A Victorian Obsession

Leighton House Museum
14 November 2014 – 29 March 2015

A Victorian Obsession, an exhibition at Leighton House of fifty-two masterpieces of Victorian art, is housed in the very place where many of the pictures were actually painted (and a number of the artists gathered); and there is something immensely satisfying and special in this. Perhaps most renowned for its Arab Hall, Leighton House is a work of art in its own right, and is like stumbling upon Aladdin’s cave. Its palatial features show Italian Renaissance and Middle Eastern influences, and includes a fountain, Islamic tiles mainly from Damascus, and peacock blue tiles by William De Morgan. As the curator of Leighton House Museum, Daniel Robbins, explains, these are ‘a very eclectic set of sources but brought together as this one artistic or aesthetic statement.’ Leighton was a prime figure in the Aesthetic Movement – grandeur, abundance and beauty without any didactic tone – as were Edward Burne-Jones and Albert Moore, works by both of whom appear in the collection.

There are remarkable pictures by John Everett-Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John William Waterhouse, John Strudwick, Arthur Hughes, John William Godward, Leighton himself and the Dutch painter Alma-Tadema who moved to England and befriended many of the Pre-Raphaelite painters. The latter has an overwhelming presence in this exhibition; most notably in the Upper Perrin room which is entirely dedicated to his The Roses of Heliogabalus, an overpowering image of decadence in the ancient world in which the emperor Heliogabalus is suffocating his guests with a violent flow of rose petals. The room is even perfumed with a concoction of scented-roses created by Jo Malone. Despite the multi-sensory experience of viewing this painting, this was the room I spent the least amount of time, perhaps because the gallery was added as an extension to Leighton House long after his death and it did feel the least in tune with the rest of the exhibition.

 

Edward Burne-Jones
Pygmalion. The Heart Desires,
1871, Oil on canvas
Juan Antonio Pérez Simón Collection, Mexico
© Studio Sébert Photographes

 

Frederic, Lord Leighton
Greek girls picking up pebbles by the sea
1871, Oil on canvas
The Pérez Simón collection, Mexico
© Studio Sébert Photographes

 

The pictures are on loan from Mexican art collector Juan Antonio Pérez Simón, associate of the world’s richest man Carlos Slim, making this the largest Victorian private art collection outside Britain and shown here for the first time. For some of the paintings, this is their debut exhibition. The theme connecting all these pictures together is the representation of female beauty. Inspiration for these artists came from several sources. There are literary heroines from Arthurian legends, women as goddesses, enchantresses and romantic heroines, but also biblical subjects such as Esther, or the female beauties of Greco-Roman sculpture and even those from Egypt and Mesopotamia.

The drawing room presents literary-inspired works such as Hughes’s Enid and Geraint and Strudwick’s Elaine, both of which allude to the Arthurian romance and poetry of Tennyson, or Burne-Jones’s Pygmalion and the Image – The Heart Desires, inspired by William Morris’s version of Pygmalion, originally from Ovid’sMetamorphoses. The story in Burne-Jones’s picture tells of a young sculptor pondering his vocation of creating beautiful female sculptures when he can’t find love himself:

For what to him was Juno’s well-wrought hem,
Diana’s shaft, or Pallas’ olive-stem?
What help could Hermes’ rod unto him give,
Until with shadowy things he came to live?

This room of literary references leads onto the dining room where you must instantly recognise the iconic painting The Crystal Ball by Waterhouse, which has the lady in a crimson dress scrying in crystal. It was in this very room that Leighton held aesthetic soirées with, among others, Rossetti and Millais around the dining table. Leighton was a key figure in the late Victorian art world as President of the Royal Academy of Arts and his guests were far-reaching – William Morris, the poet Robert Browning and even Queen Victoria – to name a few.

Leighton’s own paintings express the importance of the aesthetic view that art merely needs to be a thing of beauty, an idea implicitly present in his Greek Girls Picking up Pebbles by the Sea. The composition of the classical portrayal of these women is in visual harmony with each of the four women’s poses, their draperies blowing in the wind as they collect pebbles, nothing more nothing less.

The most striking room has got to be the studio, in which the light pours in through the grand north-facing window to lend the sense that creative energies in the room still exist. Leighton’s models could use a discreet staircase and there is a dais for the models that he would paint. Dorothy Dene was one of his notable models, who can be recognised in his Crenaia, the Nymph of the Dargle. This sensual nude hasn’t been hung on the walls of the house since the time it left Leighton’s studio to go on display at the Royal Academy. There is a great sense of circularity.

The bedroom is the final room to visit on the tour of Leighton House and we pass on the way an exquisite portrait of a dark haired female beauty entitled Classical Beautyby John William Godward in the lobby. Leighton’s bedroom is surprisingly modest in comparison with the rest of the house. Arthur Hughes’s A Passing Cloud shows a lamenting young girl dressed in satin in the midst of her romantic tribulations. She is so melancholy that she cannot even take comfort in the spring day outside the window, and it is perfectly situated in this ascetic room of wistfulness.

This is a highly indulgent and yet memorable exhibition of art for art’s sake, and the Aesthetic Movement, but it is also a chance to see some rare and remarkable paintings by some of the major artists of late nineteenth-century Britain: surely Pérez recognised the value of these works, not just financially but for the simple aesthetic pleasures they bring.