Lecture, Timothy Knox, The Strange Genius of Sir John Soane

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The Strange Genius of Sir John Soane

Lecture in conjunction with the Royal Oak Foundation and the Sir John Soane’s Museum Foundation

Timothy Knox, Executive Director of the Sir John Soane’s Museum

Friday, September 25, 2009, 6:00 p.m.

Sir John Soane (1753-1837) was one of the most important British architects of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Born the son of a humble bricklayer, he rose—through hard work, professionalism, and an advantageous marriage—to eminence as the architect of many of the most prestigious buildings of the Regency era, notably the Bank of England, a Neoclassical masterpiece that he called “the pride and boast of my life”. The Bank was demolished in 1925, but many of Soane’s lesser works—a brace of country houses and tombs, a picture gallery, and his idiosyncratic house-museum in London—still survive and attest to his innovative architectural ideas. Soane’s extraordinary devotion to architecture and collecting is commemorated by his Museum, a glittering treasury that survives almost exactly as he left it. In an illustrated lecture, Tim Knox will draw upon Soane’s own archive to paint a fresh picture of this strange, tormented genius of British architecture.

Timothy Knox is the Director of Sir John Soane’s Museum. He studied the history of art at the Courtauld Institute of Art of the University of London. He later became Assistant Curator at the Royal Institute of British Architects Drawings Collection and in 1995 joined the National Trust as its Architectural Historian. He was appointed Head Curator of the National Trust in 2002. He is a Trustee of Stowe House, the Pilgrim Trust, and Prehen, his ancestral home in Co. Londonderry, as well as a member of the Advisory Committee for the Palace of Versailles. This is Knox’s second visit to the Boston Athenæum; in 1999 he presented “Flights of Fancy: Stuffed Birds as Interior Decoration in the Victorian Country House” to an audience of Boston Athenæum and Royal Oak members.

To Reserve: The fee for this event will be $20. Reservations are required but will not be accepted until September 16. Please call the Athenæum’s event reservation line, 617-720-7600.