In 1802, John Soane bought a series of paintings by William Hogarth titled A Rake’s Progress (1732–4). He purchased the series at Christie’s for £598.10 and it was one of the highlights of his growing collection of art and antiquities. Soane acquired the paintings specifically for his country estate, Pitzhanger Manor, in Ealing, which he bought in 1800, and hung them in pride of place in the Small Drawing Room where all visitors to the house could see them.
The series is one of Hogarth’s most celebrated works. The eight panels detail the life journey of Tom Rakewell, a character of Hogarth’s invention, and illustrate the consequences of Tom’s immoral choices. The story tells of the young man who inherits a fortune from his miserly father but squanders it on gambling and prostitutes, ultimately resulting in his descent into madness and an early death. Only his long-suffering fiancée, Sarah Young, is left to mourn her foolish lover.
When Soane sold Pitzhanger Manor in 1810, he transported the paintings to his central London home, Lincoln’s Inn Fields in Holborn, now the Sir John Soane’s Museum. Over time, however, Soane would witness his own two sons following a path to vice and destruction. Studying the paintings, for Soane, must have been like Dorian Gray observing his portrait disfigure before him as life seemingly imitated art. Though Soane can hardly be accused of being as miserly as Rakewell’s father, the parallels are remarkable. While Soane’s eldest son, John, might be partly excused for his apparent fecklessness and apathy because of the ill health that plagued him throughout his life, the younger son George’s wayward behaviour seems to be lifted directly from the paintings.
Persistently in debt despite a generous annual allowance from his father, George often turned to his mother, whom he treated with disdain, to repay the ever-increasing sums he owed. Soane’s wife, Eliza, often concealed from her husband her role in rescuing George, though Soane suspected she was paying off the debts of both their sons. George chose an ill-suited wife, Agnes Boaden, mainly to spite his parents, and spent time in prison for a book-selling swindle he devised. Motivated by anger towards his parents, he published an anonymous two-part letter in The Champion in 1815, in which he attacked his father’s stellar reputation as an architect. A month later Mrs Soane, who suffered from poor health, died suddenly, which Soane attributed to heartache caused by George’s attacks in print.
Soane modelled Pitzhanger Manor as an innovative museum-like space to house his ambitious collection of art and objects to inspire all those who visited, including students. It would showcase items he purchased in the UK and abroad including art and sculpture but also artefacts, models, and architectural mouldings and features, that might be drawn upon to animate his own design. Soane could therefore easily demonstrate his ideas to clients and friends who might have otherwise struggled to envision his artistic intentions. One of the further motivations was the hope that the impressive house and collection might awaken his sons' passion for architecture and that they would follow him into the profession. They were fourteen and eleven years old when he bought the eighteenth-century villa, which he remodelled so that as well as the collection, it could also accommodate the family as a weekend country retreat.
For its history, it seems befitting to mount an exhibition at Pitzhanger that explores the role of family and relationships, the anxieties of parenthood and the function of familial proximity in the creative process of art. Idris Khan and Annie Morris are artists with distinct practices who explore colour, memory, history, time and space in different ways. They are also married and have two children and a dog named Pencil. When their work is seen together and in dialogue, it becomes clear how their lives together are written into their art. It should be emphasised, however, that the choice of Pitzhanger Manor as a site where relationships and the influence of the family are explored is where the comparison between the Soane family and the artists’ family ends. Morris and Khan enjoy a convivial family life with their children and rarely spend a moment apart.
Khan and Morris met at art school and married in 2009. As with many couples, their relationship has been tested and they have experienced both tragedy and joy as they have navigated life together. Their art, produced in adjoining studios, has started to visibly impact the other’s work over time. Observing their work side by side, one can appreciate how a single event rippled through it, resulting in very different outcomes as each learned to deal with the new reality in a distinct way. One can also see how the practice of each has influenced the other.
