Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 April 2016
In 1811 the authorities at Dulwich College commissioned from Sir John Soane an extraordinary combination of a burial chamber, almshouses, and art gallery; and Soane responded with one of his most inventive designs, a work with an architectonic presence much greater than its modest size and cost would imply (Figs 1 and 2). The building escapes conventional stylistic categories, its classicism having overtones of Gothic, ‘primitive’, and even Egyptian architecture.
1 Summerson, John, Architecture in Britain, 1530-1830 (Harmondsworth, 1953)Google Scholar, ‘Soane and the Picturesque’, pp. 298-99; Stroud, Dorothy, The Architecture of Sir John Soane (London, 1961), pp. 110–11 Google Scholar; Mellinghoff, G.-Tilman, ‘Soane’s Dulwich Picture Gallery Revisited’, John Soane (London, 1983), pp. 77–99 Google Scholar; Waterfield, Giles, Soane and After: the Architecture of Dulwich Picture Gallery (London, 1987)Google Scholar.
2 SirSoane, John, Lectures on Architecture, ed. Bolton, A. T. (London, 1929), p. 78 Google Scholar.
3 Marginal note in Soane notebook 15, labelled ‘MSS 1805 Architecture de Cordemoi, Architecture de J F Blondel’, p. 101, Sir John Soane’s Museum.
4 Soane, Lectures, p. 90.
5 Ibid., p. 82.
6 Knight, Richard Payne, An Analytical Inquiry of the Principles of Taste (London, 1805).Google Scholar Page references given below refer to the fourth and final edition of 1808. Soane owned a copy of the first edition.
7 Ballantyne, Andrew, ‘Genealogy of the Picturesque’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 32, no. 4 (October 1992), 320–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
8 Laugier, Marc-Antoine, Essai sur Varchitecture (Paris, 1753)Google Scholar translated with an introduction by Wolfgang and Anni Herrmann (Los Angeles, 1977). The most detailed study of Soane’s primitivism is to be found in Ruffinieredu Prey, Pierre de la, John Soane: the Making of an Architect (Chicago, 1982)Google Scholar, Chapter 12 ‘“In the Primitive Manner of Building”’, pp. 245-64, where the dairy projects (1781) for Lady Elizabeth Craven are described and illustrated on pp. 245-47.
9 Soane, Lectures, pp. 21, 70, 73.
10 Waterfield, Soane and After, p. 7, quoting a remark cited by Bolton, A. T., The Works of SirJohn Soane (London, c. 1920), p. 78.Google Scholar
11 Waterfield, Soane and After, p. 7.
12 Hussey, Christopher, The Picturesque: Studies in a Point of View (New York, 1927)Google Scholar; Watkin, David, The English Vision: the Picturesque in Architecture, Landscape and Garden Design (London, 1982)Google Scholar; Hippie, Walter, The Beautiful, and the Sublime, and the Picturesque in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetic Theory (Carbondale, 111., 1957)Google Scholar. Sir John Summerson called the phase to which Dulwich belongs the ‘picturesque period’ of Soane’s career; Summerson, John, ‘Soane: the Case-History of a Personal Style’, Journal of the Royal Institute ofBritish Architects, 3rd ser., 58, no. 3 (January 1951), 83–91 (p. 88).Google Scholar
13 Marginal note in Soane’s own copy of Knight’s Principles of Taste (1805) at Sir John Soane’s Museum, p. 157 (pages 160-61 of the 1808 edition). Commenting on Knight’s text ‘in the pictures of Claude and Gaspar, we perpetually see a mixture of Grecian and Gothic architecture employed with the happiest effect in the same building… ’, Soanenoted ‘In painting[, ] but such [illegible] are not to bebesought for similar practices as new works.’
14 As Summerson (Architecture in Britain, p. 298) pointed out.
15 Knight, Principles of Taste, pp. 234, 475-76.
16 Ibid., p. 382.
17 Ibid., p. 176.
18 Soane, Lectures, p. 90.
19 Watkin, David has even credited Vanbrugh with inventing the picturesque: Thomas Hope 1769-1831 and the Neo-Classical Idea (London, 1968), p. 125.Google Scholar
20 This at least was Knight’s theory. Price on the other hand believed that there were ‘atoms’ of picturesqueness in picturesque objects: Ballantyne, ‘Genealogy of the Picturesque’.
21 Knight, Principles of Taste, p. 176.
22 Soane, Lectures, p. 82.
23 Horace Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England, quoted by Lovejoy, Arthur O., ‘The First Gothic Revival and the Return to Nature’ in Essays in the History of Ideas (Baltimore, 1948), pp. 156–57.Google Scholar
24 Wedgwood, Alexandra, ‘Soane’s Law Courts at Westminster’, AA Files, 24 (Autumn 1992), 31–40.Google Scholar
25 Summerson, John, A New Description of Sir fohn Soane’s Museum (London, 1954, rev. 1986)Google Scholar façade, p. 13; the ‘Parloir of Padre Giovanni’, formed in 1824, p. 31.
