Coral, 1911

My newest jewellery acquisition is a set of beaded coral, a necklace and a bracelet, here pictured draped across Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Venetian pastiche Fair Rosamund (1861). The model, Fanny Cornforth, wears a coral necklace which Rossetti borrowed from Georgiana Burne-Jones while working on the portrait. Although coral has been popular since antiquity, I particularly associate these beaded necklaces with the Pre-Raphaelites, as they are featured in so much of their work.

Coral was for a long time perceived as something ambiguous and difficult. It was harvested from the sea, but no one knew exactly where it came from and its origins were shrouded in terrifying myths. According to Greek mythology coral was created when Perseus beheaded Medusa on the shores of the Red Sea, and when he placed the severed head on a pile of seaweed, the pile was petrified by the blood seeping from it, or alternatively the seaweed began to absorb Medusa’s powers and turned into coral.

Coral has been worn for protection against evil since the antiquity, yet it has always confused naturalists and collectors. It is both natural and artificial, both an animal and a mineral, and it proved notoriously difficult to classify alongside other marine invertebrates such as molluscs and jellyfish. Today we know that coral belongs to both the mineral, vegetal and animal kingdoms and that it is a living organism which feeds, reproduces and lives in colonies. In fact, the coral reefs are entire ecosystems in themselves as they feed and shelter other organisms such as sponges and fish.

Coral has been admired for its vibrant colour, displayed in cabinets of curiosities, been widely used in jewellery, rosaries and even to decorate weapons. It has also played a central role in religious art, symbolising for instance the tree of life, the blood of Christ and the resurrection. Coral was also believed to carry sacred and medicinal qualities and today components of coral reefs are used in chemotherapy drugs to fight cancer. As a material coral is capable of being both beautiful and ugly, depending on whether it is polished or left in its natural state, and in her article for Victorian Review, Katharine Anderson suggests that it therefore appealed not only to those who favoured it for personal adornment, but also to naturalists drawn to it in its natural, grotesque form. [1]

As coral was known for its protective qualities, it was often gifted to children and infants, a custom which dates back to ancient Rome. In her book on the cultural history of jewellery, Brilliant Effects, Marcia Pointon draws attention to the fact that in the 17th and 18th centuries coral was used in children’s toys such as rattles and whistles “to make safe this puzzling and difficult to classify substance” by connecting it with the innocence of childhood. [2]

In the early 19th century, Napoleon’s Egyptian Campaign (1798-1801) led to a rise of the Egyptian Revival style in decorative arts, jewellery and architecture. It became fashionable to wear jewellery inspired by antiquity, such as strings of cameos and micromosaics, depicting mythological figures and archeological discoveries. Coral jewellery gained popularity and was worn as parts of great sets, comprised of necklaces, bracelets, earrings, brooches, combs and tiaras.

Where the late 18th and early 19th century had been seized by a craze for archeology and antiquity, the Victorian era was characterised by the interest in natural history, which brought on an obsession with jewellery inspired by shapes found in nature. Coral became even more popular in the Victorian era and was widely used as a material in conventional jewellery, often carved into cameos and elaborate naturalistic motivs, such as flowers, leaves and clusters of berries.

One aspect of coral which I find fascinating is explored by Pointon in Brilliant Effects, where she analyses Ariel’s song from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, emphasising how the human body after death is turned into the materials it coveted in life: precious coral and iridescent pearls; “Full fathom five thy father lies,” Ariel sings; “Of his bones are coral made; / Those are pearls that were his eyes; / Nothing of him that doth fade, / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange.” [3]

Coral is harvested from the sea to decorate the human body, but unlike the body coral does not decay, for when it is removed from its natural surroundings it turns from a living organism to a hardened mineral, enabling it to outlive its wearer. In The Tempest nature is unequivocally triumphant as coral and pearls grow on the drowned man, adorning the body even in death.

