The Linley Sambourne House Part 2

Self-portrait of the artist Edward Linely Sambourne

Self portrait of Edward Linley Sambourne. Dated 1891, scanned from The History of "Punch", by M.H. Spielmann, Cassell & Company Ltd. 1895, page 531. Source: Wikipedia.

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A month ago we paused our tour of Sambourne House after the ground floor Dining Room.

The Drawing Room is not only on the first (U.S. second) floor, but is the first floor. This is the showplace, the most public part of the house. Like some of the other rooms, it may appear cluttered and even claustrophobic to modern eyes. According to the guidebook, the room held 250 objects by 1877, and the number continued to increase over the years.* It seems that Linley was an avid collector, often to his wife’s dismay. I was not dismayed. So much to look at! So many beautiful things! The reel will let you judge for yourself.

Video of Sambourne House Drawing Room

Moving up to the second (U.S. third) floor, we enter a more private area. While the furniture of the Main Bedroom is arranged much as it was in the Sambournes’ time, the wall coverings (here and elsewhere) have undergone some changes. In 1877 the original Morris & Co. wallpaper was replaced with a Japanese embossed paper. Then in 1960, the Countess of Rosse did a little redecorating, which included replacing it with another Morris & Co. paper.

Sambourne House Main Bedroom video

Among the wonderful objects in the Main Bedroom are the blue and white china on the mantel and the ornamental fan “whose leaves were decorated for Sambourne by many of the leading artists of his day.” Several leaves are signed, but even zooming in, I can’t make out the names.

Though the main characters in my stories belong to the upper orders, I need to know as well about the people who kept their lives and homes in order, whether or not they actually appear onstage. And so I learned that a typical middle class family of the time would probably have four servants: housemaid, parlor maid, nursery maid, and cook. The latter two would have slept in their own domains. The maid’s room would have been a little plainer in the Sambournes’ time, with painted rather than wallpapered walls—and this room might have held two beds, for the house and parlor maids, instead of one.

Video of maid’s room in Sambourne House.

While his children were young, Linley Sambourne worked at first in the Morning Room, then in an extension he had built at the back of the Drawing Room. The room shown in the reel below was originally the nursery, then his daughter Maud’s bedroom until 1898, when she married. The following year it became his Studio. In the 20th century, the room underwent more changes before restoration, based on his son’s 1920s photographs, began in the 1980s.

Along with the still photo of the Studio are some samples of Sambourne’s work. You can learn more about him and see more images of the house and his work by simply searching his name online, but I recommend you start with the museum’s website here.

Then you might want to look at some of these sites:

https://www.londonxlondon.com/sambourne-house-london/

https://www.withinlondon.com/post/sambourne-house

https://www.diaryofalondoness.com/sambourne-house-london/

https://www.rbkc.gov.uk/museums/interiors-sambourne-house

https://www.nancygouldstone.com/blog/sambourne-house-a-glimpse-into-victorian-artistic-life

*Unless otherwise noted, the information and quotations in these two blog posts come from the Linley Sambourne House guidebook and brochure.

Leighton House Museum

George Frederic Watts RA, Portrait of Frederic, Lord Leighton, P.R.A, 1888.

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Though the artist Frederick Leighton belongs to the late Victorian era, rather than the time of my stories, I decided to visit his house in Kensington again (we’d toured it several years ago) because artists’ residences are interesting, especially those of 19th century artists. Not all were starving in garrets, as Leighton House demonstrates.

Born to wealth, Leighton was one who did not fret about where his next meal was coming from. He was able to furnish his house with treasures from around the world. One of several additions was the Arab Hall: "More expensive to build than the whole of the original house, on completion in 1882 it caused a sensation,” according to the museum’s brochure. It still does.

To my great regret, I can’t offer a reel of the Arab Hall, thanks to a miscommunication at the time of our visit. However, these images at the museum website should give you an idea.

Still, I think the Staircase Hall (reel below) is pretty impressive, too.

