Toward a new interior an anthology of interior design theory

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The Specular Spectacle of the House of the Collector

Helene furján

introduction Visiting nineteenth-century English architect Sir John Soane’s Museum at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London, one notices that the view is continuously redi- rected into and through the house by architectural apertures and mirrors stra- tegically located throughout the interior. The house is primarily known for Soane’s collection of antique artifacts and architectural prints, including a portfolio of Giovanni Piranesi’s original proofs. The collection was organized in anticipation of transforming Soane’s private, professional collection into a public museum. Helene Furján highlights this lesser-known collection and the disposition of mirrors throughout the house that reflect, fragment, and multi- ply views of the antiquities.

Furján speculates on the significance of the mirrors in reference to the emergent technology’s symbolic and philosophical meaning to the represen- tation of knowledge, nature, religion, and painting. Soane’s ongoing integra- tion of mirrors, according to Furján, increased illumination by directing light into windowless areas of the house. As a result, the mirrors inadvertently emphasized shade and a perception of depth on the surface of the antiquities. Dramatic spatial illusions were constructed with mirrors that reflected spaces and rooms, and gave the overall appearance of a larger, deeper house. She observes that this light guides the viewer’s gaze toward the details of antique fragments throughout the house. The placement of antiquities and the mirrors were orchestrated to produce such effects as doubling their quantity and space.

Mirrors were fashionable machined objects at the time, such that Furján characterizes the Soane house as combining “antiquity and modernity.”* The mirrors and antiquities visually merged in the same way as did the programs of house and museum, or private and public. The house was configured to display the collection of antiquities for his practice. The result recalled Renaissance cabinets of curiosity that rescaled the full-scale interior into portraits of a miniaturized world when viewed in convex mirrors. Furján concludes that

Originally appeared in Assemblage, no. 34 (1997): 57–69.

Weinthal, L. (Ed.). (2011). Toward a new interior : An anthology of interior design theory. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from asulib-ebooks on 2019-11-23 11:19:58.

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Helene furJán

Soane installed mirrors as a constructed look on antiquities. His latent identi- fication with classical architects and his ambition to preserve his longevity in their company, along with his cultural affiliations, conditioned him to prepare the collection for posterity in the form of a public museum.

———

Much will the Mirrour teach, or evening gray,

When o’er some ample space her twilight ray

Obscurely gleams; hence Art shall best perceive

On distant parts what fainter lines to give.

—William Mason, The English Garden

IN 1792 JOHN SOANE, by then a well-established architect, began building at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London. This was to mark the start of an occupa- tion that would extend over three adjoining sites, charting a history of con- tinuous construction and reconstruction. His first house, at no. 12, was made possible in large part by a legacy left by his wife’s uncle, George Wyatt, who had died in 1790. The inheritance also allowed Soane to begin to amass a col- lection, although his collecting activities here remained modest—a library and a set of plaster casts of architectural detail that inhabited a corridor connecting the house to his office at the rear. The first significant museum space at no. 12 was a room he added behind no. 13 after its purchase in 1808, a space that was filled with the by then sizable collections moved from his country house, Pitzhanger Manor, on its sale in 1810.1 By this date, the house had already undergone many permutations. Soane built his final residence at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, no. 13, between 1812 and 1813 once the existing house on the site was demolished; it continued to be altered, in a history that con- structs a narrative as convoluted and labyrinthine as the spaces of the house themselves came to be.2 By the 1820s, the house in its present form was largely in place, although the collections still expanded and small adjust- ments were made until Soane’s death in 1837. [fig. 7.1]

In a surprisingly small space, Soane managed to elaborate multiple narratives of display and collecting, exhibiting his interests as an antiquar- ian, an architect, and a man of taste in collecting and storing inscriptions of culture and history. The objects that bore such inscriptions encompassed not only the fragments and collectibles of high culture and antiquity, but also the very domestic environment in which they were located. As a house-museum, in which the collections cannot be distinguished from the domestic objects, the furniture and furnishings, of the house itself, Lincoln’s Inn Fields not only incorporated the collection into the house, but significantly, incorpo- rated the house into the collection.

