By using this website you agree to our Cookie policy

December 2022

Vol. 164 / No. 1437

Leighton House Museum, London

Reviewed by Susan Owens

Leighton House Museum, London from 15th October

One could illustrate changing attitudes to Victorian art through the vicissitudes of Leighton House. When Frederic Leighton died in January 1896 this most opulent of studio-homes was lined with works of art, from Islamic tiles to nineteenth-century French paintings, displayed in an interior ‘built’, as his sisters wrote, ‘for his own artistic delight’. [1] Although it opened as a public museum in 1900, it was without his collections of paintings, decorative arts, furniture, textiles and carpets that had been auctioned a few months after his death in an eight-day sale. Decades of neglect followed. Such was the disdain for the house’s original interiors that by the 1960s there was barely a wall that had not been painted cream or a ceiling that did not have a fluorescent strip light suspended from it. Worse still, the bulldozers were closing in. 1961 saw the nearby studio-home of Leighton’s friend George Frederic Watts demolished to make room for flats. Kensington and Chelsea London Borough Council, responsible for Leighton House, ominously resisted calls to put a preservation order on it.

The turning point came in 1969 with the inauguration of the Friends of Leighton House, under the Presidency of John Betjeman; and in the 1970s further momentum was brought by the beginnings of a new, scholarly focus that sought to rehabilitate Leighton as an artist. In 1982, when the dynamic Stephen Jones was appointed as the house’s first curator, the painstaking process of restoration began in earnest with the steadfast support of the long-term Chairman of the Friends, Richard Ormond. Now, with the reopening of Leighton House following an ambitious programme of redevelopment under the curatorial direction of Daniel Robbins, the project has been brought to a resoundingly successful conclusion.

The visitor now enters by stepping into a new spacious entrance hall and shop constructed in the Perrin wing, a substantial annex added to the east end of the house in the 1920s. A large wall-case offers a clear and generous introduction to Leighton as a man, an artist, an Academician and a collector through portraits, letters, a small bronze reduction of his Athlete wrestling with a python (c.1903–11), a Damascene jar and an Iznik jug, a cast of his hands and his palette. The architects, BDP, have reclaimed the contiguous space beneath Leighton’s first-floor Winter Studio, an extension supported on elegant iron pillars that he added in the 1880s to the east of his main working space to provide better light for painting. An unsympathetic block housing kitchens and lavatories added in the 1950s has been removed and the columns and plinths revealed; the airy space now houses the De Morgan Café (Fig.27). A glass wall allows views out onto the loggia and garden and a large wall case glitters invitingly with colourful ceramics by William De Morgan, who played a key part in the house’s decorative schemes.

The most striking change to the building is the addition of a brick rotunda to the east that replaces an external fire escape. Connected to the house via a glass link, this new structure, which houses a spiral staircase and lift, ingeniously echoes the form of the 1877 Arab Hall at the west of the house that Leighton built to display his collection of Islamic tiles. In a crowdfunded project, the Iranian artist Shahrzad Ghaffari was commissioned to create an eleven metre- high mural for the new staircase (Fig.28). In Oneness Ghaffari has sought to make connections between cultures by drawing on thirteenth-century verses by Rumi, using calligraphic brushstrokes to represent this poem’s universal themes of love and knowledge. Like the Arab Hall, the mural offers an immersive experience, its imagery unfolding as the visitor moves up and down the stairs.

The architects have created much needed additional space by extending the Perrin wing downwards. As well as a store and a small display area, the new basement houses a dedicated drawings gallery, in which an inaugural exhibition curated by Chloe Ward features a representative selection of Leighton’s drawings, of which the museum houses over seven hundred. These range from his precise nature studies, which reveal the influence of John Ruskin, and the preliminary sketches through which he worked out his compositions, to virtuosic representations in black and white chalks of fluidly rippling drapery. The artist valued his drawings highly and with few exceptions kept them to hand in his studio in frames, drawers, folios or cases. [2]

Personally, Leighton is often regarded as a cipher. Not for nothing did Henry James nail him in his short story The Private Life (1893) as Lord Mellifont, a man so inveterately sociable and performative that when alone he simply ceased to exist. Leighton’s domestic arrangements did nothing to dispel this impression: his must have been the grandest one-bedroom house in London, and a spartan bedroom it is – at least in the context of the other rooms. Upstairs in the Perrin wing a new exhibition in the redeveloped gallery space, Artists and Neighbours: The Holland Park Circle, brings nuance to this view by exploring the most local dimension of Leighton’s busy social world. As well as works by Watts, Julia Margaret Cameron, Marcus Stone, Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale and Leighton’s future biographer Emilie Barrington, the display includes a number of new acquisitions, among which is an uncharacteristic work by Albert Moore, A vase of dahlias (c.1880). The artist presented this glowing little painting to Leighton as a gift, probably to thank him for his support in 1869 when the more conservative elements at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, objected to his nude Venus. After the exhibition closes it will once again hang in the Silk Room, back in the place Leighton had chosen for it.

Although the museum’s curatorial team have continued successfully to pursue acquisitions of furniture and objects once owned by Leighton, where that has not been possible, they have purchased similar examples or commissioned replicas. This has resulted in a distinct enrichment of the interiors, particularly upstairs in the Silk Room and the studio, where attention has been focused on the kind of layering of furniture, textiles and objects visible in nineteenth-century photographs of the rooms (Fig.29). It is clear that Leighton regarded wooden and rush-seated chairs not so much to be sat upon as to function as portable and easily changed display stands. Typically, he would drape a length of fabric over the back and prop a framed drawing on the seat, creating a conversation – often cross-cultural – between the different elements. In front of the studio screen are bookcases with marquetry and lapis lazuli insets commissioned from the furniture maker Luke Hughes, that replicate the Greek Revival pair made by the house’s architect George Aitchison, missing since the 1896 sale. The shelves are currently being stocked with editions of books on subjects from needlework to mythology that Leighton is known to have had in his library. All this activity has produced a new density of texture, with additional carpets and wall hangings improving the sound quality of the rooms and giving a new domestic and decorative dimension to the studio in particular.

The newly developed Leighton House is among the most impressive projects of its kind, its bold vision balanced by sensitivity to the original fabric of the building and its interiors. There is little doubt that Leighton himself would feel more thoroughly at home there today than at any time in the house museum’s long history.

[1] A. Orr and A. Matthews: ‘Lord Leighton’s House’ (Letters to the Editor), The Times (28th January 1899).

[2] W.B. Richmond: ‘Lord Leighton’s House’ (Letters to the Editor), The Times (30th April 1896), p.6. See also P. Martin: ‘The creation of Lord Leighton’s drawings collection’ in idem and D. Robbins, eds: exh. cat. A Victorian Master: Drawings by Frederic, Lord Leighton, Scarborough (Art Gallery), Bristol (Museum and Art Gallery), Bournemouth (Russell- Cotes Art Gallery and Museum), Glasgow (Hunterian Museum) and London (Leighton House) 2006–08, pp.7–14, esp. p.7.