Video of the Staircase Hall at Leighton House

Below are a few other images, to give you an idea of Leighton’s taste. #1 & #2 Architect George Atchinson, with whom Leighton worked on the house from the time he acquired the empty plot until shortly before his death; #3 a pair of marble columns on the ground (U.S. first) floor; #4 the Drawing Room (since Leighton’s studio was his reception room, this infrequently used room was the “withdrawing room” for Leighton’s women guests, after dinner); #5 & #6 the Drawing Room’s Murano glass chandelier; #7 & #8 Leighton’s painting, Eucharis (Girl with a Basket of Fruit); #9 & #10 one of the pair of beautiful bookcases in the first floor (U.S. second floor) Studio; #11 & #12 the German marquety table, also in the Studio; #13, #14, #15 the Antechamber, containing a mashrabiya, a pierced wooden screen; #16 Loretta showing off in the Silk Room, the last change Leighton made to his house, and which he used as a gallery for pictures by his artist friends.

If you’d like to see what his house was like when Leighton was alive, you might take a look at this Strand Magazine article of 1892.

Searching for the sites in "My Inconvenient Duke"

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Ready for lunch at Ye Olde Cock Tavern

Please brace yourself for some extremely nerdy history—and yes, let’s start by saying I can get a little obsessive about historical details.

For the most part, when writing my stories, I’m living in the past, via books (some of them quite old and crumbling) and online sites. Every book also requires me to consult several maps, from different years. Coordinating between the early 1800s and the 2020s helps me work out distances (not always clear on old maps) and helps me calculate travel times (via online tools + aforesaid crumbling books).

So, yes, I do my best to be accurate. But when I’m in London, I can’t resist checking: finding the places and making sure I got things right. There’s also the thrill of finding a building, for instance, that’s still there. It doesn’t matter if I already know it’s still there. I get excited, as I did the day I was walking alongside the Thames in Richmond, and saw, peeping out over the trees, the top of what I felt certain was Asgill House, aka Ithaca House, where Raven Radford’s parents live in Dukes Prefer Blondes. Yes, I knew it was in Richmond, close to the river—hadn’t I researched the daylights out of it? All the same, to stand in front of it and get a sense of the environment was a joy, which I shared with you in my Asgill House post.

Another place I knew still existed was the Cock Tavern, where Blackwood meets Maggie Proudie, in My Inconvenient Duke. It dates to the 1500s, though changes have occurred. The most startling one—and the one I forgot when I was standing in Fleet Street, baffled (this often happens, as I have no sense of direction)—was that it had moved across the street in the 1880s, fifty years after the time of the story. Then, in the 1990s, a fire destroyed the interior. It was rebuilt, using old photographs, but it does not look as it did in the 1880s, as you can see if you view some of the images at the London Picture Archives.

What it looked like in 1832 is anybody’s guess. I suspect that the sort of layout we see in the 1880s (Image #3) isn’t completely different from the 1830s. It very likely would have had boxes (in the U.S. we call them booths) similar to those in Image #4, a Thomas Rowlandson print of 1800, of another tavern on Fleet Street, either the Rainbow or the Wheatsheaf.

Another, much more elusive location was the site of the Holland Arms, which became the Lovedon Arms in the Blackwoods’ story. I knew that the inn no longer existed, but I wanted to find where it used to be, an interesting challenge in the Kensington High Street. As mentioned in my notes to the book, the Holland Arms was also referred to as the White Hart and the White Horse in some sources.

Image #1 shows it as the White Hart on the travel map in Cecil Aldin’s The Romance of the Road. Image #2 is an 1832 map of the area of Kensington where Blackwood and Alice search for Ripley. The 1827 map in Image #3 pinpoints two locations: the Holland Arms/White Hart/White Horse to the left and the toll gate to the right. #4 is the Holland Arms as it appeared in Leigh Hunt’s The Old Court Suburb (1855). #5 and #6 show where it stood. That’s me, looking triumphant, once I felt sure this was the place. Image #7 is the Kensington tollgate. And #8 was the big surprise. I kept looking at the building and wondering if that had been a tollgate. After double and triple checking the location, I feel reasonably certain that this was site of the Kensington tollgate. I know the gates were abolished in 1865. However, I don’t know if the toll-keeper’s building survived. Is this the original building, renovated? Another building erected on the site? What’s its current function? More sleuthing required.