Weinthal, L. (Ed.). (2011). Toward a new interior : An anthology of interior design theory. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from asulib-ebooks on 2019-11-23 11:19:58.

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THe SPeCulAr SPeCTACle Of THe HOuSe Of THe COlleCTOr

The mirror—the convex mirror in particular—figuratively duplicates the collections housed here, and it is perhaps significant that by the time Soane died the house and its museum contained over a hundred mirrors, most of them convex and most of them concentrated in the Breakfast Room.3

[fig. 7.2] Re-collecting the interior within their compass, the mirrors present a collection of images that capture the carefully preserved and minutely con- structed professional environment of a late-eighteenth-century architect, the collections of a late-eighteenth-century antiquarian and connoisseur, and the domestic interior of a late-eighteenth-century gentleman. These mirrors proffer up a miniaturized (and thus collectible) image of the world of the viewing subject for the very reflection of that subject.

Ironically, it is through its very capacity to distort that the convex mir- ror most reflects the collecting act, gathering and concentrating, in compar- ison with the plane mirror, which merely “reproduces what lies within its field.”4 The convex mirror helps to select and organize the interior, as cru- cial a part of its arrangement as the furniture it tends to fix in its images: “Its curved surface reduced the world to an idyll, to a small cleanliness.”5 Gathering in the interior, and even what lies outside its windows, the con- vex image provides a “coordinated world” reduced to the scale of compre- hension. A domestic object that reflects, and thereby holds and collects, the collections, the mirror is also, in its proliferation in this house, a collection

fig. 7.1: Plan of the ground floor of nos. 12, 13, and 14 lincoln’s Inn fields. By courtesy of the Trustees of Sir John Soane’s museum

Weinthal, L. (Ed.). (2011). Toward a new interior : An anthology of interior design theory. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from asulib-ebooks on 2019-11-23 11:19:58.

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in itself. It is one, moreover, that in its sheer repetition threatens to exceed its capacity to organize, confounding and confusing, or better, dissolving, the spaces of the house into images.

But the mirror also operates as a figure for history itself. As Siegfried Giedion was to note a century later: “History is a magical mirror. Who peers into it sees his own image in the shape of events and developments.”—an observation that neatly points to the personal investment to be located in Soane’s “desire for history.”6 The mirror could represent, for him, a scrying apparatus that magically conjured up the image of the past that he himself wished to inhabit. This was not simply a desire to be immersed in the past. It was a desire to see his collections of that past in a context of architectural history that included himself, his work, his role as preserver of the past, and, most significantly, the very container of that past, the house itself. In other words, the house-museum could function as a mediation, or even continu- ity, between the past and the present, or rather, the antique and the mod- ern; or indeed, between his own past and a future safely predetermined by the frozen collections of art, antiquity, and domesticity that form the house as museum.

That in addition to a “union” of the arts, Soane was interested in a union between antiquity and modernity can be seen in this house that, with its mass of antiquities, is equally filled with works contemporary with Soane and is, furthermore, built using the latest developments in technology and the latest fashions of design and interior decoration.7 And the mirror that populates this interior is itself a result of the industrial advances and mass production of the time: cast plate glass having been produced in England

fig. 7.2. Convex mirror in the Breakfast room. Helene furján

Helene furJán

Weinthal, L. (Ed.). (2011). Toward a new interior : An anthology of interior design theory. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from asulib-ebooks on 2019-11-23 11:19:58.

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since 1773 at the British Cast Plate Manufacturers’ casting hall in Ravenhead, then the largest industrial building in the country.8 Cast glass was quickly adopted by the Adam school, which also popularized the overmantel mir- ror and the ovalframed mirror and returned the convex mirror to fashion.9 By the time that Soane was building in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, then, the mir- ror was very much in vogue, an indispensable item of interior decoration employed in all manner of ways: pier glasses, overmantel mirrors, looking glasses and cheval glasses, pilaster insets, door facings, display-case back- ings, convex mirrors, vista mirrors, catoptric devices, and so on. As such, the mirrors of Soane’s house are a compendium of their fashionable usages at both the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth.

