November 2008

In this month's issue

Explore the Apollo archive

Look back over two vibrant years of Apollo: browse every issue from January 2006 to the present day.

Archive

Work is also progressing well on Jill Lever’s catalogue of Soane’s own drawings and Gordon Higgott’s catalogue of the baroque drawings which have been entered directly onto the database. Both these groups of drawings have been digitally photographed – the little Soane sketchbooks presenting a peculiar challenge to the photographer. Jill Lever’s work on the early Soane drawings is being supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund and will come to an end in 2009. Gordon Higgott worked at the museum from September 2005 to November 2006 on secondment from English Heritage, a project funded by the Getty Grant Program, with additional support from the Gilbert and Ildiko Baker Foundation. Dr Higgott’s catalogue of the 83 Hawksmoor designs for Greenwich Hospital was posted online in 2006 (www.soane.org.uk/drawings). Although the site needs design improve-ments, and the images could be larger, it is both a foretaste of further instalments of this catalogue and an example of the high standard of scholarship that the museum is determined to maintain.

The remaining 8,000 drawings of the Adam collection will be digitally photographed over the next few years in readiness for adding further blocks of material to the catalogue, divided up into four broadly defined themes – Adam country houses; town houses; urban schemes; and designs for furniture and decoration. The photography process –once again supported by Mrs Gledhill – will involve the creation of a concise catalogue of all the Adam drawings. Readers currently rely on a printed hand list, so the new concise listing of the drawings can be posted online in advance of full catalogue entries becoming available Soane’s library is now almost entirely catalogued, but the entries still need a final edit before they can be put online. In 2007, the museum appointed a three-year fixed-term contract post of Library Curator, to complete this work. Dr Stephanie Coane has already edited and published online over 1,200 catalogue entries for books, which join the catalogue entries for the acclaimed exhibition ‘Hooked on Books’, at the Weston Gallery, Nottingham University, in 2004. This entire catalogue, with its valuable essays on Soane’s bibliomania by Eileen Harris and Nick Savage, is now out of print and was added to the museum’s website in 2006. Harris and Savage’s work on Soane’s collection of works by Giovanni Battista Piranesi – a collection of exceptional interest formed by someone who knew Piranesi personally – is now also available online. We hope to add images as soon as funds will allow. Dr Harris has now turned her attention to the complexities of the ‘Soane Case’ – the various editions and proofs of Sir John Soane’s own publications, of which the museum has the definitive collection.