A North Kensington Interior
By JAMES POPE•HENNESSY THERE is small magic in the words North Kensington, there is nothing overtly exotic about Earls Court. Indeed what part of London seems more commonplace than the junction of Kensington High Street with the Earls Court Road ? Neither the Gallic symmetry of Earls Terrace, designed by a French speculator during the Regency, nor the placid spacious garden of Edwardes Square can make this area seem delectable. Even Leigh Hunt could 'dig up a little .,, to say about this corner of his old court suburb; the most he can do for it is to relate the amusing fiction that Edwardes Square was laid out by a spy who wished to provide cheap London accommodation for the sous-officiers of Napoleon's army of occupation, and the dull ,fact that Mrs. Elizabeth Inchbald, the actress and playwright, lived in furnished lodgings in Earls Terrace. Nor does it deeply stir us to know that Coleridge is rumoured to have once walked along the winding paths of Edwardes Square, or that " a lady who was a child at the time, is very proud of his having spoken to her and given her a kiss," for to us the actual personality of Coleridge seems distinctly less bewitching than it did to his contemporaries. But if you cross the High Street from Earls Terrace—a row of pleasant houses which seem, to judge from the state of their once trim, cream-painted front doors to have gone steeply down in the world—and take the first turning off Melbury Road you can fancy yourself in Cairo or Damascus. Enter a large mansion in red brick, sign your name in a visitors' book to the sound of a tinkling fountain, step through a second doorway, and there all about you lie the shimmer and the sheen; the artfully filtered daylight and the cool speckled musharabiyehs' shade, of Sir Frederick Leighton's Arab Hall.
During the two final decades of the last century, this room was one of the most celebrated in all London. In a disparaging article in the Dictionary of National Biography, Walter Armstrong, who there unjustly accuses Leighton of being a poor draughtsman, and too, facile a painter, terms the Arab Hall " the creation by which, in some quarters, Leighton is best known." After the painter's death in 1896 there was an outcry that, whatever happened to the contents, the house and Arab Hall must be preserved: " As a matter of mere reverence," wrote one of Leighton's numerous -continental admirers, " how many would come from all parts of the civilised world to see his abode."
Since 1925, when the last of Leighton's trustees, his biographer Mrs. Russell Barrington, made the house and its collection of pictures over to the Royal Borough, Leighton House has been used for local exhibitions and concerts and for lectures such as those of the Kensington Society. Perhaps inevitably, the house, which has now been re-opened three years, makes a bleak, unloved impression, with tubular chairs in stacks, and a collection of Leighton's excellent drawings and big academic pictures somewhat hastily arranged along the walls. But although the Corots and Constables, the unfinished Reynolds portrait of Rockingham talking to Burke, the Sebastiano del Piombo, the Delacroix Sappho and all Leighton's other prized possessions are gone, as has the stuffed peacock which, perched on the stair-rail, " seemed to have shed some of its brilliant hues upon its surroundings," the house remains one of the most important examples in London of enlightened late Victorian taste.
The staircase, which the architect Aitchison had designed so as to give to people seen ascending it from the hall the appearance of going slowly from shade into light, is lined by tiles specially designed by William de Morgan, in what one tends to think of as peacock blue, but what is technically known as " Egyptian Green." The stairway mounts from a square hall, with black and white mosaic floor, and it is from this hall that a short passage with a silver ceiling and a gold cornice leads into the Arab room. Begun in November, 1877, (some four years after the completion of the Wrest of the house) and virtually finished in 1879, this room was then acclaimed one of the marvels of London. Its genesis lay in Leighton's two journeys to the East, during which he had begun to make a collection of Saracenic tiles from Cairo, Rhodes and Damascus, subsequently continued with the aid of Sir Richard Burton and his wife. It was to house these tiles that this domed annexe, complete with lattice-work windows from a Cairo harem, a black marble basin and fountain, a gold frieze by Walter Crane, and a quantity of pillars in green, blue, red and black marbles from Caserta and Genoa, from Belgium, Southern Ireland and the Pyrenees, was designed by Professor Aitchison who made special drawings for it from buildings in Moorish Spain. A lantern at the summit of the dome contains small panes of brilliantly coloured glass, and this " jewel-like " effect, together with the brilliant marbles, the sixteenth. century tiles, and the hanging lamp in the form of a copper corona, make an effect as picturesque as that of one of J. F. Lewis's eastern water-colours. Elsewhere," a contem- porary remarks, " Leighton satisfied his love of chastened form; in this room and its approach he gave full scope to his delight in rich colours."
Upstairs, in Leighton's vast studio, are a number of his pictures, and the empty platforms on which his models would stand. The absence of the lumber and the dusty canvases usual in a painter's studio, was thought noteworthy by Leighton's friends, who regarded it as one more proof of the P.R.A.'s fine character. It is difficult for us at this moment to realise just how much Leighton was revered and loved by his contemporaries. " Intellectually, spiritually and socially he was the most brilliant leader and stimulator of artists we have ever seen in England," a friend wrote of him: " One of the greatest men of any time," said Watts. His letters alone make it perfectly clear that Leighton Was a man of singular charm; courteous, generous, witty, romantic-looking and in every way fulfilling what the Victorians meant when they used the word artistic," Leighton was compired with Dickens and with Irving for his vitality, creative force and humour. A very handsome, bearded figure, with " a soft, willowy, rather effeminate manner," he had, Lord Redesdale tells us, " one great charm—the look of happiness."
Beyond the lecture-rooms, which were once Leighton's drawing- and dining-rooms, lies the garden, untidy now but once neatly kept and skilfully arranged to seem larger than it was. Here, in slippers, a " land and water hat " and a smock overall, the P.R.A. would sit lounging on a garden chair on Sunday mornings in the summer-time, discoursing merrily to a circle of his friends. The whole house, and most particularly the Arab Hall, is indeed emphatically a house for the summer; on winter evenings the fountain plashing into its deep, cold pool, where two large golden Japanese tench stolidly brooded, struck a chill into the guests. Originally the basin in the Arab Hall had been of white marble, but since this was found to leak it was replaced by one in black marble. This proved to be a mistake, for not only was it generally judged gloomy but on at least one occasion, at which Burne-Jones and Whistler were present, a guest smoking and drinking his coffee in the Arab Hall stepped backwards and fell in amongst the tench. Leighton, who had previously lived in Orme Square, jocularly called his new abode " living in a mews." Today, in spite of the clearly arrowed labels which direct you to " Leighton House " from Kensington High Street and from Abbotsbury Road, the house seems little visited. Carefully preserved though it is, you cannot help wondering whether more should not be done to re-furnish it, and to restore the house thoroughly so that it may perform even better than it does its true role—that of reminding us of a remarkable English personality and of the aesthetic values and point of view of a vanished, highly cultivated epoch in London life.
The above is the sixth of a series of articles in which Mr. Pope- Hennessy, a former Literary Editor of the "Spectator" re-explores post-war London.
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