By 1825, for instance, when C. J. Richardson produced a series of watercolors surveying the house,10 there were no less than five pier glasses in the North Drawing Room to compensate for its northern aspect. The South Drawing Room accommodated an overmantel mirror, a pier glass between the two front windows, and three convex mirrors. [fig. 7.3] The Dining Room held four large convex mirrors (with ornamental circles on the top that were removed by 1830) set up in the corners of the east and west walls, adjacent to mirror-backed niches on the north and south that contained classical busts.11 [fig. 7.4] Strips of mirror appeared on the window frames and on the fronts of the two projecting piers that separated this room from the Library, where, in turn, a pier glass hung between the front windows over a mirror- paneled chest. The Breakfast Room had strips of mirror set into pilasters and around the glazing of the bookcases. The museum area housed two mir- rors: one in the Corridor and another in the Colonnade, set in the window recess under an odd and very small oculus cut in the ceiling. In the Monk’s Parlor, a large paneled mirror lined the north wall to reflect the colored glass of the window opposite, and in Soane’s bathroom, a large overmantel mir- ror was divided into three and canted forward so that he could see himself better.12 There would, of course, be many more: the myriad convex mirrors of the Breakfast Room and its mirror-backed niche and overmantel mirror were yet to come, as were the convex mirrors and the catoptric niche in the stair hall. The Library windows facing onto the street were to acquire mir- rored shutters, while opposite, those in the Dining Room facing onto a court- yard were to acquire angled mirrored panels on either side. Mirror strips would be added to a pilaster and a relief panel in an anteroom between the Breakfast Room and museum area when it was rearranged around 1826, and in 1836, a large convex mirror would be placed in a north-wall recess of the Egyptian Crypt. And a canted mirror device was to be set into a window in the Crypt anteroom, with a pane of glass placed at a ninety-degree angle over one of mirrored glass, designed to reflect light from above into the depths of the interior.

THe SPeCulAr SPeCTACle Of THe HOuSe Of THe COlleCTOr

Weinthal, L. (Ed.). (2011). Toward a new interior : An anthology of interior design theory. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from asulib-ebooks on 2019-11-23 11:19:58.

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fig. 7.3: View of the South drawing room, showing one of the convex mirrors. Helene furján

fig. 7.4: Convex mirror and bust of dione in a mirror-backed niche in the dining room. Helene furján

What is remarkable, though, is not so much the mirrors’ various employments, but their accumulation; their association both with and as a collection. Here are to be found all the possible concerns—from the archae- ological to the fashionable, from the mirroring of the self to the interiorized landscape of vista and perspective—that the mirror could invoke. Their pri- mary function at Lincoln’s Inn Fields remained, of course, to multiply the level of illumination from the inadequate sources of natural daylight and candlelight, introducing light into the farthest reaches of these complex inte- riors through reflections and refractions.13 But they nonetheless provided, or

Helene furJán

Weinthal, L. (Ed.). (2011). Toward a new interior : An anthology of interior design theory. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from asulib-ebooks on 2019-11-23 11:19:58.

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amplified, poetic and picturesque effects of light and shade, expanded the spaces of the house, sometimes even providing the illusion of additional rooms, and contributed, figuratively and literally, to the collecting impulses of the interior.

The mirror of History During the Middle Ages and beyond, the mirror received a theoretical usage that exceeded its power merely to reflect. There was the mirror of God; the mirror of wisdom and the mind, which pointed both to religious truth and to the world as a place of transient semblance; the mirror of the soul, a reflec- tion of ideal virtue; mirrors of creation; and mirrors of human nature, which set out guidelines for proper conduct. These figurative (always convex) mir- rors suggested that the image contained allegorical or symbolical significa- tions capable of revealing truth and knowledge beyond the visual surface. In other words, the mirror contained the possibility of distilling meaning, if only its signs could be interpreted; or its surface besmirched, like the crys- tal ball or gazing sphere, and its hidden depths suddenly rise to that surface.

