Inside Out

HOME celebrates the most colourful, dramatic and exotic interior of all: Leighton House

The image of the 19th-century artist starving in a garret is an attractively romantic one. But, as attests the Kensington home of aesthete and neoclassicist Frederic Leighton, 1st Baron Leighton, a serious fortune awaited the more successful painters of the age. (A title too, of course, always proved persuasive to the art-buying cognoscenti of the day; and it is unlikely to have been a detracting factor in his appointment as President of the Royal Academy). Whether or not visitors are acquainted with the oeuvre of Lord Leighton, an exploration of the house that was purpose-built for him by architect George Aitchison speaks of his penchant for the eclectic, the exotic, the colourfully dramatic and the exquisite. Leighton would go on to tinker with it irresistibly over the three decades he lived there, right up to his demise; his was, after all, one of the most talked-about houses in the country. He called it his ‘private palace of art.’

The interior is the more striking for the surprises it presents. For Leighton House’s exterior – all plain, even austere red brick– is most reminiscent of a vaguely forbidding Italianate museum; the sole architectural flourish is a dome (also in red brick), the only hint at the thrilling treasures that lie inside.

The sheer scale of those treasures magnifies the surprise and delight once inside. For quite beside his own works, the most famous of which reside elsewhere (Flaming June in Puerto Rico, Cimabue’s Celebrated Madonna Carried in Procession through the Streets of Florence in the National Gallery), Leighton House is, as it was always intended to be, a repository and showcase for collections amassed from Leighton’s extensive travels, for his art and taste, as well as being his workplace.

The Arab Hall

Image courtesy of Will Pryce

His was one of the most talked-about houses in the country. He called it his ‘private palace of art.’

The whole house is inspired by the artist’s travels in Italy and the Middle East, but the pièce de résistance must, inarguably, be the Arab Hall, which was inspired by a 12th-century palazzo in Sicily. Archways and columns frame vistas through to a spectacular staircase, while deep blue textured antique tiles originally sourced from Damascus supply the high drama. The brick dome you see from the outside is revealed here in all its interior glory, golden and jewel-like. And suspended from it is an ornate gasolier, lighting up the square pool that sits below, as in the houses of grand Romans millennia ago. The golden hues dance in the light and the reflections of the water – all the better for admiring the glimmering glory of its mosaic frieze, designed by Walter Crane and created by legendary Venetian glass-makers, Salviati.

Lord Leighton was, evidently, not a man given to understatement. Once visitors have drunk in the splendour of the Arab Hall, the adjoining Narcussus Hall awaits, named for the centrally positioned diminutive and beautiful bronze cast of that self-regarding classical figure. The deep Turkish turquoise on the walls comes courtesy of Arts and Crafts pioneer William De Morgan, great friend of William Morris, for whom the commission was an early accolade in his career; the idea for the room, meanwhile, was Lord Leighton’s. Having seen a similar ‘Narcissus room’ among the excavated remains of a house in Pompeii, he once again sought to marry the Italian influence with Syrian, Turkish and Persian touches. At the foot of the staircase stands a stuffed peacock, an embodied metaphor for the house, and a symbol of the Aesthetic Movement to which Leighton subscribed.

Also on the ground floor is the dining room, whose jewel box-like theatrical red provides a stage set for Leighton’s ceramics, which hang decoratively on the walls. And it is this that best articulates the purpose of the house; its creation was to house artefacts so avidly amassed over a life. This is not a place that simply accommodates them; they are the point, not least because they so inspired Leighton’s work.

While Lord Leighton’s more official entertaining took place downstairs, his guests were, perhaps later in the evening, frequently led upstairs to his studio, the powerhouse of his creativity. In stark contrast to the ornate flourishes and sultry darkness of the more formal ground floor rooms, his studio on the first floor is cavernous and airy, all the better to stretch out his often vast canvases and to see his models, who were provided with a screen and a fireplace behind which to prepare in comfort. It was befitting of a man whose sitters were often eminent themselves, and whose visitors – who counted among their number Queen Victoria herself – even more so. It was here that he held famous musical soirées, and it was, to Leighton, an assembly room of sorts, complete with a minstrels’ gallery.

The Silk Room

Image courtesy of Justin Barton

The Drawing Room

Image courtesy of Kevin Moran

Lord Leighton was a man of whose interior life little is known; so consummate an entertainer and public persona was he that researchers have uncovered scant details of private passions. But then, perhaps, the clues to his internal machinations are all here, his calling card presented for all to see: his elaborate relics of a well-travelled life, his wit and the comfort he provided as a professional host as contrasted to the plainness of his own bedroom, where a single iron-frame bed differs little from the one in the butler’s bedroom, a cocoon from which a butterfly would emerge daily.

Twists and turns of fate led to Leighton House today coming under the auspices of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. Following Leighton’s death in 1896, his sisters Augusta and Alexandra attempted to sell it; but an enormous house with only one bedroom had, it transpired, limited appeal. To meet the generous legacies set out by his will, they dispersed much of his collection around the world – Constables and Delacriox paintings were bade farewell to – and so stripped of its raison d’etre, the house fell into a number of odd uses, including as a children’s library for a time. Restoration in the 1980s and 90s, allied with a much larger scale on-going project to reinstate its erstwhile glory have re-established Leighton House as a monument to the tastes and mores of one of the leading figures in Victorian art.

Words NANCY ALSOP

Photography ©LEIGHTON HOUSE MUSEUM, RBKC