The main themes Khan explores in his practice are time, light and memory. He turns to music, philosophy, history, and architecture for his source material, and manipulates or layers materials to explore the significance of an idea across the ages. Reaching into the past to inform the work of the present is an approach Soane utilised in his designs for Pitzhanger Manor. Creating over one hundred drawings for the design of Pitzhanger, Soane was inspired by his grand Tour of Italy when he was a student. Arriving in Rome in 1778, Soane spent over two years studying the architecture of the ancient civilisations, visiting Hadrian’s villa in Tivoli and the Colosseum. The impact of this trip resonates in Pitzhanger where his linear spin on the Neoclassical style is evident. Wanting to acknowledge the weight of antiquitarian design on his contemporary style, Soane added a small ruin-like folly outside the house, creating a layering of architectural styles from various periods in one location. The façade, described by Soane as a ‘sort of self-portrait’[1] of himself, was modelled on the triumphal Arch of Constantine in Rome and features Iconic columns topped by a caryatid female figure like those on the Acropolis in Athens. This resonates closely with Khan, who explains that he looks to create ‘vibrations in an image that holds the weight of its cultural impact’.[2] The impact of the expressed idea behind the work is paramount.
Khan was born in Birmingham to a British Muslim family and grew up in Walsall, a market town in the West Midlands. He initially studied photography at the University of Derby and, although his practice has branched out to different media, his interest in the recording of time persists, the camera being the means of capturing a moment. Khan studied for a Masters degree at the Royal College of Art in London, and he considers this period as formative for the plethora of source material suddenly made available to him with his move to the city. Khan still uses much of this source material today, turning to music and philosophy in particular to inform his art. His studio library reflects his interests and mirrors the richness in Soane’s personal library who was attuned to the influence he might divine from his broad range of interests which included architecture, poetry, music, drama, history, sculputre and painting, and more.
One of the first pieces of Khan’s that drew critical attention was every … page of the Holy Qur’an (2004). Here, instead of drawing on the Qur’an as a source of inspiration, he uses the book as an object and as the material in his work. Khan photographed each page of the Holy Book and layered one image on top of another as transparencies, reminiscent of the X-rays his father, a surgeon, would have at home because of his work. Fascinated from a young age by the ghostly aesthetic of X-rays, they feed into his investigations into light. The work took two months to complete and the resulting effect is that of an illegible pattern, a soft fraying of lines that is geometric and abstract. Conceptually, one is looking at multiple points in time at once, which is in fact a Cubist concern. Like Schrödinger’s cat, Khan’s work is both dead and alive at the same time. The book is there for us to see, but we cannot see it. It speaks of an ambivalence to his birth religion and an anxiety about his past, but with a need to connect with it. He is finding his own way of celebrating his cultural tradition, though with apparent melancholic undertones.
Annie Morris studied at Central Saint Martins before completing her studies at the École de Beaux-Arts, Paris, and then the Slade School of Fine Art in London. She employs a variety of materials and media including sculpture, painting and tapestry, although drawing has always been, and remains, central to her practice. The oil-stick drawings featured in the exhibition, as with her other drawings, are bold and quick, drawn from mind to hand in a stream of consciousness, with instinct guiding her across the page rather than extensive design planning. The figures, abstract forms, cyphers and symbols that appear in her work are a new iconography unique to Morris. She draws with gestural freedom, her art informed by her own personal experience and by art history.
Citing a near-obsession with colour, Morris largely works with raw pigment and investigates colour as an essential part of how we experience the world. She selects her hues intuitively, approaching colour in a comparable way to Frida Kahlo. The young Kahlo famously included in her journal a lyrical stream-of-consciousness meditation on the symbolism of different colours that was inspired by an assortment of coloured pencils. She noted that green is a good warm light, blue an electricity and purity of love while yellow is ‘madness sickness fear, part of the sun and of happiness’, and used the colours to reflect these associations in her work. About black, she wrote: ‘nothing is black – really nothing.’[3]Likewise, Morris uses abstract colour to express her experiences, and her work can be read like a diary of her personal life that taps into a universal female experience.