In the medieval mind, such knowledge was usually connected with divine agency, and the scryers who made its recovery their trade were thus theological readers.14 But “mirrors” were also texts, whether exhaustive books of instruction or histories, that sought to fix aspects of the world or of the past within their covers as did the surface of the mirror: they posited a belief, which would culminate in the encyclopedic projects, that the world could be captured in a text as faithfully as in the visual arts, reflecting it back in an objective and unmediated fashion. In the 1590s, for instance, John Norden embarked on a never-to-be-completed project to provide a compre- hensive “chorography” of Britain, his Speculum Britanniae. Chorographies, the specular texts perhaps closest to Soane’s own interests, were a “type of topographical-historical-antiquarian literature,” an attempt to unite an anti- quarian interest in inscriptions and relics to history and to a visual and often pictorial interest in landscape. These written descriptions accompanied by maps undertook to survey minutely both the past and present of regions in order to recover and record their identities.15

Visual representation, of course, had a strong affinity with the mir- ror. Art had long been tied to the mirror through theories of mimesis, from Plato through Alberti and into the eighteenth century.16 In painting, mirrors served most commonly as signs of vanity, but they also appeared as portents. An example of the latter, painted by Petrus Christus in 1449, is Saint Elijah and the Betrothed, in which the convex mirror that rests on the jeweler’s table at the lower right edge of the frame depicts the future married life of the betrothed couple collecting their wedding ring. Mirrors could also oper- ate as representational aids, revealing what was otherwise unavailable to

THe SPeCulAr SPeCTACle Of THe HOuSe Of THe COlleCTOr

Weinthal, L. (Ed.). (2011). Toward a new interior : An anthology of interior design theory. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from asulib-ebooks on 2019-11-23 11:19:58.

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the eye. The convex mirror in Quentin Metsys’s early sixteenth-century painting The Banker and His Wife, for instance, shows a beggar in front of the window forming the frame for the interior view presented. In Jan van Eyck’s Amolfini Marriage, representation was self-consciously foregrounded, the mirror’s image not only providing the view of the room in front of the pic- ture plane, and hence of the artist himself, but also reinforcing the effect of his signature placed above it, the medieval eye of God giving way to the self- referential authorial gesture.

For Soane, the figurative mirror perhaps most at home among his col- lections is the mirror of history. And in the section of the museum proper where fragments of antique ruins abound we find such a mirror. In the Corridor a large convex mirror hangs amid these fragments, reflecting those hanging on the walls opposite it. [fig. 7.5] Moreover, it forms the focal point of a vista receding from the Colonnade and the Dome area as a visible image of the fragments that are themselves concealed from this view by the archi- tecture. [fig. 7.6] This catoptric trick recalls the earliest precursor of Soane’s museum, the cabinets of curiosity whose intention was to place the world in a room, forming a miniaturized, representative universe. These assemblages of radical heterogeneity collected together wonders and rarities that offered not only a mirror of nature but also, through their very marvelousness, the reflection of divine agency. And, in fact, the mirror and the marvel are closely connected, the word mirror deriving from “mir, the root of mirabilis (mar- velous, wonderful) and mirari (to wonder at).”17 In this regard, such cabinets

fig 7.5: Convex mirror in the Corridor, no. 13 lincoln’s Inn fields. Helene furján

Helene furJán

Weinthal, L. (Ed.). (2011). Toward a new interior : An anthology of interior design theory. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from asulib-ebooks on 2019-11-23 11:19:58.