How grotesque my set of coral jewellery suddenly feels! Made in the early 20th century it would have been a product of the revival of the style of the early 1800s, itself a revival of ancient styles of jewellery. Still, it would have been far removed from ancient myths and superstitions and worn as a fashionable accessory rather than an amulet intending to ward off the evil eye, and in all probability it would not have given its wearer a headache from pondering how to classify it. This set dates from the 1910s and although it has been restrung and parts of the lock has been replaced at some point, the personal inscription remains intact: J, 24.12.1911. Perhaps it was a Christmas gift?

Lastly, here are some examples of coral objects and jewellery, depicted in art or as they appear in museums and private collections. Here coral does not appear in its natural state, it has been removed from the sea and partly or entirely altered, reborn as elaborate jewellery or hybrid objects.

William Holman Hunt, The Birthday (A Portrait Of The Artist’s Wife, Edith) (1868)

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Regina Cordium (1860)

Jean Raoux, Naïade au plateau de perles et de coraux

Carved coral earrings, Italy c.1830, Victoria & Albert Museum (M.4&A-1962)

Frederick Sandys, Medea (1868), Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Fair Rosamund (1861)

Jacopo Zucchi, The Coral Fishers (c. 1585), detail

Miniature portrait by Lancelin (1818)

Pair of flintlock pistols, Algeria, late 18th – early 19th century, The Met (36.25.2246a, b)

Firmin Massot, Joséphine de Beauharnais

Child’s rattle/whistle, London 1811-12, Victoria & Albert Museum (M.18-1973)

Pendant with coral cameo, Paris 1854, Victoria & Albert Museum (M.30-1962)

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Monna Vanna (1866), Tate (N03054)

Carved coral necklace, Italy c.1820, Victoria & Albert Museum (M.62-2011)

Pierre Mignard, The Marquise de Seignelay and Two of her Sons (1691), The National Gallery, London (NG2967)

Coral jewellery, 1700-1860 (sold by Peter Szuhay, Gray’s Antique Market, London)

Carstian Luyckx, Allegory of Charles I of England and Henrietta of France in a Vanitas Still Life, after 1669 (?), Birminham Museum of Art

Frederick Sandys, La Belle Isolde

Spoon with coral handle, Germany 1530-40, Victoria & Albert Museum (2268-1855)

Click on the individual images for full size and descriptions.

Reading
Katharine Anderson, ‘Coral Jewellery’, Victorian Review Vol. 34, No. 1 (Spring 2008)
Joan Evans, A History of Jewellery, 1100-1870
Marcia Pointon, Brilliant Effects: A Cultural History of Gemstones & Jewellery
Natural History Museum London, Highlighting coral reefs at risk 

Notes
(1) Anderson, p. 50
(2) Pointon, p.130
(3) Pointon, p. 108

Go thou to Rome, – at once the paradise, the grave, the city, and the wilderness

Where’s the Poet! show him, show him, muses nine, that I might know him!

In Rome, at the foot of the Spanish Steps, lies the Keats-Shelley House Museum, where John Keats lived during the last months of his life, nursed by his friend Joseph Severn. Today the house is a reference library containing over 8,000 volumes of Romantic literature and a museum dedicated to the Romantics, mainly John Keats, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley.

While living in London I often visited Wentworth Place in Hampstead where Keats lived between 1818 and 1820. This is where he met his future fiancée Fanny Brawne who lodged in one half of the house with her family. I kept returning to Wenthworth Place after my initial visit because there is something irresistible about the atmosphere in that house. In one of the rooms there is a wall is covered in portraits of friends of Keats and people from his social and artistic circle – here the visitor can socialise with history and meet Keats’ contemporaries. I am not sure I would be as taken with these portraits if I had no previous knowledge of the era, but I loved the kind of museum experience it offered; to discover new faces as I recognised familiar ones, to choose who I wanted to learn more about, or to repeat what I already knew. It makes me think of that scene from Mr. Turner where the camera moves, casually and seemingly in real time, through the Royal Academy, introducing us to artists and historical figures.

When visiting the houses of Keats one enters either Regency England or the Italy of the Romantics, and as one climbs the stairs to what was once Keats and Severn’s lodgings, one cannot help but feel transported to early nineteenth-century Rome. There is a very real, specific sort of magic to house museums like this, because they were once inhabited and because the exhibits are often varied and comparatively few, allowing the rooms themselves to be exhibits worthy of attention. It feels almost like visiting a private home.

