Art & Interiors

Book reviews Art & Interiors Caroline Dakers. The Holland Park Circle: Artists and Victorian Society. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. viii + 304. $39.95 Charlotte Gere with Lesley Hoskins. The House Beautiful: Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetic Interior. Aldershot: Lund Humphries. 2000. 144 pp. $60.00 THESE TWO splendidly illustrated books illuminate a rich world of art and interiors that is somewhat more "modern" than the stereotypes of Victorian England or, to put it another way, suggest more of a transition than one might expect between high Victorianism and the more radical breaks of modernism. Caroline Dakers's study helps restore a whole dimension of the artistic life of the century. In the process she has also further rescued a group of artists who had been all too easily lumped into the general catchall term of Victorianism. She has explored the intriguing characteristics of artistic life in England and the almost inevitable proclivity of those one might have thought of as potential outsiders to be absorbed into the middle class. Dakers has done this by concentrating on a group of artists who were very eminent in their time, but are only now experiencing something of a revival—most notably Frederic Leighton, as well as significant others such as Edward Burne-Jones. Burne-Jones has perhaps been the most successfully reassessed, having recently had a major exhibition at the Birmingham Museum, Musée d'Orsay, Paris, and at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. And perhaps it is telling that he was somewhat tangential, in terms of where he lived and his style of life, to the Holland Park Circle. Frederic Leighton was deeply honored in his own time, as President of the Royal Academy, as a knight, and then very shortly before his death by being made, quite without precedent for an artist, a peer. His reputation has not quite returned to those heights, but he is certainly more highly regarded at present than he has been for some time. Leighton was the subject of his first and only major retrospective several years ago at the Royal Academy. In an earlier book, Clouds: The Biography of a Country House (1993), Caroline Dakers told the story ofthat house, built by the great architect Philip Webb, who also figures prominently in this study. There she intertwined the building and its occupants, the Wyndham family, who make appearances as well in these two books. Here too, she achieves similar connections of art, individuals and society. She recounts the story of the Holland Park artists and the houses they built in London, an outlying 507 ELT 44 : 4 2001 part of Kensington, an area that underwent intense development in the second half of the nineteenth century. Quite a few of the buildings were on the estate of the great house, Holland House, and its park. The story begins nearby at Little Holland House. There the artist G. F. Watts came to stay with the Prinseps for three days, and remained for thirty years. The possessors of the extensive new wealth of the period were now in a position to purchase art, and were frequently interested in contemporary painting rather than old masters; the latter were more identified with the aristocracy. There was an emphasis on authenticity and value for money. (If you actually knew the painter, there was no chance of it being a forgery.) It was possible for an artist, if he were lucky enough to be highly prized by the newly rich, to be extremely successful and make a lot of money. Not only would his pictures sell for very high prices, but there was important subsidiary income in its possible reproduction . With their considerable incomes, these artists were able to build magnificent homes and studios, quite often in the area around Holland Park. Dakers does a fine job in capturing the quality of their lives. On the whole, the artists were quite happy to become full members of the bourgeois society that they found about them; at the same time they did not totally lose a certain raffishness associated with the artistic life. But one suspects that the respectability of the Victorian middle class may have been exaggerated, and the convivial...