Architecture
Soane's slave
Gavin Stamp
lu a letter of 1831, John Constable wrote that 'I was shocked that such a niA au as should never have been elected an 'Acadeician,' and felt that 'I could not myself vote for any other architect while he still breathed.' The architect of whose shab- bY treatment by the Royal Academy Co.nstable was complaining, was. Joseph Mich able
Gandy who, as an artist, was
!ahnost the equal of Piranesi and who as certainly vul,a.ughtsman Etnhgelandrineshtas architectural b
visit man to Sir John Soane's Museum will
produced.. barge seen Gandy's work, possibly unwit- jinglY, for Gandy — `Soane's slave', as Sir 21111 Summerson has described him perspectives almost all of the large, luminous Poersrlectives of Soane's designs which hang Gri the walls in Lincoln's Inn Fields. But sober; work for Soane was comparatively nZet; when left to his own devices het
e drew
and buildings but fantastic architecture, which It is to h - many of his magnificent fantasies „, 'u can be seen for the first time in a Mailable exhibition at the Architectural 'ssociation, (until 36 Bedford Square, WC1 b 10 December). onen poor Gandy suffered from being neither beginning nor the other. Despite promising toeghill. flings, his career was a disaster owing L .,iis. com__ because lug to maturity during the great te:ue g hiatus of the Napoleonic Wars an.c1 se he was neither a successful arch,- st„, nor a prom artist he met with the un- "Mathetic attitude of the Academy. dereanY, melancholy, resentful of his thDendence upon others, he was, in fact, st e quintessential Romantic artist. Con- r,_411,tlY in debt, he designed the female Iiiicnitentiary in Lancaster Castle while h. e London was sitting in the Fleet Prison in al. hdon. Soane, who recognised Gandy s asekat talent, constantly helped him out and pa.ed. him to prepare those extraordinary b,U-I, tnlgs of the Bank of England or of the hdu'wleh Picture Gallery which, at times, have More than a hint of the fantastic.
Gandy exhibited at the Academy almost every year until his death in 1843. Some of these are ideal designs for Imperial Palaces, but the most celebrated are his visions of Sublime, terrifying architecture. This, as a subject, was not peculiar to Gandy. Vast terraces, endless colonnades and remote, sinister buildings set against turbulent skies appear in the work of several early 19th- century painters: Turner, David Roberts and, above all, John Martin. Gandy did even better because, as he was an architect, he made these visions seem convincing and real. Many of these paintings are imaginary reconstructions of ancient temples. Like Piranesi before him and William Walcot after, Gandy used the Antique as an excuse for a personal vision of a monumental, exotic architecture of truly Sublime power. Users of the RIBA Library will know Can- dy's 'Tomb of Merlin', glowing in a dark, vaulted cave. Here in the AA's exhibition is also 'The Tomb of Agamemnon', a Greek Revival fantasy set in a powerful interior which might have been designed by Soane. Just as Boullee's megalomaniac fantasies in pre-Revolutionary France had a close rela- tion to contemporary design, so, here, the division betwen fantasy and real architec- ture is blurred, as it was when Gandy drew Soane's Bank of England in ruins. I do not know if the 'Boat-house for Sir J. Lugard', was a serious commission, but it would have been wonderful: a rugged Tuscan tem- ple, half submerged in a lake. As for 'Pandemonium, or part of the high capital of Satan and his peers' (a subject later tackled by Martin), this stunning, huge watercolour has to be seen to be believed.
In opening this exhibition, John Sum- merson recalled how he had first written about Gandy in 1936, which was the year Surrealism hit London and when British precursors of this phenomenon were being sought. Gandy was not, of course, a proto- Surrealist, but his visionary paintings have the qualities which make the work of Salvador Dali so successful: the impossible represented with highly sophisticated and accomplished realism. Gandy had both the technical skills of an architect and a water-
colour technique of the high standard of English painting at the time; the result was triumphant success in the recondite genre of architectural fantasy: convincing represen- tations of extraordinary architecture liber- ated from the tiresome restraints of practi- cality and economics.
Gandy did have a small career as an in- dependent architect: a few houses, Storrs Hall by Lake Windermere, the curious Doric House on the upper slopes of Bath. He could not ever build what he imagined, but flourished instead in this curious but vital and recurring tradition in architectural development. As Summerson wrote in his splendid essay on Gandy in Heavenly Man- sions (1949), 'in his own particular kingdom — the kingdom of architectural fantasy he reigns absolute. And that kingdom has its own unique constitution. This local sovereignty makes Gandy, in a sense, the companion if not the peer of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Walter Scott.'
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