Leighton House Museum
Let me just draw your attention to this museum in London which was also the home of the great artist, Lord Leighton. If you get the chance to visit it seize it or simply make sure to fit it into your schedule when you next travel to London. It is in Holland Park.
No ancient pillars, or statues with an arm off on display. As I am falling to pieces myself I am not too keen on seeing old monuments. That is for the young with a life ahead of them.
This was a home built by an artist and turned into a museum. I particularly loved the Arab Hall with its magnificent tiles and exotic ambience. Lord Leighton had travelled to Turkey in 1867, to Egypt in the following year and to Syria in 1873. On each of these trips he collected textiles, pottery and other objects that were later to be displayed in his house. However, the trip to Damascus in 1873 laid the foundations for the wonderful collection of tiles that line the walls of the Arab Hall extension. Further examples were collected for Leighton by others, including the explorer and diplomat, Sir Richard Burton.
In 1877, Leighton began the construction of the Arab Hall. This was an ambitious and costly undertaking. The model was an interior contained in a 12th-century Sicilio-Norman palace called La Zisa at Palermo in Sicily. Aitchison, the architect, and Leighton brought together a group of their contemporaries to contribute to the project; the potter William De Morgan, the artist Walter Crane, the sculptor Edgar Boehm and the artist and illustrator Randolph Caldecott were all involved. The mosaics and marbles and skilled craftsmen were all sourced in London, although Crane’s design for the gold mosaic frieze was made up in Venice and shipped to the site in sections.
The other striking element of the interior of the Arab Hall is the wonderful tiles made by William De Morgan (1839-1917). After training as a painter at the Royal Academy Schools and then, with the encouragement of his friend William Morris, designing and producing stained glass, William De Morgan became the foremost potter associated with the Arts and Crafts Movement. Fascinated by the technical and scientific aspects of his craft, by the mid1870s he became increasingly expert in the colours and glazes of Ottoman pottery, often referred to as ‘Persian’ style. Leighton invited De Morgan to a breakfast meeting where the Arab Hall project was discussed.
De Morgan was paid a total of £227 for his work between July 1880 and January 1882, although such was his perfectionism that it was apparently completed at a personal loss of £500 – a fact that he felt he could not reveal to Leighton.
In the Silk Room there are some of my favourite painters: Albert Moore, John Everett Millais, George Frederic Watts, John Singer Sargent and Lawrence Alma-Tadema.
This is not another museum. It is an experience. I hope to go again before I am dead and buried and both my feet in the grave.