Arts
Music and Dance
Helen Smith It is one of the sad facts about the current system of listing buildings that the vast majority of those buildings of historic or architectural importance are subject to no control over their interiors. In the case of domestic interiors of the Victorian period and indeed later this has often been a serious omission. Both in town and country, and in private and public ownership, houses continue to be stripped not only of their moveable fittings and furnishings but of fireplaces, tilework, woodwork, plasterwork, metalwork and decorative painting, • all of which are essential parts of the architecture of the interior. Buildings listed Grade I, which include such obvious nineteenth-century examples as Leighton House, Kensington, with its exotic interior by Aitchison, and Cardiff Castle, the fantastic creation of William Burges and Lord Bute, as well as other houses not open to the public such as Burges's own Tower House, have fully protected interiors. In all these cases the Department of the Environment has recognised the importance of preserving what remains of the nineteenthcentury decoration and we can be thankful that this is considerable. Buildings of this period are more commonly given a Grade II listing which may only be sufficient to preserve them until it suits the convenience of the owner or the local planning authority to argue for their demolition. In this case there is no protection of the interior unless it is designated Grade II* and this seems to be all too rarely granted to Victorian houses, although examples include George Corson's Spenfield in Leeds. In the past few years strides have been made in the listing of Victorian buildings, partly due to the greater public interest generated by the Victorian Society and local preservation societies, but all too often while preserving a moderately important exterior an extremely important interior has been allowed to disappear.
My case in point, which is worth examining in some detail, is No. 1 South Audley Street, at this very moment occupied by a cheerful team of decorators making the best of a bad job after the removal of the paintings and some of the most important features of the decoration of the house as part of its conversion from offices into more offices pending a possible sale. The blame for the state of the house is not entirely due to the present owner or leaseholder, who admittedly had to cope with the uniform coating of cream paint ('magnolia', as the decorators called it) over much of the plasterwork dating back perhaps to the 1930s. Over the years, however, and between the various parties concerned, some very serious mistakes have been made. The reasons why this house should have been kept intact concern both its arthistorical and historical importance and its intrinsic aesthetic value. The house as it now stands no longer accurately mirrors the artistic and social climate of its period, nor does it reflect the unique character of the patron who created it, a certain Mr Stewart Hodgson, merchant banker and friend and patron of many leading artists in the 1870s and 1880s. Like the Baring family, with whom he was in partnership, Hodgson is an example of the wealthy financier whose artistic patronage bridged what is often a gap between the fashionable and the aesthetically sound. For his country house, Lythe Hill, at Haslemere in Surrey, built before his town house in 1868, he employed Frederick Pepys Cockerel!, son of C. R. Cockerell, to build a red brick Neo-Tudor house and although Pevsner describes the house as 'formidably ugly' he was evidently well enough satisfied to employ Cockerell again in South Audley Street in 1878. Hodgson, as well as jumping on the band-wagon early on in the craze for moulded terra-cotta, was one of the few pioneer patrons satisfying a growing urge among avant-garde painters to decorate buildings with mural paintings. As early as 1873 W. B. Richmond was painting mural panels in Lythe Hill drawing room, which was followed by Frederick Leighton's `Daphnephoria' in 1876, painted on a vast canvas and exhibited in the Royal Academy but definitely commissioned as decoration for a specific wall in the house. For both artists opportunities such as these were lifelong ambitions, too rarely received.
When F. P. Cockerell died in 1878 Hodgson switched to an even more fashionable architect and one more closely connected with the worlds of painting and the applied arts, George Aitchison, who completed his house in South Audley Street in 1879. He was largely responsible for the interior, to judge by its very high quality. Aitchison was particularly an interiors man, widely employed by the upper classes and the wealthy to redecorate existing houses, a fashionable but less radical alternative to William Morris. Lord Leighton, with whom he was on friendly terms, employed him to build Leighton House from 1866 onwards and it was probably on Leighton's personal recommendation that Hodgson took him on. He was obviously, with good reason, delighted with the result and later employed Aitchison to revamp the interiors at Lythe Hill. For what had been created in South Audley Street was nothing less than a 'palace of art', a town mansion on a modest scale vying with Leighton House in its effect.
In parallel with the work done at South Audley Street, Aitchison was completing the Arab Hall at Leighton House with its combinations of Oriental tiles, gold sculptured capitals by Aitchison and Randolph Caldecott and a mosaic frieze by Walter Crane and Hodgson. Aitchison, with his love of polychrome splendour, was obliging and in the first floor drawing room he combined the skills of both Leighton and Crane with his own. The whole house is richly but not overpoweringly decorated with carved wood panelling, inlaid woods, metalwork, and marble, stone and mosaic fireplaces in great variety, and much of the original effect of the hall and staircase remains. The plasterwork in the main rooms must have lost its polychrome and gilding some time ago except for a sample in the ground-floor drawing room, but the house's remaining fittings testify to the high quality of design and execution in all the decorative detail.
The drawing room, until recently, contained one of the few examples of Leighton's decorative painting and it has been 'discovered' by the art-historians too late for it to be preserved in situ. The long friezes of 'Music' and 'Dance' which dominated the decoration have recently been removed and are now on show in Leighton House. They were exhibited in the Royal Academy in 1883 and 1885, where they attracted a lot of attention prior to their installation in Hodgson's town house. The other major feature is the series of six panels of mosaic designed by Walter Crane in about 1880. They are still situated in the upper corners of the frieze and in two lunettes but although the gold grounds shine as brightly as ever and the designs are as powerful and as fresh as we would expect from the artist they are somehow lost in the present decor and we can scarcely visualise their former effect. The entire coffered and moulded ceiling is painted whiter than white, as are the cornice, walls, wooden dado and elaborate carved wood overdoors, but an attempt has been made to mitigate the stark result by 'picking out' the details on the ceiling in purple paint, carefully chosen to match the purple patterned wallpaper inserted in the frieze to fill in the gaping hole left by the Leighton friezes. A similar unsympathetic treatment has been, afforded the remaining painted frieze. or birds by W. E. F. Britten in the adjoining room, which now appear very grubbY between the glaring white walls and pretty plaster ceiling. The partly redeeming twist to this story is that the Leighton friezes were generouslY given to Leighton House by the present owner, who is considering selling the house. This kind person took the responsibility for the paintings themselves and prevented them from being sold abroad or whitewashed. Ultimately, however, the responsibility for an interior of this importance should have been with the DOE and a serious omission was made in 1970 when the house was listed Grade II with no star. There is still enough left of star quality.
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