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fig 7.6: View through the Colonnade revealing the convex mirror in the Corridor. Helene furján

were close to another display device popular around the same time, catoptric boxes that were either lined with mirrors or contained two plain mirrors set at various angles to each other so that objects or scenes were multiplied, pro- viding optical illusions.18

The catoptric box and the cabinet of curiosities come together in Soane’s house as a means of creating a fully internalized world, from the wondrous universe in microcosm of the cabinet to the Leibnizian monadic world of the catoptric device. Indeed, the catoptric device could be seen as a cabinet of wonder in its own right, and Soane’s house, with its Chinese- box effect of cabinets within cabinets and its mirrors lining every available

THe SPeCulAr SPeCTACle Of THe HOuSe Of THe COlleCTOr

Weinthal, L. (Ed.). (2011). Toward a new interior : An anthology of interior design theory. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from asulib-ebooks on 2019-11-23 11:19:58.

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surface, is, in effect, itself a catoptric device. Individual catoptric devices actually exist in the museum; in particular, the mirror-backed display niches composed, in one instance, in the hall, of two angled mirrors. But perhaps most significantly, the mirrored shutters of the Library windows that face onto Lincoln’s Inn Fields were not lined with mirrors, as was common at the time, on the outside, so that when open they would bring, along with the daylight, the image of the park and street into the house. On the contrary, the mirrors line the inner surfaces, radically excluding the outside world when shut and reflecting in its place the candlelit interior back to itself.

Is this, then, Soane’s attempt to turn his back on the world outside and recreate his own internal world? If so, this is not yet quite the space of con- templation that would characterize the mid-nineteenth century (figured by Kierkegaard’s internal reveries), but rather, a compensatory space, replacing the marauding urban world outside that threatened to annihilate or, perhaps worse, overlook him. Soane substituted for urban civil society, the arena of the long and bitter fights in which he was embroiled, including the extended battles with his son George, a world of things. And these things had a special, genealogical, significance. They were not only signs of culture and history, they were also signs of Soane’s rise to a gentlemanly status, markers of taste, connoisseurship, and antiquarian erudition. Together they formed Soane’s own history: the legacy he wished to leave, the material remainders of his collecting activities, and a history of architecture.

But the most powerful message evident in the fragments themselves, especially those of the Corridor area, may be the crumbling and decaying state of these traces of history. Bathed in a musty yellow light, these pieces of ruins speak of antiquity, in the manner that Winckelmann himself pro- posed, as a past age irrevocably lost. The mustard hue of the Corridor depicts the sun set on the classical age, and the image inscribed on the surface of the mirror suggests the faint vestiges that are all that remain. In this sense, the fragments tell of the mortality of artifacts, destined to “die” as their human makers do. Soane knew this, and often had his own work depicted, projected into a future moment, as ruins. But he was also clearly interested in artifacts as markers of a human mortality, to which his collection of funerary objects attests. And as the decaying fragments served to remind, as a memento mori of the ephemerality of all things.19

Yet, lest this space conjure too well the molding and musty scene sug- gested—the sublime infinitude of fragmentation and ruin and the attendant losses of meaning—we should remember the reconstructive element of the antiquarian trade. The yellow light, just as readily evocative of the first light of early morning, heralds the promise of ruins to be salvaged. And it is no doubt significant that the Corridor of this museum is, in fact, a threshold space, leading to the stairs of the mezzanine studio above. This architectural

Helene furJán

Weinthal, L. (Ed.). (2011). Toward a new interior : An anthology of interior design theory. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from asulib-ebooks on 2019-11-23 11:19:58.

