Joseph Gandy

ON ARCHITECTURE: AN EXCERPT FROM A LETTER TO SIR JOHN SOANE

“There is no branch of trade or manufacture in this country but requires the artist’s aid and who so proper as the architect to do it, even the painter and sculptor in their highest departments and the whole of the arts and sciences are but decorations to the walls of a palace or church or house, and all should emanate from the architect’s genius. Wren Jones Kent and others did this and led taste from the Gothic age to this moment of Grecian imitation. I believe you are the only one who has dared to go further and show that architecture is not an imitative but an inventive art, whose models must be formed in the mind, because there are none in nature.”

Priv. Corr. III G.1 (16) 8-3-1816. 
Joseph Gandy was an English artist, architect and architectural theorist who worked as Soane's draughtsman and creative partner.

With thanks to Bruce Boucher, director of Sir John Soane's Museum.

Alberti on the qualities of the architect in his Ten Books on Architecture