Soane and Death: The Tombs and Monuments of Sir John Soane.

Death was a major preoccupation for John Soane. Its trappings and symbolism, always determinedly non-Christian, provided him with a considerable repertoire of significant ornament and evocative architecture.

Personally Soane was dedicated from his early years to the creation of a professional life which, he hoped, would be seen by future generations as a model. Death was a vanishing point on the horizon but also the beginning of a life organised to be immemorial - within his house-museum at 13, Lincoln's Inn Fields. The Soane family tomb at St Pancras is one memorial, but the house and his own writings spell out Soane's odd life of ambition and aspiration, dashed by professional and personal disappointment.

The essays in this catalogue range satisfyingly around the subject of the exhibition. David Watkin connects Soane's preoccupation with mortality with the Enlightenment search for origins and in particular looks at the vision of an Elysian setting for funerary monuments. Roger Bowdler engagingly traces the chaste Neo-Classical tomb (though not those designed by Soane, which appear as catalogue entries) now vanishing fast in rundown burial grounds and churchyards under the twin attacks of atmospheric pollution and vandalism. Giles Waterfield's essay takes the notion of the 'donor-memorial', placing Sir Francis Bourgeois and Noel and Margaret Desanfans' mausoleum and gallery at Dulwich against a wider framework - culminating in some lavish twentieth-century American acts of patronage, such as the Getty Museum. Glare Gittings' essay looks at Soane's own behaviour faced with bereavement and the attitudes of his oldest friends particularly Rowland Burdon, carelessly misnamed Reginald throughout the essay bemused by his rigid attitude of frozen grief and bitterness after his wife's death. Soane the mourning widower was an unflinching Neo-Classical pose in himself.