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 

A Cabinet of Collectors 8: Olga Hirsch

A Wrapped-up Story

Card games were a very popular pastime at the Tudor courts.  Anne of Cleves reportedly entertained Henry VIII on their unconsummated wedding night by playing cards with him.

 Anne of Cleves, portrait miniature by Hans Holbein c. 1539

© Victoria & Albert Museum

Worn and dog-eared cards could be recycled.  Holbein's lovely portrait of Anne, like so many miniatures of the period, is painted on vellum and backed with a piece cut from a playing card.

The printing centres of Germany and then France led the market in early woodblock printed and hand painted playing cards, for which several layers of paper were glued together (i.e. pasteboard).

The Queen of Hearts, from Jehan Personne, 1493

(see The World of Playing Cards)

The last sheet might be folded over the front edges for strength, and some were backed with block-printed decorated papers.  To make full use of their printing blocks,  factories in Germany, Holland and Austria would use the same woodblocks to print fabric, paper, and even to stamp the baker's bread, which would then be wrapped in those decorated printed papers.

But the main uses of printed decorated papers, besides wrapping goods, was by publishers and booksellers.  Books were frequently sold just with protective paper covers, for owners to have bound to their own choice, and marbled papers, introduced into England by John Evelyn, are still the classic choice as endpapers.  Decorated printed papers were also ideal for books of non-standard sizes, such as music scores, and this is how the British Library's remarkable collection of decorative printed papers began.

Olga Hirsch began accumulating antique printed papers for repairing her husband Paul Hirsch's collection of rare music scores and literature*, and then started to collect them for their own sake.  She sought out examples of different techniques -- block printing, metallic, embossed, stencilled and pasted papers - from different countries and periods from the 16th to the 20th century.  Her collection of 3500 decorated papers, as well as many book examples and reference material, was bequeathed to the British Library in1968, outstripping most other international collections.
* Her husband's unique music library bought by the British Museum in 1946.

 

 Scrotted marbled paper, early 19th century

National Library of the Netherlands

French block printed paper, Olga Hirsch collection

Mid-19th century rococo style, with gold and colour blocking

Olga Hirsch collection

Japanese 19th century katagami (stencil cut) paper

© British Library, Olga Hirsch collection

The Hirsches, like Anne of Cleves and Holbein the Younger, were also foreign migrants from Germany, settling in Britain, and remembered in our national collections.  And it is by the circuitous  influence  of old recycled paper, that an American migrant artist, James Whistler, created one of our iconic views of the Thames, now in the Tate Gallery.

Nocturne: Blue and Gold, Old Battersea Bridge
James McNeill Whistler  © Tate Britain

Whistler and his contemporaries were inspired by the work of Hokusai, master of woodblock prints, discovered in Paris by Felix Braquemond in 1856.  Copies from Hokusai's sketchbook were being used as wrapping paper, protecting shipments of Japanese export porcelain.

 Mishima Pass,  Mount Fuji,   Katsushiga Hokusai  c. 1830-32

© Metropolitan Museum of Art