John Keats and Joseph Severn lived at number 26 Piazza di Spagna from November 1820 until Keats’ death in February 1821, but the Keats-Shelley House Museum is not a mausoleum, it is an affectionate commemoration of the Romantics and a house which is still very much alive with regular lectures, readings and seminars.

The exterior of the house with the Spanish Steps in the background. When Keats and Severn moved into number 26 Piazza di Spagna there were already three lodgers living at that address: an Englishman, an Irishman and an Italian officer. The house was managed by Anna Angeletti, a 43 year old Venetian widow with two children.*

The main room in the house is the salon, which contains busts and portraits of Keats, Shelley and Byron, as well as letters and documents which are on display. During Keats and Severn’s tenancy the room was divided into three apartments, one of which was occupied by Angeletti.

View of the Spanish Steps, currently closed for restoration work, from the salon. In the 1810s and 20s, Piazza di Spagna would have been crowded with tourists, just like today.

Doing a bit of blending in with the wall panels in front of Joseph Severn’s posthumous portrait of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1845).

Bust of Lord Byron in the salon.

Cameo of Keats by Giuseppe Girometti (c. 1821) and a miniature portrait of Lord Byron.

Lady Caroline Lamb, an Anglo-Irish aristocrat and novelist who is mostly known for the two-month affair she conducted with Lord Byron in 1812. She was tall and thin, enjoyed dressing as a pageboy, as depicted in this lithograph, and she wore her blond hair cropped short. She cared very little about the opinions of others unlike Lord Byron, who craved approval, despite his haughty public personage. Lady Caroline was intelligent, witty and she mastered Latin and Greek although she had received no formal education, as was usually the case for women at the time. After reading Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage she fell passionately in love with Lord Byron and pursued him with a literary interest as much as a sexual one.** Lady Caroline and Lord Byron were were each other’s equals both in intelligence, wit and temperament, they shared similar views on literature and politics, but she was as obsessive as he was jealous and their relationship ended horribly. Byron lost interest and started ignoring her, she answered by turning up at his house in the middle of the night. He sent her spiteful letters, she sent him angry threats, and when he criticised her publicly at a ball given in the honour of the Duke of Wellington she melodramatically reached for a dinner knife, which had to be wrestled from her. The gossip surrounding their affair and its aftermath made it impossible for them to lead a normal life, perhaps particularly for Lady Caroline who were distraught to the point of a mental breakdown. Despite this she continued to write and publish her own work after their affair ended.

Augusta Leigh, Byron’s half sister, with whom he developed an intimate friendship after the death of his mother in 1811. Augusta was kind and understanding, seemingly to the point of altruism and in this respect she was the polar opposite of Lady Caroline. Augusta and Byron almost certainly became lovers and although this was not illegal at the time, it shocked society and were one of reasons Byron’s wife demanded separation.

Lady Byron (Annabella Milbank) was intelligent and highly educated and her particular interest and talent for mathematics earned her the nickname “the princess of parallelograms.” When Byron proposed to her in 1812 she turned him down, but he continued to pursue her and in 1814 she accepted his second proposal, partly because of her undeniable fascination with him and partly because she considered it her religious and moral duty to reform his bad character. The marriage was a disaster. Byron was drunk, abusive and in deep financial trouble, and Annabella was convinced he was going mad. In 1815 Annabella gave birth to their daughter Ada, who would later become the mathematician who wrote the first algorithm to be processed by a machine, but this did not save their marriage and the couple were separated in a private settlement in 1816.

Teresa Guccioli, the daughter of Count Ruggero Gamba who was a member of the Carbonari, a secret society of Italian revolutionaries. She had just married Count Guccioli, a man almost forty years her senior, when she met Lord Byron in 1818. Their affair was initially tolerated by the Count, even when Byron followed them to their country estate and openly established himself as Teresa’s lover, and when he eventually protested she obtained a divorce from the pope. Teresa was Byron’s favourite Italian mistress and they lived together until he left for Greece in 1822.

