November: Drawn in Kensington - Linley Sambourne House

Linley Sambourne, the famous Punch cartoonist posing

Sunday, 1st November 

"I called for Anne Rosse at her uncle's house in Stafford Terrace, a house bought by her grandfather, Linley Sambourne, the  Punch cartoonist of the 1880s.  It is a period piece, untouched.  It is choc-a-bloc with art nouveau. The Morris-papered walls are plastered with old photographic groups and Sambourne drawings, the frames touching each other, weird clocks galore, stained-glass windows, Victorian walking-sticks and parasols.  Anne and I walked round the pretty back streets by Holland Park, and took a bus to the Ritz, where Michael joined us at 1 o'clock and Oliver [Messel]* at 2 o'clock.  We talked over the luncheon table till 4.  Oliver is a camouflage major in Norwich.  He has discovered Ivory's  disused Assembly Rooms, made them into his headquarters, and is redecorating them."
[*Artist and designer, brother of Lady Rosse] 

Ancestral Voices  James Lees-Milne 1942

The rich, darkly cluttered Victorian interiors of Linley and Marion Sambourne's Kensington home are  just as Lees-Milne describes, but relieved by lamps, mirrors, and the light reflecting off the glass-framed pictures and photographs covering the walls,

Two views of the Drawing Room  

© Linley Sambourne collection, Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

This family home at 18 Stafford Terrace was part of the artistic life of Kensington in the 1880s, dominated by Lord Leighton in nearby Holland Park  Road.  It was preserved almost unchanged by Lady Rosse, remembering her happy childhood, and the Victorian Society, until it was passed to the local authority and opened to the public in 1980.

Linley Sambourne made a good living from his drawings for Punch, but he had to follow the editor's directions.  He wrote to James Whistler  to warn him that he would be satirised for his libel case against the critic John Ruskin, who had so strongly derided Whistler's Falling Rocket  painting.  "I am in a manner obliged to take up any subject the editor points out….I have every sympathy with you in what must be a most trying and irritating time".

Working to deadlines and aiming for a range of accurately drawn characters,  he used posed photographs as a source for figures in his cartoons, and turned one of the bathrooms into a workroom, with a marble-lined developing tank in place of the bath.

Marion Sambourne posing for a Punch cartoon drawing © RBKC Sambourne collection

He used family and servants for these photos, and professional models for artistic and nude poses;  when I first visited in the 1980s many of these were hung in the workroom;  I still remember one (maidservant or model?) of a nude young woman in profile, wearing nothing but a pair of black stockings, and looking as unconcerned as if she were just washing dishes.

As well as the stylish 'aesthetic' furnishings, the family records, photographs, diaries and correspondence were also preserved, now part of the Linley Sambourne archives;  Marion Sambourne's diaries in particular give a fascinating picture of daily life for a well-off Victorian  family and their artist friends.

and see: rbkc.gov.uk/18 Stafford Terrace;  The Holland Park Circle, Susan Dakers 

Flaming June

Flaming June  Frederick Leighton  1895

Museo de Arte de Ponco, Puerta Rica

This is the famous painting by Frederick, Lord Leighton, probably of his favourite model, the actress Dorothy Dene, who also sat for George Frederic Watts and John Everett Millais.  These were among the rich and socially ambitious painters who built houses for themselves in Kensington, close to the homes of their wealthy patrons like the Ionides family, the Prinseps or Lady Holland.

Leighton's house on Holland Park Road was designed as a Palace of Art, with six eye-catching public rooms, including his large studio/gallery, the scene of soiree's and concerts as well as actual painting.  His single bedroom is small and almost spartan in contrast.

He came to fame early, when Queen Victoria purchased his painting Cimabue's Celebrated Madonna in Procession in Florence when it was shown at the Royal Academy in 1855;  his work follows this classicizing Renaissance revival style.

