London’s hidden gem of a manor house unveils stunning drawing exhibition with a royal connection

After its renovation, the sumptuous Leighton House opened alongside its sister museum, Sambourne House, last year. Now, A Life of Drawing: Highlights from the Leighton House Collection is poised to draw the art crowd

The Arab Hall, Leighton House

Dirk Lindner/RBKC, Leighton House

When Lord Leighton died in 1896, he left in his wake a house of magnificent proportion. Leighton House, the Arts and Crafts manor designed by architect George Aitchison, was complete with Arab tiles, gold mosaic friezes and opulent oriental-inspired ceilings. For more than a century, it has been a museum of extraordinary interiors and Leighton's famous artwork.

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Now in the hands of Kensington and Chelsea council, it has undergone an £8 million renovation to return it to its former glory. Filled with flamboyant interiors, including an exquisite Arab Hall featuring exquisite mosaic floors and tiles, the house is, in the words of BDP architects, a ‘Hidden Gem to National Treasure.’

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The latest attraction set to draw crowds to Leighton House is an exquisite exhibition, A Life of Drawing: Highlights from the Leighton House Collection. Promoting the opening, curator Dr Chloe Ward previewed three of her favourite works, including two portrait heads for Leighton’s Cimabue’s Celebrated Madonna - the first painting he exhibited at the Royal Academy, which was immediately purchased by Queen Victoria.

Drawings gallery, Leighton House

Dirk Lindner/Leighton House

‘The exhibition highlights some of the artist Frederick Leighton’s most beautiful and impressive artworks; his works on paper,’ she says in an Instagram video. ‘This exhibition is in a newly designed gallery space that is specifically designed for works on paper to be displayed safely. It is in a new wing of the Leighton House museum… It shows some of the artworks that Leighton considered to be his most important works.’

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The history of the house is as captivating as his resulting works. As a young artist, Lord Leighton lived in rented rooms in Bayswater, he wrote to his mother in 1862, ‘I wish I had a house,’ according to Laura Freeman in the Times. And what a house he came to build. 

Frederic Leighton (1830–1896), Study for Cimabue’s Celebrated Madonna, 1853

© Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

In 1864, Leighton commissioned George Aitchison to design the first part of the house, located just off Kensington High Street, inspired by his travels to Turkey, Egypt and Syria. Together, they created a red-brick, asymmetrical construction typical of Arts and Crafts architecture. Walter Crane designed a gold mosaic frieze, William de Morgan the parakeet tiles. Leighton built the Arab Hall, a domed and turquoise-tiled folly with a fountain at its centre.

Oneness by Shahrzad Ghaffari

Dirk Lindner

The Arab Hall, a domed and turquoise-tiled folly with a fountain at its centre, is perhaps the centre-piece of the house. Rivalling that is a spiralling staircase with an 11-metre-high mural, hand-painted by the Iranian artist Shahrzad Ghaffari enveloping the curved walls of a new helical staircase across three floors. It’s the first contemporary artwork on permanent display at the museum. At the foot of the staircase in turquoise and rust stands a cast of Leighton’s sculpture An Athlete Wrestling with a Python, the snake’s coils echoing the steps.

The Silk Room, Leighton House

Dirk Lindner/RBKC, Leighton House

Speaking to the Telegraph ahead of the reopening last year, conservator John Bainbridge, said ‘it’s absolutely unique. Yet hardly anybody knows the house is here. Leighton was an academic artist and unfashionable for decades after he died. It is only in about the past 10 years that we’ve begun to look again.’

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Leighton House is not the only one to have undergone a renovation in the past few months. Also renovated at the same time is sister museum to Leighton House: Sambourne House, just off Kensington High Street. Home to the Punch cartoonist and noted illustrator and photographer Edward Linley Sambourne who knew Leighton personally and had many acquaintances in common, the two eventually became part of an artistic community known as The Holland Park Circle. 

With original decoration and furnishings of the Aesthetic Movement, including William Morris wallpapers and a collection of Sambourne’s own photography and illustration, Sambourne House is an enchanting historic site.

Sambourne House Drawing Room

Leonardo Tommasin/RBKC

Daniel Robbins, Senior Curator of Leighton House said at the time of the opening, ‘The culmination of this many-sided project marks a truly transformational moment where both Leighton House and Sambourne reopen under a joint vision, intended to widen appreciation and enjoyment of Victorian culture, while forging meaningful connections with the contemporary world.’