Yet Soane’s most important work between 1810 and 1818 was private, except for what he built as Architect to the Chelsea Hospital, and, in the case of his house and his family tomb, wholly personal. All that remains of consequence of his work at the Chelsea Hospital, the stables of 1814-17, might as well be private, for this is no great monument with columned portico and Pantheon-dome such as preoccupied most architects of Soane’s generation and status abroad (Plate 28A). Rigidly astylar, boldly arcuated, and executed in common yellowish London stock bricks, with no more deference to the purplish walling bricks and bright orange-red rubbed dressings of Wren’s earlier buildings at the Hospital than to his English Baroque style, this is as utilitarian as any project of Durand’s. Moreover, in its very simple detailing this reflects, and quite consciously, something of that primitivistic aspect of international Romantic Classical theory deriving from the theories of Soane’s favourite critical author, Laugier. Above all, in the proportioning and in the organization of the arcuated elements, the design of the stables is personal almost to the point of perversity. It is far more comprehensible to the abstract tastes of the twentieth century than in accordance with the ideals most widely accepted in the England of Soane’s own day. Soane’s Dulwich Gallery of 1811-14, outside London, is likewise built of common brick and has similarly primitivistic detailing. This structure is most characteristic of its period in being a museum, indeed it is the earliest nineteenth-century example; but it could hardly be more different from the line of sculpture galleries that runs from Klenze’s Glyptothek in Munich through Bindesbøll’s Thorwaldsen Museum in Copenhagen. Nor does it much resemble the picture galleries of the period running from those in Schinkel’s Altes Museum in Berlin through Klenze’s Ältere Pinakothek in Munich to Voit’s Neuere Pinakothek, also in Munich. It is least unlike the last of these, although that was designed forty years later; this similarity may help to suggest how confusingly advanced in style Soane, eldest of the leading architects of the post-Napoleonic decades, remained even in middle and old age.