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The Sir John Soane Museum belongs to a select group of attractions in the capital whose defining characteristic is that everyone agrees they’re brilliant, only when it comes to closer discussion of their charms, it transpires that many ‘enthusiasts’ have never actually visited them – although they’ve usually been intending to for years. If that accurately describes your relationship with the Soane, this exhibition could be just the prompt you’ve been waiting for.
The museum was the home of an inveterate nineteenth-century collector who was anxious to share the fruits of his foraging, even after his death. In 1833 Sir John Soane, Professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy, negotiated an Act of Parliament to preserve his Holborn home and make his eclectic stash of treasures available to ‘amateurs and students’ of architecture, drawing and painting.
A wealth of classical antiquities, casts, models and books is crammed into a townhouse where the rooms, corridors and staircases are illuminated by various ingenious lighting techniques. Portraiture and prints interested Soane too, and form an important part of the collection. So this exploration of the development of portraiture by British printmakers from the mid-twentieth century to the present is a neat fit. The show consists of 40 engravings, etchings, screenprints and lithographs from the award-winning Clifford Chance collection which is normally displayed in the law firm’s offices.
An early screenprint by Patrick Caulfield, David Hockney’s 1976 ‘Henry at Table’ and Tim Noble and Sue Webster’s ‘Double Double Vision Vision’ (a lithographic portrait drawn while the artists were blindfolded) are among the works included. William Hogarth’s 1743 work ‘Character and Caricaturas’ will also feature in the exhibition, alongside the same artist’s ‘A Rake’s Progress’ and ‘An Election Series’, a highlight of the museum’s permanent collection.
So there you have it, the perfect reason to discover an intimate, atmospheric museum that more than lives up to its reputation.