Sir John Soane and Modern British Sculpture by Dr Bruce Boucher FSA

The general impression of Sir John Soane’s Museum is of a shrine to classical art, but John Soane was equally committed to what was the modern British art of his day. Soane saw an affinity between architecture and sculpture, and as his museum took shape, it attracted gifts as well as acquisitions from artists like Flaxman, Banks, Nollekens, and Chantrey. The focal point of his collection was  the Tivoli Recess, a narrow space of 2 x 1.5 m on the landing between the first and second floors of No. 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields. But Soane’s collection pervaded the house on every level, reflecting that mixture of the aesthetic and autobiographical for which the Museum is famous.

Bruce Boucher was Director of Sir John Soane’s Museum from 2016 to 2023. He studied at Harvard University, Oxford University (Rhodes Scholar), and the Courtauld Institute of Art. He taught for over twenty years at University College London before entering the museum world as curator and head of European Sculpture, Decorative Arts, and Ancient Art at the Art Institute of Chicago (2002-2009). He was Director of the Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia from 2009-16. Bruce Boucher is the author of a number of books, among them: The Sculpture of Jacopo Sansovino (1991), Andrea Palladio: The Architect in his Time (1994, revised, 1998 and 2007), Italian Baroque Sculpture (1998), and Earth and Fire: Italian Terracotta Sculpture from Donatello to Canova (editor, 2001).  He is a corresponding member of the Ateneo Veneto in Venice, a former president of the board of the Center for Palladian Studies in America, and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. His latest book, John Soane’s Cabinet of Curiosities: Reflections on an Architect and His Collections, was published by Yale University Press in 2024.

RECORDING: Sir John Soane and Modern British Sculpture, Dr Bruce Boucher FSA