Leighton House Museum

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

Note: If you receive this blog post via email and cannot see the video, please follow this link to the blog itself.

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"

Note: If you receive these posts via email and are unable to see the video, please follow this link to the blog.

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.

Ham House Part 2

Ham House, Richmond

Note: If you receive this post as an email, and can’t see the videos, please click on this link to my blog.

I’ve offered a few views of the North Drawing Room in the previous blog post, but reels give a better sense of the environment. The tapestries show farming activities during the year. Milking in April, Sheep-Shearing and Hay-Making in June & July, Reaping in May and August, Plowing and Sowing in September, and Wine-making in October. Though they were woven between 1699 and 1719, they were not hung in this room until early in the 20th century. According to the guidebook, the tapestries hanging in this room in the 1600s depicted the story of Phaeton, and “Tapestry was then the ultimate form of luxury room decoration.”

The Queen’s Bedchamber gets a reel, too. It stopped being a bedchamber and turned into a drawing room in the 1740s.

The Queen’s Closet did not get that kind of makeover. It’s very much as it was originally. The oval image is on the ceiling. Only the most honored guests would be invited here. I don’t know whose shoes these are—the guidebook is silent, because things get moved around, and this layout is a little different from the guidebook—but I assume they date to the 17th century.

The ebony cabinet stands in the Duke’s Dressing Room. The other two images are of the Duke’s Closet, a much smaller and more private room. The original upholstery and wall hangings were, according to the guidebook, “black and olive damask with a scarlet fringe and silver and black edging.”

People are always curious about cleanliness in past times. While they didn’t bathe according to our standards, our ancestors kept as clean as they could, given their circumstances. They changed their undergarments frequently, because these could be easily laundered. People took daily sponge baths—if they could. Cleanliness did depend on economics. If you’re a pauper, your first concern is staying alive. If, on the other hand, you’re a duchess, you’ve got servants to fill your bathtub and make everything pleasant for you. And certainly, as is the case today, some people simply won’t bother. For instance, the 11th Duke of Norfolk (1746-1815) had an aversion to soap and water. The servants had to wait until he was dead drunk in order to bathe him. One of his wives died in childbirth and the other one went insane. But he had mistresses! They must have had strong stomachs.