Joseph Gandy and the Rendering of the Soanean Ideal

A Lecture by Bruce Boucher, Deborah Loeb Brice Director of Sir John Soane's Museum

John Soane is recognized as a master of color and light, elements he considered fundamental to the “poetry of architecture.” For most of his active career, Soane relied upon Joseph Michael Gandy, a younger and less well-known architect, to communicate the poetry of his creations at the Royal Academy’s annual exhibitions.

Although he built little, Gandy (1771-1843) excelled in a niche genre of architectural representations that fused landscape and atmospheric perspective, thereby evoking a “lumière mystérieuse,” as Soane liked to call it — an atmosphere charged with mystery. Ironically, it is through Gandy’s watercolors, rather than built works, that Soane’s designs are best known today.

About Bruce Boucher

Dr. Bruce Boucher is an art historian and curator specialising in Renaissance and Baroque sculpture and architecture. He is professor emeritus at University College London, where he taught for over 20 years, and has published a number of books. Before joining the Soane, Bruce was Director of the Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia, which followed a role as Curator and Head of European Sculpture, Decorative Arts, and Ancient Art at the Art Institute, Chicago. He is former President of the Board of the Center for Palladian Studies in America and currently a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. Bruce became Deborah Loeb Brice Director of the Soane in May 2016.

About the 2020-2021 Soane Lecture Series: Color and Light

In 1780, John Soane returned from the Grand Tour with a fresh eye for light and color — daylight streaming through an oculus, marbles aglow in amber dusk, a rich red fragment of wall plaster from Pompeii. In the years that followed, Soane became obsessed with light and the effects it could produce, deploying colored and stained glass, richly pigmented surfaces, and increasingly inventive lighting strategies throughout his interiors to generate dramatic, ever-changing scenes.

Today, Sir John Soane’s Museum in London stands as a testament to the architect’s bravura manipulation of color and light, brimming with “exquisite hues and magical effects” (in the words of Soane’s friend, the novelist Barbara Hofland) enjoyed by thousands of visitors each year. Inspired by Soane, our 2020-2021 lecture series considers the interplay of light and color across periods and disciplines, from Soane’s world to the arenas of art, architecture, and design in the twenty-first century.