A whole lot of Byrons.

John Keats by Joseph Severn. This is one of several copies made of an original portrait finished in 1819.

Fanny Brawne met Keats in 1818 and they got engaged the following year. Fanny read Shakespeare and Byron, mastered French and German, loved to dance and were extremely interested in fashion and dressmaking. She was energetic, witty and political, and could often be found in discussion with her friends, the officers stationed in the neighbourhood or the émigrés who had fled the French Revolution and settled in Hampstead. During the last year of Keats’ life he grew increasingly conflicted towards his relationship with Fanny. He adored her but lived in constant fear that they would be separated by his death. Demonstrating considerable maturity, the young Fanny remained constant and supportive to Keats in his confused state of increasing illness and emotional crisis. As his condition worsened, Keats were instructed to keep his distance from Fanny, as the doctors believed his weakened state was caused as much by emotional strain as by a physical illness. Nevertheless Keats lived at Wentworth Place with the Brawne Family and were nursed by Fanny for a month, which he described as the happiest month of his life, before he left for Italy.***

Self portrait by Joseph Severn from 1822.

Keats reading, drawn by Joseph Severn.

Drawing or tracing of the Sosibios vase by Keats.

After Percy Shelley drowned in the Adriatic Sea while out sailing with Lord Byron in 1822, his body was burned on a beach near Viareggio. Some fragments of Shelley’s bones which did not burn were collected by his friend Trelawny, who cherished them for his entire life. The alabaster urn to the far left contains a fragment of Shelley’s jaw bone which was given by Trelawny to Leigh Hunt, a mutual friend of him and Keats.

Locks of hair taken from Shelley, Keats and Leigh Hunt.

Locks of hair were exchanged between friends and lovers as tokens of affection in the 18th and 19th centuries. 

Silver reliquary which once belonged to Pope Pius V, containing locks of hair from Milton and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Milton’s hair was a gift from Leigh Hunt to Robert Browning who placed it in the reliquary together with a lock of his wife’s hair.


A tress of Shelley’s hair, aged 13.

The painted ceiling in the salon.

Posthumous portrait of John Keats after an original by Joseph Severn from 1822. It depicts Keats at home in Hampstead, writing Ode to a Nightingale.


View from Keats’ bedroom window.

The room where Keats died, with his death mask on display. It has been reconstructed as everything it originally contained was burned in order to sterilise the room, according to Roman custom.

He is gone – he died with the most perfect ease – he seemed to go to sleep. On the 23rd (Friday) at 1/2 past 4 the approach of death came on. “Severn – I – lift me up for I am dying – I shall die easy – don’t be frightened – thank God it has come.” I lifted him up in my arms, and the pleghm seemed boiling in his throat – this increased until 11 at night, when he gradually sunk into death – so quiet that I still thought he slept.

Letter written by Joseph Severn the day after Keats’ funeral, addressed to Charles Brown with whom Keats’ lodged in Hampstead.

Depictions of the pyramid of Caius Cestius, at the foot of which lies the Non-Catholic Cemetery where Keats and Severn are buried.

Wentworth Place, Keats’ house in Hampstead.

“If I should die,” said I to myself, “I have left no immortal work behind me – nothing to make my friends proud of my memory – but I have loved the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remembered.” – Keats to Fanny Brawne, February 1820

* Roderick Cavaliero, Italia Romantica: English Romantics and Italian Freedom (p .13)
** Paul Douglass, Lady Caroline Lamb (p. xii)
*** Andrew Motion, Keats (p. 324)

La città eterna

Now I am here at my ease, and as it would seem, shall be tranquillised for my whole life; for we may almost say that a new life begins when a man once sees with his own eyes all that before he has but partially heard or read of. All the dreams of my youth I now behold realised before me […] and all that I had long been acquainted with through paintings or drawings, engravings, or wood-cuts, plaister-casts, and cork models are here collectively presented to my eye. Wherever I go I find some old acquaintance in this new world, it is all just as I had thought it, and yet all is new, and just the same might I remark of my own observations and my own ideas. I have not gained any new thoughts, but the older ones have become so defined, so vivid, and so coherent, that they may almost pass for new ones.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italian Journey

A Marriage of Minds: Mary Wollstonecraft & William Godwin

I didn’t plan on commemorating Valentine’s Day, but then I thought it would be a good excuse to write about my favourite historical couple: the rather amazing Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, who were political philosophers, novelists and key figures in a British discourse on the French Revolution, known as the Revolution Controversy, which took place in the 1790s.