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studio can be seen from below, illuminated by the bright, clear light of inven- tion and imagination, a romantic reflection of genius, framed by the decayed and ruined fragments of antiquity barely visible in the yellowed gloom. In a sense, then, Soane is playfully combining Gothic gloom with fantasies of restitution, mortality, and redemption. Though irrevocably of the past, and perhaps importantly so, they nevertheless form the material of Soane’s anti- quarian and architectural projects: fragments of classical architecture that operate as signs of history, didactic architectural examples, and generative details.20

Most of the “antique fragments” are, in truth, plaster casts and can therefore be seen as souvenirs, or simulacra, of ruins. Moreover, the yel- low light is caught up in the ruse, “for it is that soft primrose hue so pecu- liarly adapted for the exhibition of the marbles, imparting the tint of time to those who have not yet attained it.”21 Although Soane did not collect most of his fragments directly from their source, they were indeed often made pre- cisely as souvenirs, the casts taken off ruins and ancient buildings visited on Grand Tours. Not all the fragments are of ancient origin, but all were seen as material for the study of architecture and as an aid to production in the stu- dio. Thus the fragments would offer several possibilities for Soane. In anti- quarian terms, they would be valued for their “pastness,” that is, their ability to represent historicity, if not history itself. In connoisseurial terms, they served to impress colleagues and (gentlemanly) clients with his taste and knowledge. And in architectural terms, they would provide a catalogue from which the architect could draw for the invention of new designs, assembling and recombining the fragments in new ways. As Peter Thornton points out, “Soane’s was the collection of a working architect and was used as an anthol- ogy of antique architecture and decoration as well as a teaching collection.”22 But what he does not make clear is that this was Soane’s design method, inherited from such architects as Piranesi and George Dance the Younger: the collecting together and framing of selected fragments; or, as Christopher Hussey writes, speaking of Piranesi’s reconstructions, the “pouring together, as from a combined treasury, armoury, and museum the hoarded relics of an epoch.”23

In other words, the museum collects itself both as the fantasy and fic- tion of reconstruction, one ordered through the narrative coherence of history. It is in this sense that the mirrors of Soane’s house-museum are important: as poetic figurations of these imagistic operations. They reflect, that is, double, the operation of the museum itself, providing a vehicle through which the past becomes accessible to representation. The con- vex mirror, in particular that in the Corridor, though part of the collection itself, collects history in a catoptric fashion, a visual trick attempting to pull the discrete fragments together in a cohesive image that would form such a

THe SPeCulAr SPeCTACle Of THe HOuSe Of THe COlleCTOr

Weinthal, L. (Ed.). (2011). Toward a new interior : An anthology of interior design theory. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from asulib-ebooks on 2019-11-23 11:19:58.

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narrative, a mirroring of the antiquarian trade.24 For the antiquarian, history so poeticized in this “delightful” image remains as evocative as the unread- able inscription on the ruined monuments of which his fragments form the traces. Like the sublime image of the ruined monument that this scene evokes,25 the mirrors transform fragments into something that, though not a totalizable whole, is nevertheless expressive of a gathered heterogeneity: history, in other words.

Notes * Helene Furján, “The Specular Spectacle of the House of the Collector,” Assemblage 34 (1997): 60. 1 Sir John Soane (1753–1837) built an extension to no. 12 behind the existing house at no. 13 between 1808 and 1809, containing the central tribune area that still exists and Soane’s professional offices, the Colonnade of the present museum. Pitzhanger Manor in Ealing, purchased in 1800 and occupied as a country residence from 1804 to 1810, was largely demolished and rebuilt, with the notable exception of parts of the house worked on by Soane’s revered first master, George Dance the Younger. It was to a great extent here that Soane began seriously not only to collect, but to construct the spaces of his house around, and even as, the collection. 2 Soane was able to purchase no. 13 by moving its (obliging) resident into a new house built at no. 14. The new house at no. 13 occupied parts of no. 12 and in 1823 was extended into the rear of no. 14. 3 The only existing record of the purchase of convex mirrors for Lincoln’s Inn Fields is a bill dated 1794 for two from the opticians P. and J. Dolland. Although this paper will concentrate on no. 13, and especially in its later manifestations, this suggests that not only were there mirrors in no. 12, but that some of them were convex, placing Soane at the forefront of their return to fashion around 1800. These mirrors may well have been reused in no. 13. 4 Wolfgang M. Zucker, “Reflections on Reflections,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (Spring 1962): 243. 5 Ibid., 245. 6 Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (New York: Norton, 1969), 2. Giedion seems to refer to the divining properties of the scrying mirror (see n. 14), although, ruling out an attempt to foresee the future, he uses it to peer backward. The phrase a “desire for history” is from Stephen Bann, who links it to the renewal of “curiosity” in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, resulting in the spread of interest in history from connoisseurs, professional historians, and antiquarians to a mass public, particularly through such representational mediums as the historical novel, history painting, and such spectacles as the history museum. See Stephen Bann, Romanticism and the Rise of History (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995), esp. 3–30. 7 Soane was one of the first in Britain to patronize contemporary, especially British, artists. See John Britton, “The Union of Architecture, Sculpture and Painting,” in Sir John Soane, Description of the House and Museum on the North Side of Lincoln’s-Inn-Fields, Etc. (London: James Moyes, 1830).

