Cathy's Art Diary

Interesting small exhibition at Leighton House of photographs taken by Edward Linley Sambourne,   cartoonist and illustrator for Punch over a long weekend in Paris in 1906. The show complimented one upstairs looking at the clothes of his wife and daughter and these photographs concentrated on people in the streets of Paris with an emphasis on clothing. I was intrigued as to how he took these street photographs at this date, many of which felt spontaneous. I loved this one of a sailor as well as this one of women walking which catches the movement of their clothes. Closed 10 October 2024

Charming exhibition at Leighton House looking at the clothes and shopping habits of two residents of their sister museum Sambourne House. The show looked at the buying habits of Marion Sambourne and her daughter Maud using them to examine the history of clothes shopping in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. When Marion died in 1914, her children kept her house largely as she had left it, preserving the original contents including a collection of almost 150 items of Marion and Maud's clothing and related ephemera. There was a lovely selection of dresses shown with letters from Maud to Marion about clothes and invoices for purchase. A useful map showed the location of all the dressmakers and shops recorded in the archive. Closes 20 October 2024 Review Evening Standard  

Charming exhibition at Leighton House of drawings in gold by Evelyn De Morgan. I am fond of Evelyn de Morgan’s work although it’s subject matter can be a bit strange and I own a small sketch by her, but I had never come across her rather unique idea of drawing in gold. The show explained her technique well and how she bought ‘cakes of gold’ which she ground down to create gold paint and a type of   crayon which she’d invented. It also explained how, informed by Renaissance mystic and alchemist, Paracelsus, she felt gold was a colour of spiritual salvation. The works were very delicate but at first looked a little dull but when you looked closely you could see the gold shimmering on the surface and giving an other-worldly effect. Closes 27 August 2023 Review Evening Standard  

Fascinating  exhibition at Leighton House looking at the artists that built studios around Little Holland House in the 19th century. The show was quite small but clearly explained and beautifully set out. I loved the labels which gave the artists name, address, architect of their studio and date they moved in. They also explained the links between the people. I thought I knew this group well due to their links to the Bloomsbury Group but I was introduced to some wonderful new characters. My favourite was Emile Isabel Barrington who was an amateur artist who trained with G.F.Watts and helped to make the house we were in a museum. It was a lovely touch to include not only a couple of paintings by her but a bust by Mary Thornycroft who had a studio next door to her. Can I also take the opportunity to point out the excellent recent refurbishment of house which has reinstated the original entrance and added new exhibition space and a café. There is also a compact new staircase wh...

Delightful exhibition at Leighton House Museum looking at the life and work of Lawrence Alma-Tadema. It was lovely that these works were shown throughout this beautiful house so that some were seen in the sort of aesthetic setting for which they were painted. There was a useful booklet with all the labels in but it took me a while to realise there were also room guides giving more background on some of the main works. I’d thought they were just guides to the rooms themselves. I also missed out on the tape which might have filled in a bit more of the background information. I was fascinated to see Alma-Tadema’s early work which placed him in the Flemish tradition he had been born into and included a lovely early self-portrait. The second room looked at his honeymoon in Pompeii and the almost overnight effect this had on his work. I loved the imagined Roman scenes populated with Victorian faces. He moved to London in 1869 on the death of his first wife where he met Laur...

Confusing exhibition at Leighton House Museum looking at one of Leighton’s last works “Flaming June” which is currently on loan from Puerto Rico. My advice is go to the last room of the show which is fantastic as it brings “Flaming June” back together with four of the other works Leighton painted for what turned out to be his last Royal Academy show. They are hung in the same configuration as in a photo of them in his studio next door. Most of them are in private collections plus one is from the Metropolitan Museum in New York so it’s a wonderful achievement to have brought them together. Once you have seen the pictures do the rest of the show which is studies for them, other work which had influenced them and sketches of another commission he was working on at the time. If you do these first, as the leaflet indicates, you do wonder why you are looking at some of them. You need the grounding of understanding the work before hitting the detail. It’s not helped by the works ...

Delightful exhibition at Leighton House looking at the representation of female beauty in the Victorian and Edwardian eras based on the collection of Juan Antonio Perez Simon. I’d never been to Leighton House before so I have to start by saying how amazing that is. I just loved the Arab Hall complete with pool and William de Morgan tiles and the lovely studio space upstairs. The exhibition fit so well with the décor. Leighton of course was well represented in the exhibition including the lovely “Greek girls picking up pebbles by the sea” and studies for it. There were also some nice Rossetti’s and Burne Jones’s   but most interesting were the artists I had not heard of before such as William Clarke Wontner and John William Godward. As ever I love the silliness of Alma-Tadema. I liked the fact he started off being true to Medieval and classical life and it was great to see the coach he had made with a Greek and an Egyptian side as well as a picture using it. Howeve...