Art books are normally organized around artists and movements, an exhibition or
a gallery. But Dakers takes a different approach, and looks at the houses they
built and lived in, within a small area of West London (just north of the The Victoria and Albert Museum). Between the 1850s and 1890s, much of the land surrounding Holland
House in this previously semi-rural part of London was sold off for building. A
number of the plots were purchased by artists who had benefited from the buoyant
market for pictures, and who built houses designed by the avant-garde architects
of the day. Then as now, most significant English artists lived in London, and
for a while Leighton's presidency of the RA made Holland Park its most
prestigious artistic enclave. Some of these artists' houses can still be seen
today, although only Leighton House and
Linley Sambourne House are open to the public. Holland House itself was largely
destroyed in World War II, and the remainder of its grounds are now a
public park.
Each chapter of this book is more-or-less a free-standing essay, but the author
doesn't simply move from house to house, but takes a broadly chronological
approach, while coming at her subject from different angles: for instance, there
is a chapter about the artists' military and musical sidelines. One consequence
of the essay style is that many characters walk on and walk off without too much
ceremony: to get the most from this book you already need some familiarity the
Victorian art world. There are plenty of footnotes, but mostly they comprise a
scrupulous itemization of original sources: there is no list of 'further
reading'.
The artistic community of Holland Park was dominated by Leighton and Watts: the latter had been in with Lord Holland
since the 1840s, and was a long-term
house-guest of the Prinseps at Little Holland House in the 1850s. Of necessity, these two artists also
dominate any account of the Holland Park Circle. However, both of them are now
quite well served by modern biographies, and perhaps the most revealing chapters
of this book are about minor figures, whose paintings may be familiar, but whose
biographies are not: they include Fildes, Normand and his
wife, Prinsep, Schmalz, James
Shannon, and Stone. There is also of
course quite lot about the architects and decorators, such as Burges, Shaw and Webb, and lots of photographs of the houses
they built, and their interiors, mainly extracted from The Builder and
Building News; these publications seem to have had some affinity with
Hello! magazine in terms of the purple prose that was deployed to
describe both and occupants.
There are many out-of-the way titbits, such as enjoyably salacious details of
the affair between Princess Louise (1848-1939) and the sculptor Edgar Boehm (1834-1890),
and the latter's dramatic death. And a whole chapter is devoted to a usefully
linear account of the Ionides family, who often appear in a fragmented and
confusing way -- the men as patrons and the ladies as 'beauties' -- in other
books. In addition, many of the illustrations are agreeably unusual: for
instance, instead of using the ubiquitous photograph of Moore from Baldry's biography, the author has
turned up a much less well-known sketch from the NPG.
Unfortunately there are imperfections. For instance, the author appears not to
have seen Normand's 'Bondage', which
is described as a "tableau of bound women", which it is not (to the
disappointment of many, no doubt). The index also has defects: for example, in
compiling this little review one finds that Princess Louise is not listed under
"Princess" or "Louise", as you might expect but under "HRH", an honorific that
is however omitted in the case of her mother. On the subject of queens, one
notes that "Queen Anne style" is followed by the unnecessary variants "Queen
Anne" and "Queen Anne period". And "Bondage" is not indexed at all, although two
other pictures by Normand are there. Final moan: there is no proper list of
plates so that, for instance, you are given no idea how big the original of any
painting might be.
In summary, this book presents a facet of the Victorian art world as its
habitués would have seen it: for, with their children looked after
by nannies and no TV to distract them, Victorians were always dropping in on
their neighbours. It is an absorbing, but not an easy read. And you would do
well to have some complementary sources of information to hand.
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