Summary A Collector's Model of Desire: The House and Museum of Sir John Soane
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Anth 101
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Pennsylvania State University - All Campuses
A Collector's Model of Desire: The House and Museum of Sir John Soane
A Collector's Model of Desire: The House and Museum of Sir John Soane
A Collector's Model of Desire: The House and Museum of Sir John Soane
A Collector's Model of Desire: The House and Museum of Sir John Soane
collection to museum, from the living and changing body of collected
artefacts to that pivotal moment when, on some fundamental level,
change is arrested and the museum begins. I shall do this by focusing on a
nineteenth-century collection still in situ in its original ambience, now
frozen into a permanent museum. Second, while collecting, obviously, is
a movement of desire and acquisition (not least the desire to become
valorized as The Collection of a Museum), I want to examine the way it is
also a process of nostalgia.
Just as the museum looks back to the 'real' life, the activity, of the
desire that brought it into being, so that desire, that very process of
collecting, itself looks back to an origin. Collecting is inherently a cult of
fragments, a sticking together of material bits that stand as metonyms
and metaphors for the world they may refer to but are not. 3 Its desire,
Elsner, John. The Cultures of Collecting, Reaktion Books, Limited, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/oxford/detail.action?docID=368650.
Created from oxford on 2017-08-10 09:33:08.
, JOHN ELSNER
then, the inspiration for its enlivening and obsessional dynamic, is for the
plenitude of objects that once - in some imaginary world - were all
together and so did not need to be collected. But (and here we may move
from general observations to something more specific) that imaginary
world did exist, at least for those collectors from the Middle Ages
through the Renaissance and on to the Getty people - as well as for the
protagonist of this essay, Sir John Soane - who have been obsessed with
the idea of the classical. For Antiquity, and especially Roman Italy, has
always been that endlessly bounteous mother-earth out of which the
fragments now housed in museums from St Petersburg to Texas were
once extracted. 4
In suggesting that Roman Italy was constructed as the all-plentiful
provider and the Ur-collection, I wish to address a dream lying wistfully
behind the collecting impulse: namely, the urge to evoke, even sometimes
to fulfil, that myth of a completion, a complete ancient world, which was
once itself collected in the imperial splendour of Rome. For ancient Rome is
more than just the supreme paradigm of collectors (its collections were and
are our canon) and the ultimate exemplar for empires. It was these things
not just because of its priority in the past of Europe but because (in the myth
that it told to glorify itself) it succeeded. That myth, which brought
fulfilment in the act of accumulation together with supremacy in the arts of
government, may only have been propagated by the Romans and without
total faith, but it was believed (and needed to be believed) by the myth-
making collectors from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment whose
activities have generated our cultural institutions, above all the museum.
The material body of evidence to which I want to turn in an exploration
of these questions is the house and museum of Sir John Soane. In his
private town-house (whose current postal address is 13 Lincoln's Inn
Fields, London WC2 3BP, but which in fact occupies most of numbers 12
and 14 as well), Soane (1753-1837), the architect to the Bank of England
and Professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy, collected and
displayed an extraordinary number of books, paintings, architectural
models, drawings, prints, plaster-casts and sculptural fragments. 5 Sir
John Soane's Museum is (like the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in
Boston) a very special case of the private house that, with its collection
intact, is memoralized in situ as museum. It thus embodies and freezes for
posterity the moment at which collecting (and redeploying a collection)
ceases, the moment when the museum begins.
Elsner, John. The Cultures of Collecting, Reaktion Books, Limited, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/oxford/detail.action?docID=368650.
Created from oxford on 2017-08-10 09:33:08.
Soane's manuscript attempt of 1812 at 'Crude Hints towards a History
of my House') represented a tour through the house emphasizing the
most important objects on display. Already here, that part of the
collection under the dome at the back is described as the Museum, while
the picture room is a mini-gallery in its own right. None the less these
gestures towards institutional or official space remain within the broader
ambit of domestic space: all the Descriptions are subtitled the residence
of John Soane. The Description of 1832 reprints the text of 1830, but
with significantly greater pretensions: dedicated to Augustus Frederick,
Duke of Sussex, it included a French translation of the text as well. It also
added to the Introduction the sense that the collections had a national
rather than merely personal significance - 'to evince the desire of the
Possessor of the Collection to promote to the utmost of his power the
Elsner, John. The Cultures of Collecting, Reaktion Books, Limited, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/oxford/detail.action?docID=368650.
Created from oxford on 2017-08-10 09:33:08.
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