Sir John Soane’s Museum, 13 Lincoln's Inn Fields, London WC2

When the celebrated architect Sir John Soane died in 1837, he left his home at 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields to the nation stipulating that it should be kept as it was at the time of his death.  He designed the house himself, creating a series of imaginative interiors enshrining his belief in the ‘union of the arts’ and combining architecture with sculpture, paintings and a myriad of other collections to create ‘those fanciful effects that constitute the poetry of architecture’.  Central to this was his use of light, carefully modulated by stained and coloured glass installed in doors and windows.  Soane acquired more than 100 small-scale subject panels, which he set within borders of coloured, etched and painted glass in arrangements reminiscent of those at Walpole’s Strawberry Hill.  Most are Netherlandish or German of the 16th and 17th centuries and painted after contemporary prints by masters including Maerten de Vos (1532-1603) and Marten van Heemskerck (1498-1574).   Amongst them are examples from some of the major glass workshops of the period, such as those of Pieter Coecke van Aelst (1502-1550), Jan Swart von Groningen (c.1500-c.1558) and the latter’s pupil Dirk Pietersz. Crabeth (c.1520-1574).  There are also a number of larger composite panels of which the finest depicts the Virgin and Child with Donatrix, Netherlandish, c.1530.  Their precise provenance is undocumented but they were said by Soane to have been ‘taken out of churches and monasteries during the French Revolution’.

Most of Soane’s arrangements of glass were removed from the windows of his museum in the late 19th or early 20th century.   As a result the majority of the panels survived the blitz; the few panels left in situ were destroyed or seriously damaged. Fortunately, Soane and later Curators made record drawings of the glass and over the last 30 years it has been possible to put back all but two or three of Soane’s windows with the assistance first of Philip Crook of Vitrail Studios, York and in recent years, Chapel Studios.  Chapel Studios were also responsible for the recreation of 16 sepia panels destroyed in the blitz for a pair of double doors in the private apartments (installed in 2015).  Barley Studios of York, working with glass-painter, Jonathan Cooke, recreated the Georgian window by William Collins in Soane’s Tivoli Recess, itself a copy of the famous ‘Charity’ window in New College, Oxford (to a design by Reynolds).

The stained glass collection may be found online at www.soane.org/collections.