Leighton House

The exhibition mounted to coincide with the extensive restoration of Leighton House, celebrates the artist’s colony that sprung up around Leighton in this
corner of West London.

The group included GF Watts famous for his symbolist paintings. Watts was later to acquire a house at Freshwater on the Isle of Wight close to where Lord
Tennyson and the celebrated photographer Julia Margaret Cameron already had homes. The exhibition includes some of Cameron’s photographs. Her nephew the artist Valentine Cameron Prinsep owned the house adjacent to Leighton House.

The journey through obscure forest to light, was a metaphysical trope embraced by the Leighton and his contemporaries who revered the Divine Comedy.

Searching today for Leighton House along the empty tree lined streets of 21  st century West London,; past embassy residences and deserted 20 bedroom oligarchs’ hidy-holes, we are in a comparable Dantesque prelude; we
mistakenly enter the garden of a private mansion in West London convinced  this must be Leighton House – only to be shuffled out by a rubicund gardener
who seems to have time-travelled from the 19 th century.
When finally we find Leighton House it is a phantasm given physical form. The mise-en-scène before us evokes the moment in 1001 Nights when an oriental palace is created overnight in the garden of the Sultan. Was this the sensation Leighton intended his contemporaries to feel on exiting the hansom cabs of smog filled Victorian London and entering his Arab Hall (1877) which he filled with more than 600 luminous turquoise tiles guarded by
a blue stuffed peacock below a golden mosaic dome? The 16 th century Damascus tiles were collected in Syria for the artist by Sir Richard Burton – orientalist, translator of 1001 Nights, who also sat for his portrait by his friend
Leighton.

Past the peacock and upstairs to the silk room - here is Leighton’s collection that reflects his aesthetic pre-Raphaelite, symbolist concerns and his friendships with artists including - Corot, Millais, Frederic Watts and Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Leighton’s dwelling includes both his main studio and a light filled winter studio - complete with back stair-case so his female models like the fabulously seductive Dorothy Dene could enter and leave unobserved by shockable haute-bourgeois neighbours.

On entering his working studio where brushes and palettes remain as if waiting for the artist to take them up - we are conscious of Leighton obsession with early medieval Florence; Leighton imbibed Vasari’s Lives and the Florentine spirit of Cimabue, Giotto, Masaccio, Uccello, Gozzoli, Ghirlandaio and  Botticelli. It was Leighton who was to design Browning’s tomb in the English Cemetery in Florence.

Leighton conceived the death of Brunelleschi in the manner of a great history painting - the pale Renaissance master lies on his deathbed in the foreground
whilst in the background his sunlit Dome looks out at the centuries to come. The painting hangs in his studio.

One of Leighton’s first major sales was inspired by the Rucellai Madonna (by Duccio but misattributed by Vasari) to which Leighton gave the title  “Cimabue’s celebrated Madonna carried in Procession”– it was purchased
privately by Queen Victoria, at the urging of Prince Albert, for 600 guineas.

Leighton’s magnum opus is Flaming June. Dorothy Dene’s pose is modelled on Michelangelo's Night in the Medici Tombs which Leighton regarded as “one of the supreme achievements of Western art".