Dulwich Picture Gallery

About a month ago we visited the Dulwich Picture Gallery to see the Anna Ancher exhibition (fascinating, if a little uneven) and had a wander through the permanent collection housed in the main gallery distinctively designed by Sir John Soane. Soane’s great innovation, the indirect lighting supplied by overhead lantern glazing became the model for a generation or more of subsequent museum designers. It was England’s first public art gallery when it opened in 1817. 

The painting collection had its origins in a project led by a London art dealer and philanthropist, Sir Francis Bourgeois, (whose name lives on in the form of the famous YouTube trainspotter) to assemble a group of Old Masters as the basis of a National Gallery for Poland on behalf of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (PLC). By 1795 the PLC had ceased to exist and on his death in 1811 Bourgeois bequeathed funding for Sir John Soane to design a new museum to display the collection. In his design Soane included a Mausoleum to house the remains of Bourgeois and his business partner, Desenfans (and the latter’s wife) that occupies the heart of the building. For those who notice it, it is a slightly unsettling presence but at the same time it’s a grand gesture on the part of Soane to honour an unfulfilled ambition of Bourgeois to create a mausoleum for himself and Desenfans in the grounds of the latter’s home.

These are some notes on the examples that caught my attention.  At the top of the post is a wonderful small portrait by Rubens as a family man. Sensitive and tender, from c. 1612, a painting of his 12 year old daughter, Clara Serena. A sense of immediacy underlines her fragility and, sadly, she only lived a few more years. A stark reminder of how often infant mortality haunted family lives. Next is a small scale version of an old favourite subject due to its potential for eroticism and gruesome violence, in which the Jewish heroine Judith brandishes the severed head of the inebriated Assyrian commander, Holofernes. Based on a much larger original work by Cristofani Aliori, more dramatic conceptions of this story feature the moment of decapitation, most memorably that by Artemisia Gentileschi.  Below is an enigmatic composition of female heads orientated in opposition. It turns out to be a surviving fragment of a Poussin painting from c. 1529, rescued from the remains of an Adoration of the Golden Calf, otherwise war damaged beyond repair. Then we have a close-up on the hands of a Locksmith, extracted from a portrait by an unidentified Neapolitan artist, the full painting can be seen here. Following this is another intimation of mortality - a deathbed portrait of “Venetia Stanley, Lady Digby”, painted by Anthony van Dyck. The story goes that she suddenly died in her sleep at the age of 32 whereupon her husband summoned Van Dyck to record her likeness within two days of her demise. Sidestepping any mawkish sentiment, the artist shows her asleep in peace while also conveying, via the cloudy turbulence of her nightdress that her sleep has no end to it. Finally we have an entire wall of Gainsborough portraits except for a single Hogarth (lower left). The centrepiece is a double portrait (c. 1772) of Elizabeth and Mary Linley, accomplished singers and performers from a well-connected Bath family, their willowy forms surrounded by wispy foliage. About 12 years later in 1785, Gainsborough was employed to update their apparel to reflect changing fashions, by which time their musical careers were over, thanks to their marital status. 

 

John Soane and the Bank of England

When the profession of architect emerged in the Western tradition, typical clients were drawn from the ranks of Dukes, Princes, Sovereigns, Archbishops and Popes.  Sir John Soane who worked for 45 years as architect to the Bank of England must have been the first to be employed by corporate finance, designing a group of major banking halls and a grand rotunda. He oversaw every detail of the construction process from the acquisition of land to the choice and sourcing of materials. Soane’s property dealing enabled the bank to realise its ambition to detach itself from the tightly packed jumble of city streets around its boundaries and develop an island site, fit to repel intruders.  Whenever the nation’s leaders embarked on a military conflict or a naval adventure they turned to the bank to raise the finance.  Britain’s colonial expansion was financed from the same source.  The great families of the landed gentry and the rising merchant class looked to the bank as a secure resting place for their assets to generate revenue.  It was a private company whose existence was absolutely crucial to the imperial project from the mastery of the seas to the murky business of extracting value from colonial possessions via the deployment of slave labour.

In a business where trust was vital, the bank had to maintain a spotless reputation for integrity and financial rectitude - it’s instructive to browse the official portraits of past Governors and Deputy Governors to observe their formidably impassive and callous expressions, radiating moral certainty with a flavour of the parsimonious, ill-concealed behind luxuriant displays of facial hair.  It was equally important that the buildings should play their part - on the exterior by presenting facades of impregnability while internally impressing the visitor with grand spaces supported and enclosed by substantial forms designed to convey an overwhelming impression of stability and probity. Soane went above and beyond the call of duty to meet his employer’s requirements in every respect throughout his 45 years in office.

The Bank that Soane built was an institution that dealt directly with the public and the great banking halls, each dedicated to a specific type of investment would be thronged with customers for most of the working day.  This changed over the years as some of the Bank’s functions migrated over the road to the Royal Exchange while financial transactions became increasingly paper-based requiring much less handling of currency while documentation could be delivered by the postal service. By the 1920s all of the Soane-designed public spaces had been sub-divided into cubicles as the Bank ran out of office space and it was decided to embark on a major rebuilding programme of expansion.  Sir Herbert Baker was the chosen architect. Baker had moved from South Africa with a reputation for designing mediocre and pompous civic buildings to England where these qualities were easily mistaken for greatness. Monumental imperialist bluster was his trademark with a sideline in war cemeteries and memorials. By the time Baker’s work was complete the Bank had more than doubled in height leaving Soane’s facade overshadowed by a massive classical portico.  All four of the lofty, light filled, beautifully proportioned banking halls were demolished, an action denounced by Pevsner as “the greatest architectural crime in the City of London of the twentieth century”. this judgement was unlikely to trouble Walker who was knighted shortly after his ruination of the Bank and would go on to work alongside Lutyens on the rebuilding of New Delhi in the 1930s. When he died in 1946 he was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Postcard publishers would regularly dispatch their photographers to record the Bank and the Royal Exchange, a motif that would comfortably sit within the top ten London subjects.  In the montage we have before and after views of the Bank with three of them revealing the overpowering presence of Baker’s additions.  Next is a rare postcard view of the measured proportions of Soane’s frontage follow by three images of Soane-designed banking halls.  The interior views are based on official photographs from 1894, still in circulation in 1910 when these cards were posted to an address in Maida Vale. Last is a YouTube link to a curiously informal natter about Soane and the Bank - a trifle long-winded but authoritative and informing.