‘Without the figures it’s just beige, beige, beige’ – Sir John Soane’s Museum looks beyond the buildings at people in architectural drawings
Fanciful Figures at Sir John Soane’s Museum is the first ever exhibition about ‘staffage’ – people in architectural drawings – according to curator Frances Sands, the museum’s curator of drawings and books.
‘I’m entirely biased, but I think the golden age of staffage is Soane. It’s so beautifully drawn,’ she says. ‘It’s aesthetically appealing in a way you can’t help but adore.’
She dreamt up the idea for the show during lockdown, inspired by a drawing she’d inherited by figurative artist Antonio Van Assen. With Soane’s regular draughtsman Joseph Michael Gandy, these two were very much, she says, the ‘dream team’ for depicting his designs, and their work features prominently in the exhibition.
While it’s unusual to be concentrating on the peripheral figures rather than the architecture they inhabit, there is plenty to engage in this highly appealing exhibition. Are the figures there to demonstrate the scale or purpose of the architecture? Do they offer diverting insight into the world of the times depicted? Or are they useful garnish to apply when the drawing’s main subject matter needs a bit of a lift, whether through colour or animation?
The answer, variously, is all of the above. And sometimes, staffage rather than being an incidental, contributes significantly to the atmosphere of the drawing, and even steals the show, as shown in a drawing from James Stuart and Nicholas Revett’s The Antiquities of Athens, where the local colour of the staffage draws the eye from the Erechtheion.
The exhibition sets the context by looking first to fine art, where staffage was established long before it became common in architectural drawings in the mid-late 18th century, so much so that Soane enlisted the specialist talents of Van Assen. In an early example of figures, Leonard Knyff’s bird’s-eye perspective for an enlarged Greenwich Royal Hospital in 1695 shows promenading people aplenty, albeit at dubious scales.
This desire to use staffage to impress clients was to be a recurring theme. In a Robert Adam competition drawing (attribute to Joseph Bonomi) for Lincoln’s Inn Fields, there’s all sorts going on – a child in a cart drawn by four dogs, a fiddler on a donkey, a sedan chair, people in their finery at leisure – all hinting at what we’d now think of as the promise of gentrification of what was at the time a dodgy area.
On the other hand George Dance the Younger was, says Sands, a little po-faced about his use of staffage. The far more practical example of this is featured is the elevation for a screen to a country house c1771, where a carriage is used to aid understanding of the architecture by demonstrating the depth of the Doric portico.
By this time, architects included staffage even in preliminary sketches, and use of figures was considered part of the training of architectural apprentices. While sometimes stock figures were used, Van Assen never did – although he did have favour certain types of groups, such as two ladies and a child. One of Sands’ favourite examples of staffage is the figures Van Assen contributed to Gandy’s 1801 Royal Academy exhibition drawing of Soane’s Pitzhanger Manor in Ealing. Here, the Soane family – and dog – are shown receiving fashionable visitors to their weekend entertaining house. The coupe carriage, with its red wheels and bay horses, was much imitated by other artists, with the coachman’s red seat also drawing the eye, despite the splendour of the proposed Manor itself.
His use of colour provides vivid highlights in his figures adorning Soane’s Lothbury Court at the Bank of England (1798) in bright blues and reds and more subtle greens. Since fashionable ladies were not likely to be regulars at the bank, they are probably there to help the composition.
‘Without the figures it’s just beige, beige, beige,’ says Sands.
After becoming professor of architecture at the Royal Academy in 1806, Soane put together 12 lectures on architectural history featuring more than 1,000 drawings. Staffage was prominent for the usual diverse reasons, and the exhibition features several drawings from this series. A family wearing scanty furs are shone as inhabitants of a supposedly primitive hut, believed at the time to foreshadow elements from classical architecture. An interior of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul uses staffage to encourage the viewer to join in with the figures depicted as they appear to stand back and consider the amazing scale of the interior.
As a companion piece, a short film explores how contemporary practices nimtim, Office S&M, OMMX and muf architecture/art use figures in their drawings to convey how the spaces they create could be used, and by whom. In doing so, the film also touches on important wider issues relating to inclusivity and co-design, including the risk of diverse figures being cynically appropriated for commercial gain. There’s clearly plenty more to be said on this than is possible here – it would have been great if the exhibition could have included some actual contemporary drawings, but that’s a whole other show.
In the spirit of inclusion, this highly enjoyable show also includes interpretation aimed at children, as well as codes to reference more content online such as short stories based on the drawings.
‘I hope they enjoy and I hope they find it fun,’ says Sands. ‘I’m expecting fingermarks on the glass!’
Fanciful Figures: People in Architectural Drawings, until 9 June 2024, Sir John Soane’s Museum, 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London WC2A 3BP