ARTS A winter evening at the Sir John Soane’s museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields and a group of affluent twenty- and thirtysomethings is being given a candlelit tour. Occasionally the blue flickering of BlackBerry screens competes with the warm glow of the tapers, but mostly the guests are rapt with attention as the guide explains how Soane, Georgian architect and lover of art and antiquities, built up his extraordinary collection.
The sophisticated group peering at Soane’s Hogarth paintings, Piranesi sketches and famous Egyptian sarcophagus contains one artist and a few people who run private galleries. For the most part, however, it consists of investment bankers, venture capitalists and lawyers – those accustomed to spending their days at a desk in the City rather than at an easel or auction house.