Cimabue's Celebrated Madonna by Frederick Leighton 1855

On loan to the National Gallery London, from the Royal Collection

 Many of his paintings are widely dispersed in public and private collections (there are several large murals by him at the V&A Museum), but the Leighton House collection now includes many important paintings, drawings and sculpture by Leighton and his circle of artist friends.

Leighton House  © Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

The star of Leighton House itself is the Arab Hall, based on a twelfth century palace in Palermo, with its gentle fountain and pool.   It was created to display his glowing collection of early Syrian and Isnik  tiles and ceramics,  acquired on his travels, and on a visit to Damascus in 1873, with marble,  mosaics and carving. Here he was helped by the Consul,  explorer Sir Richard Burton:

 "My wife and I will keep a sharp look-out for you, and buy up as many [old tiles] as we can find which seem to answer your description.  If native inscriptions -- white or blue, for instance -- are to be had, I shall secure them, but not if imperfect.  Some clearing away of rubbish is expected at Damascus; the Englishman who superintends is a friend of mine, and I shall not neglect to get from him as much as possible (1871)."  Other friends added to his collection and  fellow artists Walter Crane, William de Morgan, Edgar Boehm and Randolph Caldecott collaborated on the finished design,
"quite the 8th wonder of the world, including a Moorish cupola palace, with a fountain, all lined with precious Persian tiles and mosaics by Walter Crane, as good almost as a Ravenna church;" ( Mrs Vernon Lee 1883).

I am sure my small daughter cannot be the only past visitor gazing up at the amazing golden frieze who has found themselves ankle deep in the pool.     Today Leighton House is one of London's less familiar public treasures, a quiet oasis just off Kensington High Street,  where you can soak up the atmosphere of artistic life in the late nineteenth century,  preferably keeping dry feet.

Quotations from Caroline Dakers' The Holland Park Circle.

Who was Warrender Chase?

"God knows where I got Warrender Chase from; he was based on no one that I knew.

I know only that the night I started writing Warrender Chase I had been alone at a table in a restaurant near Kensington High Street Underground eating my supper.  I rarely ate out alone, but I must have found myself in funds that day.  I was going about my proper business, eating my supper while listening-in to the conversation at the next table.  One of them said, 'There we were all gathered in the living-room, waiting for him.'

It was all I needed.  That was the start of Warrender Chase, the first chapter.  All the rest sprang from that phrase.

But I invented for my Warrender a war record, a distinguished one, in Burma, and managed to make it really credible even although I filled in the war bit with a very few strokes, knowing, in fact, so little about the war in Burma.  It astonished me later to find how the readers found Warrender's war record so convincing and full when I had said so little -- one real war veteran of Burma wrote to say how realistic he found it -- but since then I've come to learn for myself how little one needs, in the art of writing, to convey the lot, and how a lot of words, on the other hand, can convey so little…..

All these years since, the critics have been asking whether Warrender was in love with his nephew.  How do I know?  Warrender Chase never existed, he is only some hundreds of words, some punctuation, sentences, paragraphs, marks on the page.  If I had conceived Warrender Chase's motives as a psychological study I would have said so.  But I didn't go in for motives, I never have."

Loitering with Intent   Muriel Spark

An Engraver's tailpiece

"It was here at No. 31 [Kensington Square], that I discovered Bewick, one afternoon while Aunt Etty was having her rest.  I remember lying on the sofa between the dining room windows with the peacock blue serge curtains, and wishing passionately that I could have been Mrs. Bewick.  Of course, I should have liked still more to be Mrs. Rembrandt, but that seemed too tremendous even to imagine; whereas it did not seem impossibly outrageous to think of myself as Mrs. Bewick.  She was English enough, and homely enough, anyhow. Surely, I thought, if I cooked his roast beef beautifully and mended his clothes and minded the children -- surely he would, just sometimes, let me draw and engrave a little tailpiece for him.  Only just to be allowed to invent a little picture sometimes.  Oh happy, happy Mrs. Bewick! thought I, as I kicked my heels on the blue sofa."

Period Piece  Gwen Raverat