Collectors: Lord Leighton’s House

This week I was delighted to be able to attend the press preview of the refurbished home of Lord Leighton in Kensington, due to re-open to the public on April 6th. The house is one of the most unusual museums in London, designed by the painter with his friend, the architect George Aitchison, to house his remarkable collection of objets d’art as well as to provide the man himself with studio space and a home.

  A new catalogue has also been published, including articles by Anne Anderson, Charlotte Gere and Barbara Bryant, and with introduction and further details by Daniel Robbins, curator for Leighton House Museum and Linley Sambourne House.

The house is striking in its collection of artefacts and its amazing use of colour throughout. The downstairs of the house features the Arab Hall, a large space decorated with Islamic tiles collected by Leighton, which, as the catalogue states, the house was adapted to display. This is perhaps one of the most memorable areas of the house, featuring screens, fountains, Persian rugs and window seats – this is definitely a room made for languorous reading and relaxing!

The Eastern influence is particularly strong in this entrance to the house, but is continued throughout in objects collected by Leighton throughout his life, though the study off the Arab Hall, for example, is much more traditionally Victorian, displaying sketches and Morris fabrics, though also containing Persian rugs. The drawing room, with its Corots and Corot copies, is again more traditional, also featuring an impressive glass chandelier, while the dramatic colours of the dining room again suggest the artist’s eye for colour. The house itself provides an interesting study in the extent to which the Eastern influenced Victorian tastes in decor, and how this aspect fits into other contemporary styles and designs.

Upstairs, visitors are surprised by the bareness of Leighton’s bedroom, containing little more than a bed and some pictures on the wall; this Spartan space was what he preferred, it seems, and provides a startling contrast with the other areas of the house. There is no secondary accommodation for guests, which is as Leighton liked it, apparently, permitting him to entertain in his beautiful public rooms but not to put guests up for any length of time!  The large studio, with its natural light and dais for models, is now filled with paintings and sketches as well as a selection of painting materials used by Leighton. It also features a canvas store built into the floor, and a ‘models’ entrance’ so that the artist’s models need not enter by the main street door, but have their own entrance and staircase to reach the studio.

The opening up of the servants’ quarters, now redecorated in the colours originally used, show off the butler’s rooms in particular, and give a sense of the building as a working domestic home as well as a showcase for Leighton’s art and artefacts, which is appealing to visitors. A huge amount of work has clearly gone into this restoration, and it has been sensitively done with a great deal of research behind it, as the catalogue demonstrates. Yet little can really be seen of Leighton the man, other than his choices as a collector; it is Leighton the artist who prevails.

All images (c) Justin Barton 2010.

The nineteenth-century world in photographs

The British Library currently has an exhibition (on until 7th March) entitled “Points of View: Capturing the Nineteenth Century in Photographs”. It’s an interesting exhibition, and bigger than I expected, covering a huge range. It begins with the origins of photography in the mid-nineteenth century, with Louis Daguerre and William Henry Fox Talbot. Alongside technical information about the new “science” of photography are early images produced by these pioneers, especially of the natural world, including Fox Talbot’s wonderful Oak tree at Lacock (left). It’s interesting to note that although once photography began to catch on it was of course a pursuit for the wealthy who had money and leisure for it, Fox Talbot himself took remarkably unpretentious images of labourers and farm buildings as well as family and grand buildings.
Ther exhibition explains the social and historical changes which took place at the same time as the development of the photographic medium, including the growing possibilities of foreign travel. Consequently many of the photographs displayed are early holiday snaps, basically, but of the most fascinating places, which really help to bring the wider world of the nineteenth century to life. Alongside these are portraits, which became increasingly popular, especially as Queen Victoria was known to collect cartes de visite, and there are some familiar images of Dickens (right), George Bernard Shaw and Maud Allen, among others. Apparently, according to an exhibition note, going to be photographed was often considered to be on a par with going to the dentist – a tedious chore, and when you see the “posing stand” – an uncomfortable-looking object designed to keep sitters still during long exposures, you can see why.
The numerous uses of photography, and the changes it facilitated in society, are brought out well here: its scientific uses, in botany and diagnostics, for example, and from the 1890s, X-rays, are examined. Early war photography is also represented, in the Crimea (1853-6) and the American Civil War (1861-5), while the possibilities brought about by art reproduction through photography are also explained.
This exhibition is scrupulous in its consideration of the photograph as historical artefact, social document and also initiator of social change, and the range of images available here alongside the informative and discursive exhibition notes make this a fascinating exhibition.

