A private palace of art - Leighton House in London

Frederic, Lord Leighton (1830-1896) built the Kensington studio-house from 1865 on. With the Victorian art market booming, and domestic taste fascin­ating the middle classes, Leight­on needed to demonstrate his importance. After all, he was both president of the Royal Academy and chief exponent of the new Aesth­eticism.

Leighton House was to be his link to a special society, so #2 Holland Park Rd needed to be special. Fortunately Leighton was enjoying increasingly high fees for his paint­ings, and he also had family money. Leighton and his arch­itect, George Ait­ch­ison, chose the decorat­ive elements for their aesthetic effect, wherever they came from. The result incorp­or­at­ed styles from Arts and Crafts, Orientalism and Baroque.

Adding to the building for years, he end­ed up with one of the most talked-about houses in the country. Around the dome was a super frieze made up of tiny tiles, commis­sioned from artist Walter Crane (1845-1915), who did the work in Venice and then trans­port­ed the finish­ed product to London. William Morris curtains were loved. Orientalist Iznik wall tiles and the fin­est Arabian and Persian artwork were coll­ected on his regular trips to Turkey and Syria. Sometimes he comm­iss­ioned friends to buy the art objects abroad, including the Japanese and Chin­ese porcelain.

Leighton was a leading painter. His main interest lay in history painting and neo-classicism, and his most instantly re­cognisable work is Flaming June. Viewers also value his plein air oil sketches, made on his North Africa and Middle Eastern travels.

Flaming June,
by Lord Frederick Leighton, c1895
Tate Britain

On Sundays, visitors gazed at the spectacular 1877 Arab Hall, with its golden dome, intricate mosaics, walls lined with beaut­iful Islamic tiles and indoor fountain. Colleagues attended one of Leighton's famous musical soirées, complete with its minst­rels' gallery. Intimate friends were invited to spend the evening in the red dining room with glittering Middle-Eastern ceram­ics.

Or they lounged in the private and relaxed Silk Room, with its paintings by Tintoretto and Millais. Certainly it was homo-social; he filled this cosy room with pieces by friends such as Millais, George Frederic Watts, Singer Sargent and LawrenceAlma-Tadema.

Was Leighton a dandy? Presumably yes. But note three things. Firstly his young women were expected to access the studio through a separate Model's Entrance in the back. Leighton House may have been de­signed to showcase the artistic avant garde, but his class relat­ionships were still Vic­t­orian. Secondly for all his generous support of fellow artists, Leighton seemed to have had little interest in women painters or their work. Finally Leighton lived alone in his palace, occupying the house’s one, very stark bed­room on the first floor. Thus he was showy, public and extra­vagant, but private and a bit grim as well.

 de Morgan tiles

Arab Hall and sculpture

After Leighton's death in 1896, his one-bedroom house didn’t sell. So his sisters had to focus on the house's vast art coll­ection, in order to carry out the bequests in their brother's will. Following the Christie's sale, his works by Constable, Delacroix and Corot were bought around the world. During this empty time, the house’s ceilings were covered in lining paper and painted dull bronze emulsion. The wooden flooring was covered with protective layers.

After WW2, Leighton House underwent well-meaning but sloppy rest­or­ation. That changed in 2008-10, with a £1.6m fund from the Roy­al Borough of Kensington & Chel­sea; a team of curators, crafts­men and architects did a very careful restor­at­ion. Working with old photographs, they strip­ped the house back to Leighton’s original vision. It is now a testimony to a particular moment in British cultural history.
Many of the key paintings which were sold were loaned back, and now occupy their original positions. Where furniture, tiles, wallpaper and fabrics were missing, facsimiles have been commissioned from traditional craftsmen.

Enter via the splendid Arab Hall and see the central dome, newly restored with gold leaf. There are ottoman seats which have been re-upholstered in a William Morris Willow fabric, clearly ident­ifiable in photographs of 1895. And from those photos, historians set about re-creating the wallpaper that Leighton had himself commissioned. Other highlights include the reproduction of finely embroid­ered upholstery, designed by Gertrude Jekyll. It is a place of tactile luxury!

Leighton House Museum is surrounded by a group of other studio-houses, all built during the later C19th. Today the museum has a collection of 76 oil paintings by Leighton, includ­ing large-scale finished works produced for exhibition at the Royal Academy.

There are only 3 extant Leighton sculptures, but their influence over younger British sculptors was profound. The examples at the museum were pres­ented in 1900 by Leighton's friend and close neighbour, artist G F Watts.

700 of Leighton's sketches were assembled in the early years of the C20th, shortly after the establishment of the museum. The collection demonstrated his skills as a draughtsman.

The museum also has a small but significant collection of paint­ings, drawings and sculpture by contemporaries: John Everett Millais (1829-96), George Frederic Watts (1817-1904), Frederick Sandys (1829-1904) and Solomon J. Solomon (1860-1927). See drawings by Edward Burne-Jones (1833-98) and J A M Whistler. The entire collection was catalogued, conserved and toured in 2005-2007.

Leighton collected paintings by his friends and colleagues

During the High Victorian period an informal group of C19th art­ists based in West London was called The Holland Park Circle. As well as Frederic Leighton, it included George Frederick Watts, Luke Fildes, Marcus Stone, Val Prinsep and William Burges. See the group’s archives, plans, photographs and drawings. And see the group of photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron whose family had close associations with the Holland Park artists.

The museum holds a collection of c100 pieces of pottery by Wil­l­iam De Morgan and his later associates. Following De Morgan's death in 1917, this collection was presented by Ida Per­r­in who paid in the 1920s to build the Perrin Gall­ery (at the east end of Leighton House). His wife,  Evelyn De Morgan (1855-1919)'s watercolours on paper, remain.

The House Museum shows Leighton's life as a gentleman, art­ist and collector. The fascinating coll­ect­ion of the arts by Leighton and his generation is still growing.