Returning now to the staircase, we find it ends on the first floor in a landing leading to the great studio. On the left it is open to the little studio; so-called because, having a skylight, Lord Leighton used it for painting out-of-door effects until he had the glass studio built. Adjoining it, or forming an extension of it, is another room, built only a year or two before the late owner's death. After the addition of the glass studio the two were only used as an antechamber, and were hung with the pictures presented by brother artists, and with a few old masters. The mouldings round the skylights are very pretty. The latticed window before mentioned looks down from the little studio into the Arab Hall.
The great studio is a large room about sixty feet by twenty-five and about seventeen in height. In the centre of the north side is the lofty window forming a bay and extending into a skylight in the top. High up on either side of it are the three small openings mentioned when speaking of the exterior. A curtain hangs in front of them, and in point of fact they were never used. In the west wall is an apse with a gilt semi-dome, which appears in some of Lord Leighton's pictures. Across the east end runs a gallery at about eight feet from the floor with bookshelves under it on either side, and in the middle a broad passage leads into the glass studio, and still outside this is a wide balcony looking into the garden. Casts of a portion of the Panathenaic frieze of the Parthenon run along the upper part of the wall of the great studio, fit emblem of the lifelong devotion of the President to classic art. Such then is the workshop. Even now, comparatively bare as it is at the present moment of writing, this is one of the most picturesque suites of rooms in existence; but to see it on one of the grand occasions of Leighton's musical receptions was a very different sight and one not easily to be forgotten. Then when walls and easels were covered with pictures, when rare carpets hung from the gallery, flowers and palms filled the bay window, beautiful women and men of every form of distinction crowded the floor to listen to Joachim and Piatti, nothing was wanting which could give beauty or interest to the spectacle.
It will be seen that the house is still rich in artistic beauty and still has objects of value. But the most precious of its contents are after all its associations. Its floors have been trodden by all that was most notable in the society of its owner's day, people whose names alone would be an epitome of our times. It was also the workshop of a great artist. But, above all, it was the centre of a great influence which profoundly modified English art.
Whatever judgment the future may pass upon his own productions, the fact must never be lost sight of that even without them Leighton was a great man. Intellectually, spiritually, and socially he was the most brilliant leader and stimulator of artists we have ever seen in England. His earnest example and lifelong persistence fanned the flame of enthusiasm among all branches of art workers. He taught Englishmen to study form, and it was under his encouragement that sculpture, which was fallen so low, has now risen into so good a place. Finally he did more than anyone else has done to raise the status of the artist in society.
The house which he built himself was his hobby, and in the refinement and catholicity of taste it shows, there is so just a reflex of his characteristics that an account of it is indispensable to any book which claims to describe the man.
S. Pepys Cockerell.