Sir John Soane Biography, Buildings and Best Books

Sir John Soane (1753-1837) was an English architect of the late Georgian period whose work stripped classical architecture to its essentials and played with light, top-lit domes and layered space. Architect to the Bank of England for 45 years, he designed the Dulwich Picture Gallery, the first purpose-built public art gallery, and turned his own house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields into a museum, preserved as he left it.

Goring, London and Italy

Soane was born in 1753 in Goring-on-Thames, the son of a bricklayer. He trained with George Dance the Younger and Henry Holland, studied at the Royal Academy Schools and won a travelling scholarship that took him to Italy from 1778 to 1780.

The Bank of England

In 1788 he became architect and surveyor to the Bank of England, a post he held until 1833. His banking halls, lit by lanterns and shallow domes and enclosed by a windowless screen wall, were his masterpiece; most of the interiors were demolished in the 1920s.

Dulwich and Lincoln’s Inn Fields

The Dulwich Picture Gallery (1817), lit from above through roof lanterns, became a model for later galleries. At 12 to 14 Lincoln’s Inn Fields he built his home as a dense sequence of spaces filled with antiquities, casts and paintings, and in 1833 an Act of Parliament preserved it as a museum. He was professor of architecture at the Royal Academy from 1806, was knighted in 1831 and died in London in 1837.