19S 



THE CIVIL ENGINEER AND ARCHITECT'S JOURNAL. 



[July, 



ideas, excellent hints and useful studies, yet merely in bits and frag- 

 ments. Even Soane himself seems to have felt that the edifice would 

 not bear thorough and deliberate examination, for otherwise he would 

 probably have made it the subject of a specific work, executed upon 

 an adequate scale, and in the most able and finished style of architec- 

 tural drawing and engraving, so as to be a worthy record to after 

 limes, when the fabric erected by him may, in its turn, have expe- 

 rienced the fate of Sir Robert Taylor's fafade. That he did not do 

 so seems to exculpate him from the charge of overweening vanity 

 which has been brought against him, more especially as one so 

 wealthy, and withal so very " liberal" and "munificent," could hardly 

 have been deterred from such an undertaking by the cost attending it. 

 Still the last seems to have been really the case, for his character was 

 marked by a singular mixture of munificence — or what the world was 

 pleased to call such — and downright penuriousness. The passion of 

 thriftiness must certainly have gained complete mastery over the 

 natural slorge of an artist for his own productions, when he published, 

 towards the end of his professional career, his "Public and Private 

 Buildings," that work being so wretchedly got up and so villianously 

 executed as to be not only discreditable but actually disgraceful, and 

 some of the plates little better than libellous caricatures of the build- 

 ings themselves; whereas, it might have been thought that he would 

 certainly take the opportunity of doing ample justice to himself, by 

 causing his buildings to be shown to the utmost possible advantage, 

 and making manifest how very much better some of them would have 

 been hud they been executed entirely according to his own intentions 

 and original designs for them, without his being thwarted by " em- 

 barrassments thrown in his way." Poor Sir John Soane ! — on that 

 occasion he certainly cheated himself, defrauding himself of what was 

 due to his reputation, merely in order to spare his purse. Poor man! 

 he ought afterwards to have prosecuted himself for libel and defama- 

 tion of character, for the libels he did complain of — the memorable one 

 hight "Boeotian Architecture" included — were innocent pleasantries 

 in comparison with a self-inflicted injury far exceeding all that the 

 most malicious of his enemies could devise. There was, besides, 

 something in the history of that publication which it would not have 

 done to have touched upon in an I'loge upon Sir John Soane, in proof 

 of his private virtues and amiable generosity. But I may leave the 

 personal character of the man alone, merely remarking that since his 

 decease a very significant sort of silence has succeeded to that vehe- 

 ment magnification of his noble qualities which certain parties in- 

 dulged in during his lifetime. 



11. Considering him then merely as an artist, Soane seems to have 

 been for ever making experiments without arriving at any consistent 

 and satisfactory conclusions. Leaving others to censure his " constant 

 hankering after novelty," I think that he erred in not following up 

 more decidedly the cour?e he had ventured upon He seems to have 

 entangled himself in a labyrinth, where he was fearful of advancing 

 yet equally loth to turn back. With a constant glimmering of the 

 object of his search before him, he kept groping and fumbling about 

 without being able to lay hold of it, or even to conceive any definite 

 shape of it, wherefore, so far from forming — as has nevertheless been 

 said of him — a style of his own, he often departed altogether from 

 every thing deserving the name of stvle — as witness the aforemen- 

 tioned front in Lincoln's-inn Fields .' If such egregious paltriness of 

 manner and design can be called style, any body may any day achieve 

 for himself a style of his own. No wonder then that such a precious 

 sample of architectural taste was treated very cavalierly by Welby 

 Pugin in his " Contrasts ;" the wonder is that Pugin did not also show 

 up that still more Pecksniffian production the front of the National 

 Debt Redemption Office in the Old Jewry, a thing of such studied 

 meanness and deformity, and ugliness, and vulgarity, as to partake of 

 the marvellous. Surely no man was ever more unequal in taste, not 

 only as displayed in different productions but in one and the same. 

 A few ideas of his own he certainly had, and upon the strength of 

 them — though feebleness is a term that would better apply to most of 

 them — he obtained credit for originality, but instead of properly 

 cherishing them to death, without at all advancing them, or making 

 anything more of them than they were when he first took them up. 

