Quiet and still air of delightful studios
Stephen Gardiner
ARTISTS' HOUSES IN LONDON by Giles Walkley Scholar Press, £50, pp. 281 he more remote the 19th century seems, the more remarkable much of its architectural design appears. Of course, John Betjeman showed us the wonders of Victoriana long, long ago, and at a time when it was generally dismissed as senti- mental old hat; long ago, too, J.M. Richards did likewise for the fearless endeavours of the engineers, touching on everything from canal-side building to warehouses and railway sheds in his excel- lent book, The Functional Tradition. There have been others: a few years ago, Char- lotte Gere gave us a most surprising insight of behind-the-façade-riches, follow- ing that up with breathtaking revelations about furniture and household goods in Nineteenth-Centuty Design. While there's an opening for someone to do a study of the great Board School architect, E.R. Robson, friend of Rossetti and designer of 200 schools built in the decade following the 1870 Education Act, here comes yet another fascinating subject from Giles Walkley: artists' studios of the residential sort.
It is not of course confined to that won- derfully peaceful and prosperous age that encouraged and financed the release of a sudden explosion of creative energy. On the one hand, it starts off with the inaugu- ration of the Royal Academy in 1768, an event that concentrated artists like Reynolds, Turner and Lawrence in Lon-
don's West End between what are now Park Lane and Leicester Square: accord- ing to the author's diagram, the neigh- bourhood was packed with studios, conveniently sited for the RA which, tem- porarily housed in the Mall, had its art school located in Somerset House. At the other end, the boom was fading out in the 1900s, and the last work of real quality was 117 Old Church Street, Chelsea, designed by Halsey Ricardo in 1914: with the outbreak of the Great War the boom was over.
For the chief substance of the book we are back with this astonishing upsurge of individuality that lay between the 1860s and the turn of the century. This is where many of one's favourite architects surface — Edward Godwin, Basil Champneys and J.J.Stevenson (both of whom worked with Robson on school buildings), Philip Webb, Norman Shaw, Charles Voysey and C.R. Ashbee among them. Of this memorable group, Godwin's field Of action was Tite Street, Chelsea, while Ashbee seized on a similarly attractive area of the art set's fashionable base, the river front west of Chelsea Old Church, demolishing a mediaeval fishing village in the process. Indeed, the sheer nerve and verve of the combined work of Godwin and Ashbee could be said to have made Chelsea smart: Godwin's dazzling designs for the street —of which only No 46, the Tower House, remains — captured the imagination of such fascinating characters as Oscar Wilde, James Whistler and Frank Miles (all of whom commissioned plans from him), and Ashbee's spirited originality in terrace architecture of the 1890s, devised largely as a spec, attracted a sculptor, John Rollins, and James Whistler in the last 15 months of his life,
and later Jacob Epstein and the painter Ethel Walker. Like Godwin's works, Ash- bee's studio houses were designed both to establish a firm edge to the street and to be varied in height, form and detail: his final building there (probably designed by Charles Holden) was a tower of studios on the corner of Danvers Street for a collec- tion of artists which includes Augustus John and John Tweed. At seven storeys high, it was, like Godwin's Tower House, a striking landmark for the design, but it was never built; worse still, the complete ter- race vanished under a land mine in 1941, after which the work of destruction was completed in 1968 when Wates knocked down No 37 (Ashbee's mother's house) for a huge and hideous block of flats. A public inquiry allowed that disaster.
These two examples give some idea of the range of information in Walkley's book. There is of course so much besides — the work of Norman Shaw in Walton Street, at 18 Hyde Park Gate and at his best in Mel- bury Road, Kensington, for instance; of Voysey in Bedford Park; of the brilliant Arthur Mackmurdo at 25, Cadogan Gar- dens off the King's Road, a superb exercise in interior and exterior design. And there's a section on what the author calls mass- produced developments — grouped schemes round gardens at the Pembroke Studios, or along streets as at Talgarth Road, or strips of them behind Albert Bridge Road, Battersea, Park Walk, Chelsea, and Gilston Road, Kensington. Again, this is only a sample, but with the vast majority built in those 30 years after 1870, the richness contributed to the char- acter and atmosphere to bits of London was immense; how difficult to imagine a similar interest being shown in the artist's place of work today, a hundred years on.
'Whistler in his Lindsey House studio', by Walter Greaves, e. 1871. Whistler reproduced the colour scheme of his painting room at Chelsea Reach in The Artist's Mother'.
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