Reading Words and Images in the Description(s) of Sir John Soane’s Museum

Abstract

In the 18th and early 19th centuries, London was a city filled with cabinets of curiosity, lusus naturae , and bourgeoning public museums. Most of these institutions publicized their holdings through newspaper advertisements, leaflets, and self-published, descriptive catalogs that were available for purchase on-site and through booksellers. Using Soane’s Museum as a case study, this paper will move beyond historiographical analysis of individual objects in collections catalogs to probe how the museum-produced guidebooks depicted spatial arrangements. Citing examples from the 19th to twenty-first centuries, this paper will examine how the curator-produced descriptions of Soane’s Museum manipulated text and graphics to guide visitors through a constructed narrative, recreated the ephemeral experiences of the museum, and advertise the site’s unparalleled union of painting, sculpture, and architecture to audiences abroad. Soane’s Description of the House and Museum, on the North Side of Lincoln‘s Inn-Fields, the Residence of Sir John Soane (privately printed 1830, 1832; revised 1835) paired spatial narratives with the architectural language of orthographic projection and perspective engravings. His Description set forth an agenda about the museum’s arrangement and established a compositional strategy for subsequent editions of the guidebook, renamed the General Description in the editions printed between 1840 and 1930 then rebranded as the New Description by Summerson in 1955. Through the study of the changing written and visual language published in the guides by the curators of Soane’s Museum, this article will examine the changing character of the visitor experience at the museum and question the form of future editions.