Soane Museum Study Group: Travel Literature at Sir John Soane’s Museum

Description

Frances Sands – Travels of the mind: travel literature at Sir John Soane’s Museum

In recent months their speaker, Frances Sands, has been considering the large but previously ignored collection of sixteenth- to nineteenth-century travel literature at Sir John Soane’s Museum. Among the 7,000 books collected by Soane, almost 1,000 of these offer travelogues, treatises, guides, histories, tours, descriptions and observations on foreign countries and cultures, as well as collected letters from abroad, poems and fiction detailing foreign countries, and books offering instruction in foreign languages. Many of these pertain to countries and cultures which Soane would never experience. Given that Soane’s collecting was motivated by his role as an architectural educator, and his Museum was formed to create his ‘academy of architecture’, why did he collect so many books dealing with foreign places which did not obviously serve his architectural purposes? This paper will consider why Soane collected this genre of publication; what this sub-category of Soane’s collection encompasses; and offer some highlights from among that corpus.

A selection of travel literature from the Soane Museum collection will be on display at the end of the talk.

Date

Location

Sir John Soane’s Museum
13 Lincoln's Inn Fields
London
WC2A 3BP

Prices

Contact and Booking Details

More information at this website.

Reserve tickets at this website

Disclaimer

The information and prices in this listing are presumed to be correct at the time of publishing, but please always check with the venue before making a special trip.

All images are supplied by the exhibition organiser.