26 Farington, Joseph, The Farington Diary, ed. Cave, Kathryn (New Haven, 1982), vol. IX, p. 3246 Google Scholar, Friday 25 March 1808. Soane and his wife had connived to install one Mrs Cooke as a housekeeper at the Royal Academy. They did not succeed, felt thwarted (Farington says that they were ‘disappointed’) and blamed Fuseli. When Fuseli sent round a print, to which Soane had previously subscribed, it was sent back with a cursory note saying that he, Soane, ‘had more Prints than guineas’.
27 Farington, Diary, vol. XI (1983), p. 3886, Friday 1 March 1811.
28 John Richards, Secretary R. A. to Professor Soane, 3 February 1810; in Bolton, A. T., The Portrait of Sir John Soane, R.A., (1753-1837) Set Forth in Letters from His Friends (1775-1837) (London, 1927), pp. 148–49 Google Scholar.
29 Knight, Principles of Taste, p. 166.
30 Ibid., pp. 163-64, 166.
31 Soane, Lectures, pp. 79 and 84.
32 Knight, Principles of Taste, p. 162.
33 Knight was a Member of Parliament and until 1808 lived in Whitehall when in London; his seat was at Downton in Herefordshire.
34 Rickman, Thomas, An Attempt to Discriminate the Styles of Architecture from the Conquest to the Reformation (London, 1817)Google Scholar.
35 Soane, Lectures, p. 79.
36 Knight, Principles of Taste, p. 162.
37 de Cordemoy, J. L., Nouveau traité de toute l’architecture ou l’art de batir, utile aux entrepreneurs et aux ouvriers (Paris, 1714), p. 241.Google Scholar In all transcriptions from the French below accentuation has been corrected to modern conventions, but spelling has been allowed to stand: ‘On donne, dit il, le nom d’édifice Gothique à tout ce qui n’a pas été bati selon les règles de l’Architecture Grèque et Romaine mais on distingue deux espèces d’Architecture Gothique, l’ancienne et la moderne.’ Soane’s translation is in notebook 15, labelled ‘MSS 1805 Architecture de Cordemoi, Architecture dej F Blondel’, pp. 99-100 (Sir John Soane’s Museum).
38 Knight, Principles of Taste, p. 166.
39 Quatremère de Quincy, A. C., De l’architecture égyptienne considérée dans son origine, ses principes et son goût, et comparée sous les mêmes rapports à l’architecture grecque… (Paris, 1803)Google Scholar; and see Lavin, Sylvia, Quatremère de Quincy and the Invention of a Modern Language of Architecture (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), pp. 18—61 Google Scholar.
40 Soane, Lectures, p. 20.
41 Bryant, Jacon, A New System, 3 vols (London, 1774-76)Google Scholar. Soane consulted the work and made some notes on 27 September 1807 (notebook 9, Sir John Soane’s Museum).
42 Bryant, New System, I: 75-6; III: 533.
43 Soane, Lectures, pp. 79-80.
44 Ibid., p. 80.
45 Lovejoy, ‘The First Gothic Revival’, pp. 153-54.
46 Stukeley, , Stonehenge: a Temple Restored to the British Druids (London, 1740), PrefaceGoogle Scholar.
47 Ibid., contents page.
48 Stukeley, , Palaeographia sacra: or, Discourses on Sacred Subjects (London, 1763), pp. 17–18.Google Scholar
49 Laugier, , Observations sur l’architecture (The Hague, 1765), pp. 116–17 Google Scholar: ‘Il pariot que ces grands berceaux formés par deux rangées d’arbres de haute futaye ont fourni le modèle de l’Architecture de nos Eglises gothiques; et à ne l’envisager que par cet endroit, elle est plus raisonnable et plus sensée que nos ordonnances à colonnes surmontées d’un entablement très-faillant. Tout y porte de fond, et de là le grand effet. Je ne sçai si dans l’intérieur de nos Eglises nous ne serions pas mieux d’imiter et de perfectionner cette Architecture Gothique, en réservant l’Architecture greque pour les dehors. J’imagine qu’une Eglise dont toutes les colonnes serioent de gros troncs de palmiers, qui étendroit leurs branches à droit et à gauche, et qui porterait les plus hautes sur tous les contours de la voûte, serioent un effet surprenant.’ ‘Berceau’ literally means cradle, or arbour. In an architectural context a ‘voûte berceau’ is a barrel-vault, not a cradle-vault or an arbour-vault, though the figuration is highly pertinent; hence the decision in the present context to translate ‘berceau’ as vault throughout.
