professional and private practice. The family mausoleum which Soane designed was only one of numerous draw- ings, models and installations for funeral monuments, in which Christian symbolism was never deployed, made in the course of his life. A new exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery brings this aspect of Soane's work into sharp focus for the first time.
First, there are Soane's designs for funer- al monuments. Thanks to the Soane Monu- ments Trust, established in 1987, those which survive have begun to be protected and restored. They range from the chaste neo-classical tomb chest in St Mary Abbots, Kensington, for Miss Elizabeth Johnston, the daughter of a London trades- man bigamously married to the Earl of Bel- lamont, to the monument to Samuel Bosanquet at St Mary's Church in Leyton, one of Soane's most handsome and ambi- tious projects, reduced to nothing more than a low stone stump in the 1950s when it was demolished by Mr Hurry, the local undertaker. A catalogue photograph shows Hurry Jnr, heir to the family business, seat- ed on the remains.
Soane made 43 drawings and plans for his family mausoleum, designed in 1816, a few months after the death of his beloved wife. The final design for a marble aedicule beneath a domed canopy, with a low balustrade enclosing steps to the vault beneath, drew inspiration from the house- tombs of the ancients. Of the two sons on whom Soane had pinned dynastic ambi- tions, one predeceased him and was interred there in 1823. The architect him- self followed in 1837, but his younger son Design for Soane Family Tomb' by Sir John Soane George was excluded, by reason of the furi- ous attacks which he had made on his father in a popular newspaper, and which Soane blamed for the premature death of his wife. Soane hung the framed newspaper cuttings in his dressing-room, and his care- fully lettered and gilt label — 'Death Blows given by George Soane' — is among the many watercolours, models and works from his hand exhibited at Dulwich.
Second, there was Soane's house-muse- um at Lincoln's Inn Fields, where his mania produced progressive modifications such as the huge sarcophagus of Pharaoh Seti I, excavated from the Valley of the Kings and acquired by Soane in 1824, which was lowered into the house's 'crypt' and exhibited by lamplight at evening receptions.
Four essays in the well-illustrated exhibi- tion catalogue give many new insights. Clare Gittings examines Soane's psycholog- ical responses to his own bereavement; Roger Bowdler offers a survey of some of the superlative neoclassical tombs designed by Soane's neglected contemporaries, the last wave of romantic classicism before the Gothic Revival; and David Watkin explores the theoretical context to Soane's inspira- tion and originality. Soane's realisation of the key role which funerary monuments had played in the public life of the ancient world was crucial to the heroic designs of his national monuments, among them the unrealised 'Sepulchral church' commemo- rating the Duke of York.
Finally, and most significantly, this exhi- bition considers the circumstances sur- rounding the foundation and design of the Dulwich Picture Gallery itself. The superla- tive collection of paintings at Dulwich was originally assembled for sale to the King of Poland by the art-dealer Noel Desenfans and the painter Sir Francis Bourgeois, but was instead left to Dulwich College in 1811 as the basis for what was intended to be the first National Gallery. Bourgeois's execu- tors were instructed that his remains, and those of Mr and Mrs Desenfans, must be deposited in the chapel at Dulwich in 'a Tomb or Sarcophagus'.
The donors hoped to achieve immortality after death, and in this Soane was their greatest ally. The founders' mausoleum, a dimly-lit circular ante-chamber chamber from which the living contemplate the dead in a top-lit tomb-chamber beyond, enclosed in sarcophagi of faux-porphry, was designed to be an integral, central experi- ence of visits to the gallery.
A concluding catalogue essay by the gallery's director, Giles Waterfield, exam- ines Soane's determinist approach to this commission in the face of opposition from College authorities. Thanks to Waterfield, the future of the Dulwich Picture Gallery has recently been secured. With this, his last exhibition as director, he leaves the gallery with a reputation for scholarly excellence which places it among the fore- most of the capital's museums.
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