Overlooked Britain
Hertfordshire’s Xanadu
lucinda lambton Like Citizen Kane, film mogul and artist Hubert von Herkomer built himself a fantasy schloss – in Bushey
NATIONAL MONUMENTS RECORD, LONDON
Lululaund (1894) in its heyday. Below: Sir Hubert von Herkomer (1849-1914)
If there is another house as grotesquely and as gloriously exciting as Lululaund in Bushey, Hertfordshire, I will eat my hat, munching slowly and satisfyingly through the sheer delights of such a discovery. It was built between 1886 and 1894, only to be quite shamefully demolished a few decades later, in 1939. How tearfully and teeth-grindingly enraged I lament its passing. Its magnificent front door and tympanum survive, giving a most tantalising glimpse of the degree of its alarming splendour. It was a splendour every bit as noble as its creator, Bavarian-born Sir Hubert von Herkomer (1849-1914). He created paintings of considerable note and fame – think of The Last Muster with the fine old faces of the Chelsea Pensioners in the Royal Hospital’s chapel. Or there was Hard Times, the painting of an impoverished and homeless day labourer’s family collapsing by the roadside. He was appointed Slade Professor at Oxford University in 1885, in succession to John Ruskin, and he composed a wealth of music to accompany his own avant-garde ‘pictorial-music-plays’ 82 The Oldie Spring 2022
which he would perform in a theatre of his own design. He also gave concerts playing on the violin or zither. A lecturer and teacher, he established an art school in Bushey – one of his ‘greatest schemes’ – and he wrote several books as well as umpteen articles. He was to end his working life as a pioneer film-maker on elaborate cinematographic productions, in a studio he designed and built himself. Before he died, Herkomer was about to make a film of Far from the Madding Crowd in collaboration with Thomas Hardy. He was a man ahead of his time. He had a passionate interest in the motor car, owning a Daimler and writing prophecies on the car’s eventual power over mankind. In his painting The Future, a near naked, bosoms-to-the-fore beauty of a blindfolded woman is tied to the engine of an enormous motorcar. She cannot see what is coming – hence the blindfold – yet she is tightly tied to the engine that sweeps her forth unwittingly. Painted in 1905, it caused a sensation.
To top it all, Herkomer was a man who was as handsome as a man could be. I fear, though, that, by way of a flick of a flaw, modesty was by no means his middle name! Of his humdinger of a house, he wrote, ‘A stranger of average intelligence and education, passing my house, involuntarily arrests his steps to contemplate what seems to him to be an unusual type of architecture. If he be an Englishman, his first formulated thought was that a house of such pretensions should stand in a park with a one-mile private drive up to it. To have built it within 30 yards of a public road, with front gates so low that almost a five-yearold child could look over them, suggests to his mind that only a foreigner or an eccentric would have spent so much money on a mansion that had practically no privacy attached to it.’ He was a foreigner and an eccentric, born into poverty in 1849 at Waal in the Kingdom of Bavaria. He was the son of Lorenz Herkomer, a woodcarver of exceptional ability. According to the pleasingly named publication Chums,
