Bruce Boucher

Born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1948, Bruce Boucher studied at Harvard before going to Oxford to read for a second undergraduate degree in English. After Oxford, he then took an MA at The Courtauld Institute and then went on to pursue a career divided between academia and museums. Boucher taught at University College London (UCL) for over 20 years and is now Professor Emeritus at UCL. He has served as Curator and Head of European Sculpture, Decorative Arts, and Ancient Art at the Art Institute of Chicago and as Director of the Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia. In 2016, he was appointed Deborah Loeb Brice Director of Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, retiring in 2023. Boucher’s published works include Earth and Fire: Italian Terracotta Sculpture from Donatello to Canova and John Soane’s Cabinet of Curiosities. This narrative is excerpted from an interview with the Rhodes Trust on 21 August 2025. 

On applying for the Rhodes Scholarship 

I went to Harvard to do my first degree. I thought I would go on to become a professor and initially, I was thinking of Latin and Greek. My interest drifted more towards English literature, so in the end I did a degree in Latin and English. My idea was that after the Rhodes I would come back to Harvard and do a PhD in 18^th-century literature. I think probably, fortunately, the Rhodes saved me from doing something like that. If I had gone on and just done graduate school straight out of college, I would have had a much narrower background, intellectually and emotionally. I did have some wonderful teachers there and I liked that there were lots of people around who liked talking about books and ideas, but Harvard was a tough atmosphere. There wasn’t much coddling and it was really very sink or swim.  

At Harvard, like some other Ivy League schools, we were encouraged to apply for postgraduate scholarships. So, I applied for a Marshall and I applied for a Rhodes. There was a healthy contingent that applied in my year and I think five of us got Rhodes Scholarships. Certainly, though, there were no women applying, because it was a few years later that they became eligible for the Scholarships. So, the odds weren’t that much stacked against you. Still, I wasn’t expecting to win. When I did, it was like Christmas as a child. I felt I’d won the lottery.  

‘It’s a bit like becoming the conductor of an orchestra’ 

I was particularly interested in Italian Renaissance painting and a friend introduced me to a book by someone at The Courtauld Institute. I suppose that really made me decide to apply to The Courtauld. I did my MA there and then managed to get a teaching job at UCL. That was wonderful in a sense but I did become sort of locked into a system. By the time I began looking into the possibility of going back into an American university, the Renaissance wasn’t really that fashionable anymore.  

Alongside my academic work, I was also interested in exhibitions. It was a catch-22, though, because you couldn’t become a curator if you weren’t already a curator. It was a bit of old boys’ and girls’ network. But I got a Leverhulme fellowship to work on a big exhibition for the V&A, and I went on to be curator there for two years. That gave me street cred, if you will. And then, after 9/11, I felt all the more I would like to go back to America. I was interested in a couple of jobs, and I was having lunch with the director of the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown when he said, ‘Well, what about the Art Institute of Chicago? They’re looking for a head of sculpture.’ It turned out I was going there to give a lecture about the exhibition that I’d done at the V&A, so I met the director then he came over and saw the exhibition and then offered me a job.  

I’d been to Chicago occasionally and I was very taken with it. It had wonderful institutions and was sort of like a halfway house between Los Angeles and New York. My wife and I were there for about six-and-a-half years. I wanted to become a director and I went to a training course at the Getty, which was great. It was like looking at what I normally did from 30,000 feet. Later, I had the opportunity to go to the University of Virginia and become the director of the art museum there. When you become a director, it’s a bit like becoming the conductor of an orchestra. You stand at the middle, and you are concerned with balance and supporting soloists, etc. And then, at the end, if there is applause, there’s applause for everyone. If it’s brickbats, it’s on you.  

Virginia was a lovely place to be, but then the job at the Soane Museum came up, in 2015. It really spoke to my interest in the history of collecting, in particular. My wife is English and I realised that I’d spent more time in London than anywhere else in my adult life and that London was probably home. So, I was quite happy to come back. It was great to end my career in a major museum. Soane himself was very interested in contemporary art, so we did a lot of contemporary exhibitions that spoke to different aspects of the collection. I think my favourite exhibition was one we did on Hogarth. It ended just before lockdown, so we went out on a high note. We managed to get through lockdown without any layoffs or redundancies, and we communicated through a weekly newsletter. It was a good way to build up a sense of community during that time when very few of us could come into the museum.