The Soane Museum, Lincoln Inn Fields, London is acknowledged as the finest small house museum in the world. John Soane was an exceptionally talented architect and draughtsman whose life spanned a period of the 18th Century when London was growing rapidly. As a young man, he won the most coveted Gold Medal Award for draughtsmanship a scholarship prize that allowed him to travel to Rome to study and fall in love with antiquity, and its meaning and language which he adapted to his subsequent work. It also gave him a hunger to buy, collect, and build a museum all of his own. Paintings, artifacts, architectural fragments, molds, curious objects, models, and even an Egyptian sarcophagus were all placed and exhibited within his home. Amid this, he ran his firm which thrived as he gained some of the most important commissions including the building of the contemporary new Bank of England in Threadneedle Street. All this is still to be seen since he had the foresight to secure in future indefinitely by Act of Parliament preventing its dispersal after he bequeathed/gave everything to a protective Trust that presides over his huge collection to this day. From the depths of the museum to the lofty exterior this house contains one man’s story whose professional and private life is equally worthy of interest, not least from my point of view his model room provides a rare insight into how models were used and exhibited, and thought of in a world without many of the resources of communication and reproduction we take for granted today. This beautiful collection has relevance today as well as providing a historical record of architectural contemporary thought. Height: 3.5″ Width: 8″ Depth: 2.8″