Soane paid much attention to his choice of colours. He documented his colour schemes in watercolours which are still available today in the Soane’s Museum Archive (6. image of the watercolour). As Peter Thornton points out in his essay “Colour in Soane’s House”, as well as the bright coloured walls, the frames that are now aged to a dull sheen, while tasteful to a modern pallet, would have glittered in their newly applied gold.[4] The dark and aged floors would have been a fresh off-white pinewood draped in brightly coloured carpets. The windows in the Tribune were of coloured glass so that when light shone through them, it might imitate the warm Mediterranean light in an effect he called ‘lumière mystérieuse’.[5] Walking into Soane’s house would have been a kaleidoscopic experience of full-blooded colour and richly patterned wallpaper designs. He also thought the colour complimented well his collection of antiquities and plaster casts which tended to be monochromatic shades of cream.
Like Morris, Soane understood the use of colour when trying to excite, astonish and delight his audiences. Khan attributes his frequent use of ultramarine blue to a study that found it worked as a mood enhancer. Should a person feel sad on seeing the colour, they will feel more so whereas if a person feels happy on seeing it, they will likewise feel happier, thus Khan is exploring the psychological effect of the colour. As a response to the colour schemes and for the exhibition at Pitzhanger Manor, Khan created a coloured vinyl work titled After The Storm (2023) which mimics the light effects of a stained glass window in the Conservatory.
In 2010, a year after their marriage, Morris and Khan suffered a personal tragedy with the loss of their first child in a stillbirth. This shared experience marks their first truly life-altering hardship. Each found refuge in their art and saw a major shift in their artistic output. Khan started writing down his thoughts as lines in a poem and then made rubber stamps from the lines of text, which he stamped repetitively in a circle. The repetitive, cyclical pattern was cathartic and therapeutic for Khan. It was the start of his series of radiating stamped glass works, in which he layers sheets of glass that give a dimension of depth to the pattern. Khan has adopted this process for various works such as The Beginning (2016), in which through a burst of colour the occasional phrase is visible. The work resembles a mandala radiating from a point of origin. Seen from the front, the seven panels of the artwork blend into one black abyss.
Khan recalled Morris’s reaction to her grief. While he was solitarily writing down his thoughts, Morris would sit quietly in her studio drawing tight dark circles with a biro, creating large claustrophobic drawings. Over time, the circles became larger and looser, allowing in light and, after some time, colour. These drawings would eventually lead to her Stack series, in which she would make the circles in three dimensions. The sculptures, which are comprised of irregular spheres precariously arranged into tall columns, evoke the swell of pregnancy. Morris explains that the shape stood in for the shape that she lost. Sculpted in plaster and sand, the forms are painted with hand-sourced raw pigments in vivid colours such as ultramarine, viridian and ochre, which give Morris’s lumpen orbs a rich, vibrant hue.
Morris was exploring her own line of investigation with her Stack series – just as Khan was simultaneously seeking his own artistic refuge – maintaining the intensity while agonisingly selecting which pigments she might place together for the desired emotional response in her viewers. She also developed a technique in which the raw pigment seems to be lightly compressed on the surface, creating an impression of fragility. To touch it would agitate the pigment and destroy the work, or so it seems, creating a duality: the strength of the colour paired with the frailty of the substance. Poignantly, she says that by keeping the pigment raw, it remains alive. That the final iteration of this process should seem so joyful only speaks to Morris’s resolute spirit and defiance in the face of adversity. The shared experience of the stillbirth prompted both Khan and Morris to find solace in their art and moved their practice in a new direction. Motifs of layers and rhythm are present in both, though the formal work of each differs greatly.
Hanging on the walls in the main gallery are some of Khan’s latest canvases. He is still applying his signature layered motifs but is using a new element that he has absorbed from his wife: that of colour. By the same token, Morris’s distinctive Stack sculptures, which have become her most recognised series of artworks, have been created in monochrome. The more restrained pallet has a calmer effect than the highly coloured early Stack series, reflecting the influence of her husband’s art.