 There was generally something wavering and indecisive in his designs, 

 as if he did not exactly know what he would be at, or else was fright- 

 ened at his own temerity, like the man who was scared at the valorous 

 look of his own countenance whenever be saw it in a glass. Having 

 passed the Rubicon, and left arcliitectural orthodoxy behind him, 

 Soane's courage failed him, and he stood shilly-shallying without pro- 

 gressing any further. Instead of carefully rearing up his own favourite 

 ideas to maturity, he cockered and petted them till they became 

 stunted for want of exercise, so that scarcely any of them ever got 

 beyond the state of dwarfish whims. The tiny prettinesses of his own 

 house seem to have always haunted his imagination, and to have been 



present to it when they ought to have been dismissed for others of a 

 more elevated stamp, although originating in the same embryon of 

 fancy. One critic has attributed high merit to Soane for perfect con- 

 sistency of detail, and has further assured us that it is " based on the 

 purest examples of antiquity, and always harmonious," yet it is not 

 easy to reconcile such dictum with his practice of scoring walls with 

 horizontal lines, or of attempting to relieve flat surfaces by a few sunk 



lines of most jejune pattern as a substitute for ornament in relief, a 



mode, besides, often utterly at variance with the express character of 

 the order employed by him. So far from being harmonious, many of 

 his compositions — executed ones as well as unexecuted — are made up 

 of the most conflicting and contradictory elements, not artistically 

 blended together, but merely put side by side of each other. They 

 exhibit affected severity and affected playfulness in the same breath. 



One or two of them are little better than architectural sandmichs 



slices of the sternest Greek Doric clapped between other slices of 

 " my own house !" The same writer who claims consistency of detail 

 for Soane tells us that " his compositions take the forms dictated by 

 utility and convenience:" but it must surely be intended for irony, 

 since both at the Bank and in the building at the corner of Downing 

 Street, he employed an order so manifestly contrary to all utility that 

 its entablature, which is hollowed out behind, comes directly across 

 some mezzanine windows, that are thereby all but completely blocked 

 up. Indiscreet and unguarded compliments, and to call attention to 

 the very defects they are meant to divert it from. It is much after 

 the same fashion that in the book calling itself the "Georgian iEra," 

 Soane is praised for the quality of all others by which he was least 

 distinguished — amenity of disposition and suavity of manners! 



III. The British Museum and some other buildings of our great 

 classical architect being discussed the. other day, one of the company 

 observed that " at all events Sir Robert's designs had no nonsense 

 about them, but were all exceedingly chaste." To which another re- 

 plied: "Without engaging to swear for their chastity, I am willing to 

 let them have the credit of if, for I defy any one to convict them of 

 pregnancy — of being pregnant with a single idea. 



VI. Its loyalty notwithstanding, Fraser's Magazine has ventured to 

 give us sundry very free and tranchant, certainly not complimentary, 

 comments upon royal taste and royal patronage, with reference to the 

 frescoes in the summer-house at Buckingham Palace — the fate of one 

 of them, and the remuneration bestowed on the artists. "What vic- 

 tims," exclaims the writer, "have those poor fellows been of this 

 awful patronage ! Great has been the commotion in the pictorial 

 world regarding the fate of those frescoes, which royalty was pleased 

 to order, which it condescended to purchase at a price that no poor 

 amateur would have had the face to offer." This is pretty strong, 

 considering the quarter that it comes from. " Think of august powers 

 and principalities," continues the audacious Titinarsh, "ordering the 

 works of such a man as Etty to be hacked out of the wall, — that was 

 a slap in the face to every artist in England !" Really this makes one 

 feel quite " all-overish :" I am not apt to be particularly scrupulous 

 with my pen myself, but to talk at tins rate, and then to boast that 

 "Etty goes on rejoicing in his old fashion, quite unabashed by the 

 squeamishness exhibited in the highest quarter," is quite unbearable. 

 I wonder there was not "a slap in the face" given to the august taste 

 which commanded a Bal Poudri'. 



V. Nothing can be a more higgledy-piggledy set out than the walls 

 of our Exhibitions — where subjects the most incongruous are jammed 

 together. A pictorial banquet there may be, but then it is one served 

 up in the most careless and slovenly manner imaginable. In point of 

 worth they may be pretty much alike ; for my own part, were I com- 

 pelled to accept of one of them, I think I should give the preference 

 to the "pot-house piece" as it has been called, — but there surely is a 

 most striking disparity as to subject between Cooper's "Race for the 

 Derby" and Haydon's "Uriel and Satan," both pictures are in the 

 same corner of the west room in the present Exhibition. But then 

 what a specimen of an archangel is that Uriel ! tit onlv, as Titmarsh 

 saucily observes, "to hang up over a caravan at a fair." How works 

 of art ought not to be arranged the Academy has gone on showing us 

 year after year ; how they might and ought to be arranged may now 

 be learnt from the newly opened Glyptolheca, or Hall of Sculpture, at 

 the Colosseum ; and though that is not for pictures, the same principle 

 might be applied to galleries for pictures us to one for statues, namely, 

 that of dividing the walls into separate spaces or compartments less 

 lofty than the walls themselves, which, besides producing some degree 

 of repose — whereas at present we behold one dense and bewildering 

 mass of pictures from floor to ceiling — would leave room for architec- 

 tural adornment. The Colosseum puts us more out of conceit than 

 ever with the disgracefully miserable sculpture room of the Academy. 



