This lecture will look at Leighton and the attention he lavished on his London home
Frederic Leighton’s studio-house (now Leighton House Museum) is one of the most remarkable buildings of the nineteenth-century. First built in the 1860s, Leighton continued to extend and embellish his home over the next thirty years, transforming what had been a relatively modest house into a palace of art filled with fascinating collections of fine and decorative art. The construction of the exotic Arab Hall, lined with Islamic tiles collected as Leighton travelled through the Middle East brought new fame to the house as Leighton’s reputation continued to grow. This lecture explores Leighton’s motivations in lavishing such attention on the construction of his home and how it came to embody the idea of how a Great Artist should live.
THE ARTS SOCIETY ACCREDITED LECTURER
Mr Daniel Robbins
Daniel Robbins is Senior Curator, Museums with the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and is responsible for two of London’s most significant house museums: Leighton House and Sambourne House. Formerly with Glasgow Museums, he has organised many exhibitions and contributed to numerous catalogues and publications around nineteenth-century art, architecture and design, including the authorship of the companion guide to Leighton House. He was responsible for leading the award-winning project to restore the historic interiors of the house completed between 2008 and 2010 and for the subsequent £9.6 million refurbishment of two unsympathetic twentieth-century additions made to the museum. Completed in October 2022, the house reopened to great acclaim.
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