Last Word: The Restored Soane Museum

The world’s great museums provide one of the enduring pleasures of travel. However, the scale of their holdings can be intimidating. And nowadays the most celebrated institutions, such as the Louvre or the Uffizi, are often so crowded that the experience is severely compromised. Increasingly, I tend to seek out smaller museums, especially those on which the tourist hordes are unlikely to descend.

One of my favorites is the Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, which saw the completion of a seven-year restoration project last September. Soane was a neoclassical architect who rose from humble origins as a bricklayer to become professor of architecture at the Royal Academy of Arts and the designer of the Bank of England.

The museum comprises three houses (Nos. 12, 13 and 14) in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, located at the western edge of the City of London’s financial district. Soane himself lived in No. 13, surrounded by an astonishing private collection. This still includes classical bronzes, mosaics and vases; paintings by Canaletto, Watteau, Hogarth, Turner and Reynolds; drawings by Piranesi, Wren and Robert Adam; and, improbably, the sarcophagus of Egyptian pharaoh Seti I.

Soane pursued a lifelong feud with his son George, whom he considered to be a hopeless wastrel, and left his houses to the nation to prevent him from inheriting them. George’s loss is our gain. Soane died in 1837 at the age of 83, with the terms of his will stipulating that his properties be preserved in their original state. Today they form an enthralling time capsule. Best of all, the number of visitors is restricted to 90 at any one time.