Grand designs SIR JOHN SOANE’S MUSEUM SOMERSET HOUSE
Architect Sir John Soane turned his house into a museum, to be preserved, under the trust he created, exactly as it was after his death in 1837. The house is not merely a showcase for paintings, sculptures and antiquities but for Soane’s imagination.
It is a world of architectural drama, where the relatively confined space provided by two adjacent London houses was fretted over and obsessively altered by Soane to create extraordinary spatial effects: grand, astounding, even vertiginous, despite their small scale.
Among the artworks he bought were Hogarth’s series A Rake’s Progress and An Election. But perhaps his greatest coup was the acquisition of the newly discovered sarcophagus of Seti I, rejected by the British Museum because the £2,000 price was too high.
Named after the Duke of Somerset, Lord Protector of England, who ran the country from 1547 to 1549 for the boy king Edward VI, his house on the Thames was one of a string of palaces, built originally by bishops.
By the mid-18th century, Somerset House had become a place of ghosts, so Sir William Chambers was commissioned to convert the site into a different kind of palace, for civil servants.
Among the occupants were The Navy Office – it was here, to the Seamen’s Hall, that the officers of Nelson’s Navy came to discover which ships had been assigned to them.
On the Strand, the narrow facade was inspired by the Hotel des Monnaies in Paris; people entered – as they still do – beneath a supremely elegant vestibule of paired columns and vaults.
Eventually a time came when the civil servants were expelled. In place of cars came cafes, fountains, a winter skating rink… for Somerset House is now run as a trust for the working arts – home not only to The Courtauld Institute of Art and its Gallery but to artists, creative organisations and the British Fashion Council.