Wollstonecraft is mostly known for A Vindication on the Rights of Women (1792) in which she attacks the sexual double standard, argues the necessity of “a revolution in female manners” and emphasises the need for women to receive proper education. She envisioned a society founded on republican principles, in which the cornerstones were educated women who were the intellectual equals of their husbands.

Godwin was an early utilitarianist who is remembered for his novels, one of which is Caleb Williams, Or Things as They Are (1794), in which he criticises the abuse of aristocratic and institutional power. He met Wollstonecraft for the first time in 1791 at a dinner hosted by the radical publisher and bookseller Joseph Johnson, a dinner to which Godwin had invited himself because he wanted to meet Thomas Paine who were among the guests. Paine was not a particularly talkative man however and to Godwin’s dismay it was Wollstonecraft who dominated the conversation that evening. In his biography on Wollstonecraft, published after her death, he writes:

We touched on a considerable variety of topics, and particularly on the characters and habits of certain eminent men. Mary, as has already been observed, had acquired, in a very blameable degree, the practice of seeing every thing on the gloomy side, and bestowing censure with a plentiful hand, where circumstances were in any respect doubtful. I, on the contrary, had a strong propensity, to favourable construction, and particularly, where I found unequivocal marks of genius, strongly to incline to the supposition of generous and manly virtue. We ventilated in this way the characters of Voltaire and others, who have obtained from some individuals an ardent admiration, while the greater number have treated them with extreme moral severity. Mary was at last provoked to tell me, that praise, lavished in the way that I lavished it, could do no credit either to the commended or the commender. We discussed some questions on the subject of religion, in which her opinions approached much nearer to the received ones, than mine. As the conversation proceeded, I became dissatisfied with the tone of my own share in it.

He thought she was too critical and talkative and he was annoyed that he did not get to lead the conversation or talk as much as he wanted to. When he made a note of the evening in his diary he misspelled her name. “The interview was not fortunate.” he states “Mary and myself parted, mutually displeased with each other.”

They met a few times after this, but then Wollstonecraft went away to France to write. She met the radical author Helen Maria Williams, experienced the tumult of the revolution and fell in love with Gilbert Imlay. They had a daughter, Imlay left them both and Wollstonecraft tried to win him back by travelling to Scandinavia in 1794 to do business on his behalf. Imlay attempted to profit from the political situation by transporting goods through the British blockade of France, but his ship and its valuable cargo went missing. Wollstonecraft didn’t manage to locate the ship or reconnect with Imlay, but the trip resulted in her autobiographical memoir and travel narrative Letters Written in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796.) It was very well received and it made a deep impression on Godwin. Wollstonecraft visited him in January shortly after the publication of her Letters and they fell in love, slowly but passionately. Godwin writes:

The partiality we conceived for each other, was in that mode, which I have always regarded as the purest and most refined style of love. It grew with equal advances in the mind of each. It would have been impossible for the most minute observer to have said who was before, and who was after. One sex did not take the priority which long-established custom has awarded it, nor the other overstep that delicacy which is so severely imposed. I am not conscious that either party can assume to have been the agent or the patient, the toil-spreader or the prey, in the affair. When, in the course of things, the disclosure came, there was nothing, in a manner, for either party to disclose to the other. […] It was friendship melting into love. Previously to our mutual declaration, each felt half-assured, yet each felt a certain trembling anxiety to have assurance complete.

