Sir John Soane’s Collection of “Etruscan” Vases

Amid the plethora of furniture and objects in John Soane’s house, his collection of vases stands out. They rise like finials on top of the bookcases in the Library and form the chief feature of the window display in the Dining Room; they also rest on brackets beneath the octagonal lantern of the Breakfast Room. Together, they signify Soane’s membership in the elite world of the Regency collector, but Soane’s interest in them was not strictly antiquarian. Rather, he seemed primarily drawn to their forms and what they represented, both aesthetically and typologically. In a few instances, they also conferred a prominence upon his collection. Soane’s persistence in referring to his vases as “Etruscan” reflects the reception of these fictile vessels in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as well as the melancholy associations they carried in relation to the shrine he built to commemorate his wife Eliza.

Dr. Bruce Boucher became Director of Sir John Soane’s Museum in May, 2016. He studied at Harvard University, Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar and the Courtauld Institute of Art, where he obtained his Ph.D. He taught for over twenty years at University College in the University of 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. His research interests have focused upon Italian Renaissance, Baroque, and Neo-classical art and architecture. He 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 (2001). His book John Soane’s Cabinet of Curiosities will be published by Yale University Press this spring.

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