Playing games with Derrida

Well, not just Derrida, but I like that as a phrase. The End of Mr Y by Scarlett Thomas is a book about games, really, and one that is certainly my kind of thing. It begins with a rather screwed-up Ph.D. student, Ariel Manto, whose thesis is on “thought experiments” and is working on a (fictional) Victorian writer, Thomas Lumas.  She comes across one of his books, The End of Mr Y, in a secondhand bookshop, and can’t believe her eyes – it’s incredibly rare, and thought to be cursed. Rumours abound that it is so dangerous that the CIA are after a copy. So far, so good – the excitement of finding the book you want, let alone one that obscure, in a bookshop plays to my idea of a thrill very well. I also like the idea that a book can be that dangerous – that words can build up something that has an effect well beyond the page. (I have also read A.S. Byatt’s Babel Tower this week, which has something of the same idea).

And Lumas’s The End of Mr Y is the most dangerous book, ever, because of the secret world it holds – literally. I don’t want to give too much away, but it contains a formula which permits the most extreme kind of thought experiment – one which can send you into the “Troposphere”, a kind of virtual-reality place which permits you to access other people’s minds. Ariel explores this world, which one can’t help but feel is in part a welcome relief from her real world, which is mostly unpleasant. And as she explores it, she finds out things about herself, and about this world. Derrida, Lacan and other theorists become vital clues to unravelling the pseudo-scientific and philosophical secrets of the Troposphere – for example, looking at Heidegger’s and Lacan’s notions that consciousness is constructed by language itself. This is both a game, and a deadly fight, which contrasts with what’s going on in her life – the academic work and the rather sordid relationships which are also a kind of game, but ones that nobody seems to be able to win.

Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in The Guardian that much of The End of Mr Y seems to turn into a computer game. This is true, and I found it difficult to reconcile this with the nineteenth-century element of Lumas’s The End of Mr Y. I found the giant mouse-god Apollo Smintheus difficult to assimilate; it just seemed a step too far into the ludicrous. But overall, I’d recommend it. It’s a clever book, and one which makes you think; it’s also the best kind of literary metafiction, in that it considers the book as more than fiction whilst knowing that it is itself pure fiction. If that sounds off-puttingly complicated, don’t worry – Thomas makes her arguments clearly and interestingly, and has moments of poetic description which are oddly satisfying. The epilogue, though, doesn’t work and seems to take a retrograde step – if you can manage it, don’t read the last two pages!

The suspicious detective in the nineteenth century

As a break from marking essays, I’ve been reading The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale. I’d seen it in bookshops but probably wouldn’t have read it if a friend hadn’t lent it to me, but I’m glad I did – it’s fascinating by any standard, but particularly so for someone with an interest in the nineteenth century. It’s based on the true story of the murder of a three-year-old boy at Road Hill House in Somerset in 1860; I’d expected it to be somehow “novelised” – to read like sensation fiction, but it doesn’t; it’s a factual account with little unnecessary detail, which makes it somehow all the more compelling.

Summerscale’s research has clearly been extremely extensive; she tells the story, of the child’s murder and the enquiries into the death, but there’s much more to it than that. For example, I didn’t know that the first proper detective in fiction appeared in Edgar Allen Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue (I thought there must have been an earlier precedent for this), and that the first detective force was set up in Britain eight years after this. The detective in the Road Hill murder was Jack Whicher, a prominent detective of the day, whose case notes Summerscale has consulted. This book is as much about the construction of the figure of the detective, in the press, in society, and in literature, as it is about the investigation and social implications of the murder case.

What is fascinating about this book is twofold: firstly, I really wanted to know “whodunit” – and usually that kind of thing doesn’t matter too much to me. Secondly, it’s what it reveals about mid-Victorian life. The details – both cosily domestic and surprisingly sordid – of life at the house are laid out before the reader, as, it turns out, they were at the time; this was one of the highest-profile murder cases of the time. Every detail was analysed in the press; everyone had an opinion, and the Whicher received thousands of letters suggesting possible murderers and offering information. The public was both intrigued and fully absorbed, becoming armchair-detectives themselves, and at the same time absolutely horrified about the intrusion into the private domestic space which seemed paramount to a threat to national security. Of course, the voyeurism of the nineteenth century press is ironically echoed by that of the reader of this book.

When Whicher made an accusation, he was vilified for calling the family into disrepute, as a lower-class working detective who had “intruded” on the middle-class security of the bereaved family. The paradoxes and hypocrisy the case, and this book, illuminates is fascinating; I was also surprised by how much effect this and other real-life cases had on contemporary writers, in particular (of course) Dickens and Wilkie Collins. One wonders what future generations might make of the news stories that capture the current generation’s interest.