After the death of his wife in 1815, Soane was grief-stricken and blamed his son for causing ‘The burial of all that is dear to me in this world, and all I wished to live for.’[6]. In 1824 he found out that George was living in a ménage à troiswith his wife and her sister, by whom he had a child. Devastated, he mounted the newspaper article George wrote on a wooden board and painted a title above it that read: ‘Death blows given by George Soane 10th & 24th Sept. 1815’. It was nailed up in full view in the dining room at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The rift was permanent, and father and son would never speak again.
Sir John Soane is one of Britain’s most celebrated visionary architects. Interestingly, many of his designs are of a funerary character. He designed various mausoleums and tombs, including one for Eliza, as well as funerary monuments, and collected urns. Though two of his four children would die in infancy, his interest in the macabre is attributed to the death of his friend James King, who drowned when his boat capsized on his journey down the Thames to Greenwich. Soane was supposed to have been travelling with him that evening but cancelled due to a pressing deadline, and he saw the decision as one that had saved his life, especially as he did not know how to swim.
The Breakfast Room, with a curved ceiling surrounding oculus, painted with a sky blue and clouds ‘canopy’, takes inspiration from Classical memorials and funerary monuments. It is the room that receives the morning sunlight and that is why Soane chose it for where to have his breakfast. Here visitors will encounter Khan’s My Mother (2019). Created in the wake of another major loss in his life, the death of his mother in 2010, the sculpture serves as a portrait of her time on earth. For this work, Khan collected all the photographs he could find of his mother, which totalled a mere 380 and cast them in bronze. The black patina surface seems to absorb the light in the room, creating a radiating, silent presence, echoing The Kaaba in Mecca in form. This sculpture is an expression of an entire life, a melancholy reminder of the passage of time measured against the sum of our achievements. It is time with volume assigned to it.
Khan’s interest in representing time led him to investigate various ways in which it might be depicted. He first employed the technique seen in My Mother in his sculpture 65,000 photographs, a maquette of which is seen in the Dressing Room. Printing on standard-sized photographic paper Khan arranged the photographs he took on his phone over a five-year period in a reverse-pyramid shape. It is a critique of the abundance of image-making in our digital age, and the fact that most of the photographs we take on our phones are largely discarded. Khan then pulled and pushed the sheets of paper to create a ridged effect on the edges, before sand-casting the sculpture in aluminium. ‘It almost feels like the rings of a tree,’ he observes. ‘I’m not showing the pictures themselves; you’re just seeing the edges of the paper. It is about using the physicality of a photograph to show time.’[7]
Soane’s collection of antiques and antiquities is also an act of representing time. Having visited Naples and Pompeii as part of his Grand Tour, Soane was impressed with the time frieze at the archaeological site, a model of the city as it looked in 1820 can be found in Soane’s collection. The year he acquired Pitzhanger he also bought the Cawdor Vase from Baron Cawdor, a late fourth century BC vase around which he probably designed the Breakfast Room. His interests extended to non-western items including the Sarcophagus of Seti I (5. include an image of the Sarcophagus – do you have a better one?), one of the oldest museum objects in a UK public collection and the crown jewel of his collection. When it arrived in his possession, he arranged a party which lasted three days in 1825 to celebrate. The thousands of objects, when viewed as a collection rather than individually, can be seen as a chart of cultural progress over time.
Understanding the impact of time and weary his collection might be dismantled by his son, in 1833, Soane negotiated a private Act of Parliament: to preserve his house and collection, exactly as it was arranged at the time of his death, in perpetuity – and to keep it open and free for inspiration and education. When visiting Lincoln’s Inn Field today, which largely remains untouched from how he left it, the items from his collection are stacked high one on top of the other and up the walls, filling each corner with history. Some of the designs that originated at Pitzhanger Manor to complement the collection were transferred by Sonae to the townhouse when the collection moved there so one can still admire his initial intention for the collection and how the architecture against which it is set inspire future generations.