50 Quatremère de Quincy, Architecture égyptienne, p. 110; Lavin, Quatremère de Quincy, p. 60.
51 Soane, Lectures, p. 79.
52 Ibid., p. 80.
53 Soane, lecture notes, portfolio 11, pp. 9-10 (Sir John Soane’s Museum).
54 Soane, Lectures, p. 81.
55 Ibid., p. 82: ‘And storied windows richly dight,/Casting a dim religious light.’ John Milton, IlPenseroso (1631) 11. 159-60.
56 Knight, Principles of Taste, p. 178.
57 Soane, Lectures, p. 80; following Cordemoy, p. 110: ‘… cette prodigieuse quantité de Colonnes, dont les bases sont assises immédiatement sur le pavé du rez-de-chaussée, est si bien arrangée, qu’elle laisse voir sans embarras, d’un coup d’oeil toute la grandeur et toute la beauté de ces Edifices.’ (‘… this prodigious quantity of columns, whose bases rest directly on the pavement of the ground floor, is so well arranged that unashamedly it lets one see at once the whole grandeur and the whole beauty of these edifices.’)
58 Brawn, Richard, Domestic Architecture (London, 1841), p. 289 Google Scholar.
59 Laugier, Observations, pp. 284-85: ‘Un grand berceau, taillé en mosaïque, a son mérite et sa beauté. C’est une forme qu’on ne doit pas rejetter quoi’quelle soit un peu pesante. Elle convient aux endroits dont le caractère est sérieux, sombre, un peu sauvage. Cette forme n’a sa parfaite beauté que lorsque le berceau est plein et sans lunette. Mais alors elle a l’inconvénient d’exclure le jour de la partie qui doit être la plus lumineuse puis qu’elle nous représente le Ciel. Les berceaux pleins et sans lunettes ont été d’usage dans les Temples antiques et dans les Eglises bâties avant le douzième siècle. Leur obscurité comparée avec le gaieté surprenante des Eglises qui ont bâties depuis, et où une Architecture plus légère a introduit vers la voûte, le plus grand jour et les plus beaux effets de lumière, nous rendra ces berceaux désagréables par-tout où les bienséances du sujet n’exigeroit pas une lumière sombre ou de vraies ténèbres. On pourroit cependant les égayer en perçant à la clef de la voûte une ouverture quarrée ou parallélogramme, suivant le plan de l’édifice, et en élevant sur cette ouverture une lanterne à jour, au plat-fond de laquelle on transporteroit la partie du berceau enlevée par cette ouverture.’
60 Laugier, Observations, pp. 130-31: ‘Considérons présentement ces mêmes Eglises avec tous les sots ornements que le goût du 14e et du 15e siècle leur a prodigués. Un affreuxjubé se présente quijette sur ces beautés inimitables, le voile le plus déplaisant. Entrons dans le choeur à travers cette horrible barricade. Des stales informes avec de hauts dossiers masquent la vue des collatéraux.’ (‘Now we consider these same churches with all the silly ornaments that fourteenth- and fifteenth-century taste lavished on them. Here a frightful rood screen throws the most unpleasant veil over the building’s inimitable beauties. We pass into the choir through this horrible barricade. Shapeless stalls with high backs mask the view of the aisles.’) Compare Knight, Principles of Taste, p. 162: ‘At this time, when the taste for Gothic architecture has been so generally revived, nothing is more common, than to hear professors, as well as lovers, of the art, expatiating upon the merits of the pure Gothic; and gravely endeavouring to separate it from those spurious and adscitious ornaments, by which it has lately been debased: but, nevertheless, if we ask what they mean by pure Gothic, we can receive no satisfactory answer …’, and p. 180: ‘In the Gothic churches, too, a profusion of elaborate ornament, how licentiously soever designed or disposed, seldom failed to produce a similar effect [to that of the magnificent structures of the Roman emperors]: but the modern fashion of making buildings neither rich nor massive, and producing lightness of appearance by the deficiency rather than the disposition of the the parts, is of all tricks of taste the most absurd, and the most certain of counteracting its own ends.’
61 Bryant, New System, I: 218.
62 Knight, Principles of Taste, pp. 177-78.
63 Summerson, Architecture in Britain, p. 299.
64 Colin Davies, Architects’Journal, 181, no. 17 (24 April 1985), pp. 50 and 59-62, argues that the fake doors were introduced in order to balance the real doors of a porch which was not built on the other side of the building, but this does not explain their signification or their ‘perversely’ detached articulation.
65 Soane, Lectures, p. 71: The Egyptians’ ‘apertures of every kind were diminished upwards’.