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Weinthal, L. (Ed.). (2011). Toward a new interior : An anthology of interior design theory. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from asulib-ebooks on 2019-11-23 11:19:58.

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8 Until the introduction of this industrial process, glass had been produced under a monopoly by the older and less efficient blown method that restricted the size of glass sheets. This method would not become competitive again until modernized in 1832 by Robert Lucas Chance, who developed the “broad” sheet glass that, despite the development of patent plate in 1839, would be used for the Crystal Palace in 1851. Modern “silvering” techniques, where silver foil replaced the tin-mercury backing, were not developed until 1840. 9 Historically the predominant type until eclipsed by casting processes, the convex mirror returned briefly to popularity roughly between 1800 and 1820, a fashion captured enthusiastically in Soane’s museum. For further details on the history of the mirror in England, see Raymond McGrath and A. C. Frost, Glass in Architecture and Decoration (1937; London: The Architectural Press, 1961), 314–15. 10 These watercolors were bound together in a volume entitled “Sketches and Drawings of the House and Museum J. Soane Esq., R.A., 1825,” vol. 82, Sir John Soane’s Museum Archive. 11 In the Dining Room, the mirror panels that now surround three sides of both Sir Thomas Lawrence’s portrait of Soane over the chimneypiece and Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Love and Beauty were not added until very late, sometime in 1836. To my knowledge, they do not appear in any of the views that contain these paintings after their hanging around 1829, and they are certainly missing from the illustrations for the revised edition of Description of the House and Museum on the North Side of Lincoln’s-Inn Fields, 2d ed. (London: Levey, Robson, and Franklyn, 1835–36). This is also true of the mirrors added to the back of the niches above the Library bookcases. 12 Some of these mirrors were to disappear as the house evolved. 13 The most evident examples are the angled mirrored panels to either side of the windows in the Dining Room; the pier glass set between the two tall windows of Library, which largely reflects light from the dining windows opposite; the lantern in the Dressing Room, which has mirrors around its base, angled to diffuse light over the whole room; and the canted mirror device in the Crypt anteroom, which not only reflects light into the basement room, but also provides reflections of the opposite wall of the Dressing Room and study and of the parapet as well as, on the underside, of the pebbled pavement of the courtyard. 14 Specularii, or scryers, as they were known in England, were professional readers of distant events (in time and space) prevalent in the Middle Ages. They “read” spherical and semispherical reflective surfaces, especially convex mirrors and crystal spheres, interpreting the reflections through a theological medium. 15 See Stan A. E. Mendyk, ‘Speculum Britanniae’: Regional Study, Antiquarianism and Science in Britain to 1700 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), esp., 38–81. 16 As M. H. Abrams notes in his book on romanticism, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1953): “The recourse to a mirror in order to illuminate the nature of one or another art continued to be a favorite with aesthetic theorists long after Plato. In Renaissance speculation the reference to a looking-glass is frequent and explicit. ‘What should painting be called,’ asked Alberti, ‘except the holding of a mirror up to the original as in art?’ Leonardo repeatedly appeals to a mirror to illustrate the relation to nature both of a painting and the mind of the painter. . . .As late as the middle of the eighteenth century important critics

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