Morris’ flower woman, a recurring motif in Morris’s drawings and sculptures, started as a portrait of her mother. The drawing is of a woman’s body with the head, and therefore face, replaced by a flower. At times, she appears pregnant, crouching on the ground, or striding confidently in a groundless universe. Over time and as Morris herself has become a mother, it has morphed into a self-portrait. Morris explains the presence of the figure as though she is an unintentional preoccupation:
The flower woman came about many years ago kind of as a way of making a self-portrait... I wanted to abandon any face – I like the emotion that you get from it being scribbled – and the petals made me think about how transient things are, the beauty of a flower disappearing. I like the fact that she creeps back into a lot of my drawings.
In her tapestry works, Morris stitches her frantic drawings into the wall hangings, creating an image which is at once freehand and deliberate. Though the work might seem spontaneous, it involves a laborious process of sewing the lines into the fabric. Being neither sculpture nor drawing, neither figurative nor entirely abstract, the work occupies a space in between. The motifs reappear from tapestry to tapestry and the line is broken and fragile. Looking at the work, one’s eyes dart from one object to the next. There is nowhere to rest, nowhere that calms the viewer. The restlessness is all-consuming.
In Soane’s bedroom at Pitzhanger Manor, the bed has been dressed in bedsheets drawn on by Morris. She often finds playful spaces to draw and is not one to be confined to the four corners of a canvas, as with the armchairs seen in the Drawing Room. The sheets are Morris’s personal bedsheets on loan for the duration of the exhibition. Overlooking the bed is Khan’s work titled every… William Turner postcard from Tate Britain (2004). It is a salute to the whimsical while remaining true to his investigation into the recording of time. For this work, Khan photographed each postcard sold at Tate Britain’s shop of J.M.W. Turner’s work and digitally layered the photographs to create a composite Turner painting, an X-ray dissection of his art. As with the Qur’an piece, it includes all of Turner’s paintings but they are not visible; they are impossibly obstructed.
Turner was of great importance to Soane. They were close friends, colleagues at the Royal Academy of Arts, not least because of their shared love of fishing. Of all Soane’s many guests at the house, Turner was the only guest invited to sleep at Pitzhanger Manor. The ghostly appearance of the artwork reverberates like Turner’s spirit in the room.
This exhibition marks the moment at which Khan and Morris are, for the first time in their careers, truly collaborating. The result has stretched both to new levels of engagement with their art and its presentation and, most importantly, its interpretation. Hogarth understood the role of collaboration in the creative process, assigning it a higher state of potential. As he wrote inThe Analysis of Beautyin 1753: ‘Any two opposite colours of the rainbow (e.g. yellow and blue) form a third between them, thus imparting to each other their peculiar qualities. The sight of what they were originally is quite lost, and instead, a most pleasing green is found, which colour, nature has chosen for the vestment of the earth, and with the beauty of which the eye is never tired.’[8]
[1] Sir John Soane, Pitzhanger Manor: John Soane’s Country Home, Scala Arts & Heritage Publishers Ltd, 2019, p. 10.
[2]Idris Khan in conversation with Jennifer Blessing, curator of photography, Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1 December 2021,https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I95I7Ymk7PA, accessed August 2023.
[3] Frida Kahlo, The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait (1995), quoted online, <https://www.themarginalian.org/2017/07/06/frida-kahlo-diary-color/>, accessed August 2023.
[4] Peter Thornton, Colour in Soane's House, Meddelelser fra Thorvaldsens Museum, 1989, p. 197-204.
[5] Sir John Soane, Pitzhanger Manor: John Soane’s Country Home, Scala Arts & Heritage Publishers Ltd, 2019, p. 12.
[6] Sir John Soane, Sir John Soane’s Diary, quoted online <https://www.soane.org/features/death-eliza-soane> (accessed September 2023)
[7] Khan, interview with Marigold Warner, ‘Idris Khan’s 65,000 Photographs’, British Journal of Photography, 18 November 2019, https://www.1854.photography/2019/11/idris-khan-65000-photographs/, accessed August 2023.
[8] William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, ed. Ronald Paulson (New Haven 1997), p.156, available online, https://archive.org/details/analysisbeauty00hogagoog/page/n13/mode/2up?q=rainbow, accessed August 2023.