Charles Holland Architects has designed Sir John Soane’s Museum’s exhibition of paintings and engravings by the eighteenth-century satirist William Hogarth

Buildings.

Hogarth: Place and Progress is a major William Hogarth retrospective taking place at Sir John Soane’s Museum in London this autumn. Charles Holland Architects was commissioned by the museum to design the exhibition which includes a number of works – such as ‘Marriage A-la-Mode’ and ‘Industry and Idleness’ – that have been loaned to the museum for the first time. These are displayed alongside Soane’s own collection of Hogarth paintings, among them ‘The Rake’s Progress’ series.

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The principal challenge was to design a method for displaying Hogarth’s works that allowed them to be experienced collectively as well as via an episodic sequence throughout the museum. Conservation issues around the works and the museum’s historic fabric were of paramount importance.

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The design takes its cue from historic methods of exhibiting Hogarth’s work as well as the objects and furniture present in the museum’s interior. The starting point was an historic etching from 1884 showing ‘The Rake’s Progress’ displayed on an easel-like frame in the South Drawing Room. From this drawing the Charles Holland Architects developed a series of zig-zagging timber screens that populate a number of different rooms within the museum, allowing the works to be seen in series while respecting the grade-I-listed interior.

The hardwood-framed screens are intended to be read as items of furniture rather than traditional gallery walls. Their upper sections incorporate coloured plaster panels on which the paintings are displayed, and the lower sections include mirrored panels that reflect aspects of Soane’s interior.

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The combination of mirrors, voids and the zig-zagging form of the frames creates illusions and reflections that play subtle perceptual games. The colours, dimensions and orientation of the screens change according to each room. The practice has also designed a vitrine for the display of the museum’s own Hogarth volume in the Foyle Space; this object relates visually and materially to the screens to make a family of new display elements.