In every square foot of space there hangs or lies some work of art ancient or modern, peculiarly rare, choice, lovely. According to a visiting American journalist, it seemed "the apartment of a virtuoso. And all the evidence suggests that he achieved his dearest wish. Leighton House, as it came to be called rather than "2 Holland Park Road", was intended by its creator to be a "private palace of art". Fellow artists, meanwhile, could lounge in the Silk Room, a cosy second studio space where Leighton, always a generous collector of other people's work, stacked his recent purchases on chairs. Intimate friends might be invited to spend the evening in the dining room, a red jewel-box hung with glittering Middle-Eastern ceramics and set off by crimson floorboards. Meanwhile, closer acquaintances, including members of the royal family, might attend one of Leighton's famous musical soirées in the cavernous studio which doubled as an assembly room, complete with minstrels' gallery. Visitors gazed at the spectacular Arab Hall, with its golden dome and indoor fountain. Adding to the building over three decades, and still tinkering at the time of his death, he ended up with one of the most talked-about houses in the country. Buoyed up by increasingly high fees for his paintings – in 1864 his Dante in Exile fetched 1,000 guineas – and also by family money, Leighton was able to indulge his vision for a home that expressed every side of himself as gentleman, collector, artist and professional man.
Leighton House would be his personal advertisement – his calling card to a society which, until recently, had still tended to send all but a handful of artists round to the tradesmen's entrance.įor that reason the house needed to be spectacular. With the Victorian art market booming, and questions of domestic taste pressing hard on the middle classes, Leighton needed a space where he could demonstrate his position as both president of the Royal Academy and chief exponent of a new aestheticism in painting and design. Frederic, Lord Leighton built the Kensington studio-house in increments from 1865, not just as a place to live and paint but also as a stage on which he could act out the newly-dignified role of artist. L eighton House, which has reopened to the public after a £1.6m restoration, is a testimony not simply to one man and his vision but to a particular moment in British cultural history.
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