A Maze without a Plan? Display in Sir John Soane’s Museum

Part of the York Georgian Society 2024/2025 Autumn Lecture Series.

Number 13, Lincoln’s Inn Fields has cast a spell over generations of visitors, evoking delight but provoking, at times, bafflement if not confusion. Its creator intended it to be a repository of all that was best required for the formation of a modern architect; yet more generally the house and its collections were conceived as an academy for the enlightenment of the general public as well as a catalyst for the creation of new art by future generations. At the same time, it is much more than the sum of its parts and is one of the most intensely autobiographical statements conceived in three-dimensional terms. John Soane famously said that the works in his collection were arranged ‘as studies for my own mind’, but he never explained what he meant by that phrase. This talk attempts to illuminate Soane’s collection and his strategy for it through its display.

About the speaker: Bruce Boucher was Director of Sir John Soane’s Museum from 2016 to 2023. He studied at Harvard University, Oxford University (Rhodes Scholar), and the Courtauld Institute of Art. He taught for over twenty years at University College London before entering the museum world as Curator and Head of European Sculpture, Decorative Arts, and Ancient Art at the Art Institute of Chicago (2002-2009). He is the author of a number of books, among them: The Sculpture of Jacopo Sansovino (1991); Andrea Palladio: The Architect in his Time (1994, revised, 1998 and 2007); Italian Baroque Sculpture (1998); and Earth and Fire: Italian Terracotta Sculpture from Donatello to Canova (editor, 2001). He was Director of the Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia from 2009-16. He has served on the steering committee or has been responsible for various exhibitions, including: Andrea Palladio (Haywood Gallery, 1975); The Genius of Venice (Royal Academy, 1983); Donatello e i suoi (Florence, 1986); Earth and Fire: Italian Terracotta Sculpture from Donatello to Canova (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and Victoria & Albert Museum, 2001-2002). He is a corresponding member of the Ateneo Veneto in Venice, a former president of the board of the Center for Palladian Studies in America, a former member of the Association of Art Museum Directors, and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. He is currently at work on a book about Sir John Soane as a collector. His latest book, John Soane’s Cabinet of Curiosities: Reflections on an Architect and His Collections, was published by Yale University Press in 2024.

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