The couple  lived together for seven months in two adjoining houses, making it possible for them to both enjoy domestic happiness and be able to work independently. When Wollstonecraft became pregnant they decided to marry in order for their child to be legitimate, despite neither of them initially wishing to be wed. Wollstonecraft were (according to Godwin) reluctant to legally commit to another man after her ill fated relationship with Imlay and Godwin abhorred the institution of marriage which he considered: “so contrary to the genuine march of sentiment, as to require the overflowing of the soul to wait upon a ceremony, and that which, wherever delicacy and imagination exist, is of all things most sacredly private, to blow a trumpet before it, and to record the moment when it has arrived at its climax.”

Tragically Wollstonecraft died from an infection shortly after giving birth to her second daughter Mary (who later married the poet Shelley and wrote Frankenstein.) Godwin despaired and wrote in a letter to a friend: “I firmly believe there does not exist her equal in the world. I know from experience we were formed to make each other happy. I have not the least expectation that I can now ever know happiness again.” After her death Godwin wrote Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in which he recalled her unconventional life and defended her actions, both of which were frequently criticised by her contemporaries. “There are no circumstances of her life, that, in the judgment of honour and reason, could brand her with disgrace.” he writes. “Never did there exist a human being, that needed, with less fear, expose all their actions, and call upon the universe to judge them.” Godwin described not only her intellectual talent but also included accounts of her love affairs, suicide attempts and illegitimate child. He undoubtedly wrote the memoirs to pay his last respects to a woman he loved and admired, but it was badly received and he was accused of stripping his dead wife naked for all to see. Rather than celebrating Wollstonecraft, the biography gave her an undeservedly bad reputation and she was barely read for the next hundred years. Talk about killing someone with kindness. At least their reputation.

In a rather sentimental, but undeniably evocative passage in his book Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle (1913), Brailsford writes: “Had Mary Wollstonecraft lived they must have moulded each other into something finer than nature had made of either. The year of married life was ideally happy, and the strange experiment in reconciling individualism with love apparently succeeded.”

So there you have them, my very favourite couple: the-very-nearly-but-not-quite-proto-feminist and the-very-nearly-but-not-quite-proto-anarchist, and their unconventional marriage of minds.

All quotes are taken from Godwin’s ‘Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’ except for the first which is from Wollstonecraft’s ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.’

This post presents their relationship only from Godwin’s point of view, as I did this a quick write up for Valentine’s Day. I will probably revisit this post later to add some of Wollstonecraft’s thoughts as soon as I can locate an edition of her letters.

The Feast of Santa Lucia

Today is the feast of Santa Lucia which is celebrated in Scandinavia and some parts of Italy. In Scandinavia the celebration is a mishmash of folklore, Pre-Christian and Catholic traditions and it is closely associated with Christmas. Accounts vary but Lucia of Syracuse seems to have been a Sicilian noblewoman who fell victim to the Diocletianic Persecution and were later made virgin martyr. Lucia refused to renounce her Christian beliefs and forsake her vow of chastity and was consequently stabbed in the throat after having survived being burnt alive. In some narratives her eyes are gouged out, either because she wants to get rid of a suitor who admires them, or as a form of torture before being executed.

Lorenzo Lotto, Saint Lucy Before the Judge (1532), detail

In Scandinavia Lucia became associated with Lucifer and incorporated in folklore as Lussi, a demonic, witch-like figure who rode across the skies and roamed in the night, followed by supernatural creatures. She was thought to be particularly active on the night between the 12th and 13th of December, which was known as Lussinatta and was once the longest night of the year. During this night Lussi would punish any households which had not yet finished their preparations for Christmas. Lussi was also associated with Åsgårdsreia, a wild hunt consisting of the souls of the dead which rode across the skies as an omen or even to snatch people’s souls. Christmas celebrations in Scandinavia were therefore traditionally focused on symbols and decorations intended to keep evil sprits away and people would typically paint a cross over their door and keep objects with qualities believed to ward off supernatural creatures on their windowsill.

