Upon the staircase there were pictures at every turn to make one pause, step by step, on the way. Sir Joshua Reynolds was represented by an unfinished canvas of Lord Rockingham, in which the great Burke, in his minor function of secretary, also figures. Then came G. F. Watts's earlier portrait of Leighton himself; and here a genuine Tintoretto. There was the P.R.A.'s famous Portrait of Captain Burton; and over a doorway his early painting of The Plague at Florence, with another early work, Romeo and Juliet, one of his very few Shakespearean pictures.
From the landing whence most of these things were visible, you entered at once the great studio. Round the upper wall ran a cast of the Parthenon frieze, and beneath this the wall on one side was riddled and windowed, as it were, with innumerable framed pictures, small studies of foreign scenes; so that one looked out in turn upon Italy and the South, Egypt and the East, or upon an Irish sunset, or a Scottish mountain-side.
Opposite these, below the great window, were many of the artist's miniature wax models and studies. Else, the ordinary not unpicturesque lumber of an artist's studio was conspicuously absent. The secret of Leighton's despatch and careful ordering of his days, was to be read, indeed, in every detail of his work-a-day surroundings. Even in a dim antechamber, with a trellised niche most mysteriously overlooking the Arab Hall, at one end of the studio, in which the curious visitor might have expected to find dusty studies, discarded canvases, and other such æsthetic remnants,—even that was found to contain not lumber, but a Sebastian del Piombo, a sketch of Sappho by Delacroix, a landscape by Costa, a Madonna and Child of Sano di Pietro del Piombo.
At the extreme other end of the main studio was the working studio of glass, built to combat the fogs by procuring whatever vestige of light Kensington may accord in its most November moods. The last addition to the building, not long before Lord Leighton's death, was a gallery, known as "The Music Room," expressly designed to receive his pictures—mostly gifts from contemporary artists; or, to speak more accurately, works that had been exchanged for others in a wholly non-commercial spirit. These included, Shelling Peas, by Sir J. E. Millais, The Corner of the Studio, by Sir L. Alma-Tadema, The Haystacks, and Venus, by G. F. Watts, and Chaucer's Dream of Good Women, by Sir E. Burne-Jones.
Such was the daily environment of that hard, unceasing, indefatigable labour which, natural faculty taken for granted, is always the secret of an artist's extraordinary production. And it was an environment, as one felt on leaving it for the gray London without, that well accorded with the radiant painted procession of the figures, classic and other, that file through Lord Leighton's pictures.
CHAPTER X
Lord Leighton's House in 1900
In the preceding chapter a picture is drawn of the "House Beautiful," as it was in Lord Leighton's lifetime. It was then full to overflowing with all manner of treasures; but now all that were removable have been dispersed. Only the shell, the house itself, remains. Yet denuded as it is, that is still well worth looking at. The architectural features to which Mr. Rhys, dazzled by other things, hardly did justice, are now all the more apparent.