John Soane (1753-1837) was appointed to the prestigious post of Professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy on 28 March 1806. The duties of the Professor were: “to read annually six public Lectures, calculated to form the taste of the Students, to instruct them in the beauties or faults of celebrated productions, to fit them for an unprejudiced study of books, and for a critical examination of structures; his salary shall be thirty pounds a year; and he shall continue in office during the King's pleasure.” Soane had long been connected with two of the founding members of the Academy, the architects Sir William Chambers and George Dance. Chambers was a Francophile who had himself been trained by JacquesFrançois Blondel, a future professor at the Academie Royale d’ Architecture in Paris which he and Dance took as their model in founding the Royal Academy. England had been one of the last European powers to adopt the academies of arts, which, beginning in the Italian Renaissance, had been given a new lease of life by Louis XIV as part of his centralised control of art and production.

The Royal Academy, with a royal charter granted by George III who took a close personal interest in it, “sought to establish a new artistic hierarchy through the formation of an elite of forty like-minded academicians elected for life.” Soane entered the Royal Academy School of Architecture, where the teaching of architecture was organised by William Chambers, as one of only nine students admitted in 177l. His admission was probably on the suggestion of George Dance, the brilliantly inventive architect in whose office Soane had started his career in 1768. Though the Royal Academy was hardly a serious rival to its opposite number in Paris, Soane was, nonetheless, profoundly influenced by the illustrated lectures on architecture by the first Professor of Architecture at the Academy, Thomas Sandby, who stressed the importance of appropriate character in archi- tecture. In 1776 Soane won the Gold Medal of the Academy for his visionary design for a Triumphal Bridge, and was awarded the King's Travelling Scholarship in 1778. He claimed that he owed the success of his career to this award, for it enabled him to make a Grand Tour in 1778-1780 which he would never have been able to make without financial assistance, having been humbly born as the son of a Reading bricklayer.