Sometimes it’s better to travel hopefully than to arrive, my experience on Saturday morning. Eight stops to Ealing Broadway with Maigret to distract me; a destination I had hitherto not visited. Not worth a detour, as Michelin doesn’t say.
When I said Beaufort House was demolished by Hans Sloane I, for a moment, thought he was John Soane. How goofy. Sloane was a physician; Soane an architect who favoured a neo-classical look. Most of his work is on a large scale like the Bank of England and Dulwich Picture Gallery but he designed two houses to live in himself; Pitzhanger Manor and three houses on the north side of Lincoln’s Inn Fields that he demolished and rebuilt.
In 1800 John Soane bought thirty acres in Ealing to be his country residence, to live there with his wife and for it to be the Soane family home for the generations to come. It didn’t work out. There was a house on the site which he re-built in his characteristic style. It was finished in 1804 and he moved in with his wife and flaunted his architecture to get commissions. His wife was unhappy living in the country and he fell out with his sons because of his overbearing manner, although they were troublesome too, so that was that.
SALES AT AUCTION
A truly substantial, well-built and singularly modern VILLA with beautiful pleasure-grounds, in correspondent classical taste, walled kitchen garden, abundantly cropped and planted, and paddock embellished with stream of water, and luxuriant timber, pleasingly disposed, in the whole about 30 acres.
(Advertisement in The Times, August, 1809)
Pitzhanger Manor is a fine example of Soane’s work with well proportioned rooms and his trade mark slightly domed ceilings but unsurprisingly once I had admired the architecture there wasn’t much to see.
Lincoln’s Inn Fields is much better as it is crammed with his collection of art, sculpture and architectural artefacts. I went in 2015.
Thank you for the report on Pitzhanger. After a big splash when it re-opened a few years ago after restoration (with an Anish Kapoor exhibition), I hadn’t heard much about it, though I’ve been meaning to get out to see it. NWAD (= 1 star?) pushes it lower on the list.
As you chronicled well after your earlier visit, the Soane museum in town is crammed with fascinating and beautiful things, from Egyptian and Roman relics to Hogarth sets and other remarkable works. They have an extensive collection of the Adam brothers’ drawings (sometimes used to reconstruct lost bits of buildings and furnishings they designed), which Soane was far-sighted enough to acquire from the estate (after he had scooped up a lot of their library years before at Christie’s).
They also have some remarkable renderings by Joseph Gandy, an architect himself (a house he designed in Bath was for sale in recent years, I believe), but chiefly known as an artist/draughtsman whose work was exhibited regularly at the RA. Gandy worked briefly in Soane’s office and was called upon over the years to bring Soane’s ideas to life in what surely are some of the most beautiful presentation drawings ever received by a client. It was said that Gandy’s drawings made other architectural drawings “look like dirty washing.”
WWAD, then.