SIR JOHN SOANE'S ARCHITECTURAL MODELS

Sir John Soane was, among other things, one of the great collectors of architectural knowledge. His house at 13 Lincoln's Inn Fields — preserved exactly as he left it at his death in 1837 and now one of London's finest museums — contains drawings, fragments, casts, and models accumulated over a lifetime of obsessive study. Among the most extraordinary of these is the model room: a collection of small-scale plaster models of ancient monuments, many made in the early nineteenth century by the French model maker François Fouquet.

These three pieces are reproductions of models from that collection, made under licence with Sir John Soane's Museum. The Monument at Mylasa and the Monument at Palmyra are ancient Carian and Roman structures; the Temple of Artemis the Huntress stood on the banks of the Ilissus in Athens. All three are buildings that exist today only as ruins or in records — Palmyra's monuments were largely destroyed by ISIS in 2015 — which makes Fouquet's early nineteenth-century originals, and these reproductions of them, something closer to acts of preservation than decoration.

Each model is produced in plaster and displayed under an acrylic case.