An art book for children: A dog’s-eye view of an architect’s household

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The Journal of Mrs Soane’s Dog Fanny by Herself

Mirabel Cecil with illustrations by Francesca Martin

If Fanny’s journal seems aimed at 8-year-olds (my guess), it is an amusing read for any age. Her master (or at any rate the husband of her mistress) was Sir John Soane (1753–1837), who left his mark on London by designing the Bank of England in Threadneedle Street and the Dulwich Picture Gallery in what was then the suburb of Dulwich. His buildings are in the neo-classical style with much natural lighting from windows and skylights. His home in Lincoln’s Inn Fields was a museum even before his death.

In what sort of house does an architect and teacher choose to live? Sir John Soane chose one of the oddest, most eccentric, most individual houses in London. On the north side of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, it contains the classical and other historical items, both structural and decorative (including an Egyptian sarcophagus), that most attracted Soane. Fascinated by the possibilities of light and shadow, Soane designed his house with as many windows, lanterns, courtyards, skylights and mirrors as feasible. At the same time, artificial light was (and still is) kept to a minimum, so that the house has a different feel on sunny and overcast days. Whether you find Soane a discerning connoisseur or a hopeless magpie will depend on your own taste.

Fanny was a real dog; there are even two paintings of her in the Soane Museum; she was a little short-haired black and tan toy pinscher. In the present work, carefully pieced together by Mirabel Cecil from newly discovered journals left by the clever dog, Fanny has numerous adventures in this unusual house. According to the journals, charmingly illustrated by Francesca Martin in a generally Regency style of watercolour or pencil drawings, Fanny’s sidekick was Mew, the cat next door.

In the first story the four-footed friends watch the new caryatids being delivered to adorn the front elevation of the house. When the large Greek statues are in place, Fanny and Mew make their way up to the loggia to have a closer look at them. Mew challenges Fanny to climb one of them and he scampers up to the head of the statue. What cat owner would be surprised at the next development? Mew can’t get back down again. Then it begins to rain and Fanny has to hurry and find a human being to come and rescue her friend.

One evening in the deserted (at least by people) Drawing Office on the top floor, a mouse scurries across the room and Mew ‘boldly leapt after it across the table, hurtling straight through a model of some ruins … The ruins scattered everywhere’.  Unfortunately these ‘ruins’ are a model of Stonehenge, which Soane’s students have to draw as an exercise in perspective and proportion. The next day one of the pupils, Matthew, sets to work putting the model together again, on the basis of a drawing he had made of it. Says the helpful little pinscher, ‘It took him quite a while, but he didn’t complain, and I filched a jam tart from the kitchen to keep him going in this fiddly work’.

The model of Stonehenge is still there in the Drawing Office for visitors to see. Similarly the other stories and pictures relate to objects still on view in the Soane Museum. There is a scary night in the ‘catacombs’, when Fanny and Mew are accidentally locked in and have an awkward encounter with a rat.

As Sir John Soane designed an elaborate tomb for his wife when she died in 1815, we have Fanny’s sorrowful pages concerning the illness and death of her mistress. The little dog is inconsolable and takes to curling up on the floor of Mrs Soane’s wardrobe, where there are comforting scents. But little Fanny has promised her mistress to be a companion to Sir John, and so life goes on. The final picture is a double-page spread of the library, with Sir John reclining on a chaise longue with Fanny on the floor beside him. The visitor to the Museum will recognize the library, for the view is the same now, minus only Sir John and the faithful Fanny.

The adventures of the furry chums are charming, low-key escapades set in the Soane Museum and make a visit to Number 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields all the more entertaining for a small child – or a bigger ‘inner child’. Nothing will make you guffaw and roll on the floor, but there is quiet humour in the imagined life and activities of Mrs Soane’s beloved pet.

This book is published by Sir John Soane’s Museum, 2010. 75 pp. 29 colour/13 mono illus, £10.00. ISBN 978-0-9558762-3-3