Artists’ homes can offer an intriguing insight into their life and work. Gainsborough’s House in the silk-weaving town of Sudbury, in Suffolk, and Leighton House in the heart of Kensington, London, are two museums dedicated to their former residents. After recently completing major refurbishment and expansion programmes, both are also raising their profiles through creatively curated temporary exhibitions to enrich the visitor experience and tap new revenue streams.
Thomas Gainsborough, who worked in the second half of the 18th century, and Frederic Leighton, who lived a hundred years later, were highly successful painters whose homes reflected their social status and their times. Gainsborough was the son of a master silk weaver. Leighton’s grandfather was a physician to two Russian Tsars. Both families were well-to-do, Leighton’s hugely so. But Gainsborough came from “trade”, and Leighton was ‘from “Society”, a class difference that influenced their lifestyles and careers.
Leighton was a Victorian Grand Tourist, travelling abroad yearly and roaming far and wide. Gainsborough shuttled between his native Suffolk, London and Bath. Gainsborough was a founder of the Royal Academy but fell out with it over its gentlemanly pretensions. Leighton was elected its President. Gainsborough, a famous portraitist, was beaten to the post of Royal Portrait Painter by his more socially connected rival, Joshua Reynolds. Leighton, a painter of academic, softly erotic, neoclassical allegories, was awarded a knighthood and then a baronetcy, the first painter to be raised into the English peerage (though, sadly for him, he died the next day).
The museums exemplify these very different social histories. Gainsborough’s House is built around the artist’s childhood home, an elegant Georgian townhouse front concealing two converted weaver’s cottages. Leighton House, designed by the eminent architect and fellow R.A. member George Aitchison, is a purpose-built villa in manicured parkland based on the magnificent 12th-century Zisa Palace in Palermo. Its interiors are so rich in orientalist opulence they might have made a brothel-madam blush.
Gainsborough’s House has been given a £10 million makeover, which has added modern gallery rooms and other facilities. Director Calvin Winner, recently recruited from the University of East Anglia’s Sainsbury Centre, is developing an ambitious exhibition programme built on lending links with major museums.
Three exhibitions have just opened. The Image of the Artist presents portraits and self-portraits of Royal Academy members from the Academy’s collection, ranging from Gainsborough to David Hockney and a somewhat surly Chantal Joffe with her teenage daughter. Picture Perfect, a selection of Fashion Photography from the National Portrait Gallery, reveals the changing modes of culture through iconic images of the Beatles, Twiggy, Kate Blanchett and Josephine Baker. The third exhibition, John Macfarlane and The Art of Theatrical Design, is a fascinating insight into the art and technical craftsmanship of the stage sets and costumes created for Swan Lake, Tosca and other ballets and operas by Macfarlane, the Glasgow-born, internationally acclaimed designer.
Meanwhile, at Leighton House, a small preparatory version of Flaming June, now probably his best-known painting, is on view, having recently been donated to the Museum. The full-scale finished version can be seen at the Royal Academy, on temporary loan during the refurbishment of its usual home at the Museo de Arte de Ponce in Puerto Rico.
Also to be seen is the Museum’s recent acquisition, The Bay of Cadiz – Moonlight, the star of Leighton and Landscape, a show presenting a side of Leighton we are unfamiliar with. Plein-air oil sketches of landscapes from the north of Scotland to the Sahara, South-western Spain to Damascus were done by Leighton on his travels purely for personal pleasure and occasionally used as background material. Painted with impressionistic freedom and a direct, expressive simplicity absent from his buffed and polished commercial work, they reveal the more accurate artist he might have been. More than 60 have been gathered from private and public collections under the expert guidance of Pola Durajska and Daniel Robbins, who have also written a most informative exhibition catalogue.
Words: Claudia Barbieri Childs Top Photo: Leighton House P C Robinson © Artlyst
There are two small museums with big aspirations, one in town and one in the country. Both are well worth a visit.