Peter Nicolai Arbo, Åsgårdsreien (1872)

Nils Berglien, Julereia (1922)

Nowadays Lucia is mostly associated with the martyr rather than the demonic Lussi and she is depicted as a saint of light crowned with a wreath of candles, to brighten the dark winter. The current Norwegian celebration is very similar to the Swedish tradition, and dates from the 1890s, with children dressed in white, walking in a torchlight procession, singing a song set to a Neapolitan melody while handing out lussekatter (saffron buns) shaped like ancient symbols of the sun.

A rather annoyed Saint Lucy, painted by Fritz von Dardel in 1848.

Saint Lucy on the covers of two magazines from 1922 & 1931.

Happy feast of Santa Lucia! May you eat all the saffron buns and not have your eyes gouged out.

Leighton House Museum

The Leighton House Museum, located in the Holland Park district of the borough of Kensington and Chelsea in London, is the former home and studio of the Victorian neoclassicist painter Lord Frederic Leighton. It was designed by the architect George Aitchinson who Leighton befriended in Rome and over the course of thirty years the unique studio-house was expanded, developed and ornamented. The construction of the house began in 1865 and when Leighton died in 1896, it was still not finished. 12 Holland Road eventually became the ultimate architectural expression of Leighton’s admiration of Aestheticism, Orientalism and the Arts and Crafts movement.

View of the house from the garden.

The winter studio, an extension made in 1889-90. It was built to provide studio space for artists working towards exhibiting at the Royal Academy.

Leighton’s studio, where he also hosted musical evenings.

 

Left: The Arab Hall built between 1877-81. It was modelled on an interior at La Zisa, a 12th century palace in Palermo, Sicily. The hall displays Leighton’s extensive collection of late 15th and early 16th century tiles, most of which he bought on his trip to Damascus in 1873. Right: Leighton’s An Italian Lady, which hangs in the dining room.

The Silk Room, with paintings by Tintoretto and Millais. It was the last room to be completed before Leighton’s death.

  

Leighton’s Corinna of Tanagra and Clytie, both in neoclassical frames. Corinna was an ancient greek poet and Clytie a water nymph rejected by Appollo in Ovid’s Metamosphopses, after she buried his new lover alive in an attempt to win him back. After watching him ride across the skies in his golden chariot for nine days, Clytie is said to have been transformed into a heliotrope or a sunflower.

 

An amazing little nook with Egyptian latticework windows, overlooking the Arab Hall, complete with a running fountain. I was very reluctant to leave that spot – the view of the hall and the sound of the water was mesmerising. It is like being engulfed by a Pre-Raphaelite painting.

Frederic Leighton, Self portrait (1880)

Frederic Leighton was born in 1830, in Scarborough, to a financially independent and close knit family that supported him throughout his life. He received an allowance from his father until the latter died, and his older sister Alexandra strived to preserve 12 Holland Road as a memorial to Leighton after his death. He travelled a great deal and lived abroad for most of his twenties, first in Italy and then in Paris, before he returned to London in 1860. Once back home, Leighton joined the 38th Middlesex Artist Rifle volunteers and started associating himself with the Pre-Raphaelites. By 1875 he had risen to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel and become Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s most important artistic rival. Leighton continued to travel throughout his life, making several trips to the Middle East in the 1860s and 70s, collecting tiles and pottery. In 1878 he was appointed president of the Royal Academy in and in 1896 he was granted the shortest hereditary peerage in British history lasting only until the next day, when he died of heart failure. He never married or had any children, though there has been speculations as whether we was homosexual or possibly had a child by one of his models. In 1900 some of his work was exhibited at the Paris exhibition.

The Leighton House Museum is quite possibly my favourite London museum, rivalled only by Sir John Soane’s Museum. It is not just a painter’s studio, it is a living work of art, demonstrating Leighton’s artistic vision and ambitious nature, and a grand home fit for entertainment and receiving guests – even Queen Victoria visited once. It is a museum with an amazing atmosphere and both Leighton’s own work and paintings from his collection are on display throughout the house, though the elaborate aesthetic and orientalist interiors are in themselves a strong argument for a visit.

Links
The Leighton House Museum website
Take a virtual tour of the museum
Desiring Women: Myth, Love and Leighton’s Clytie

Gottlieb Schick, Heinrike Dannecker (1802)