William De Morgan at Leighton House

These photographs were taken by the author at a special open day just before Leighton House re-opened to the public in October 2022, after a long and costly transformation. Many thanks to the Senior Curator, Daniel Robbins, and to Shirley Nicholson, who showed me round. Click on the images to enlarge them.

illiam De Morgan's passion for oriental ceramics developed in the early 1870s, when orientalism was in vogue in the art world. Middle Eastern and Turkish ceramics were much admired, and were being avidly collected by the artists and connoisseurs who travelled to these parts of the world. They were generally called Persian, or Islamic, or Iznic, the latter after "a small town in Turkey which, in the late fifteenth-century, was established as a centre for producing brilliant blue, green, and red ceramics with formalised floral designs" (Hardy 10). As a craftsman himself, De Morgan began experimenting successfully with the glaze, designs and colours which made these ceramics so distinctive.

His interest in these tiles, and his practice in emulating their qualities, ideally suited him to help Lord Leighton with a challenging new project in the later part of the decade: the decoration of the unique extension to his home in Kensington — the Arab Hall at Leighton House. Here Leighton planned to display his own large collection of historic, hand-painted tiles brought home from his various travels in the East. The idea was to model it on the twelfth-century palace of La Zisa in Palermo, constructed by Muslim artisans for the Normans, and to decorate it in such a way as to achieve "maximum aesthetic dramatic impact" (Davies 398).

The tile panel with the alcove (one of a pair, either end of the west wall) is identified by Mary Roberts as "late sixteenth-century Syrian").

The transfer of such "architectural antiquities" from their places of origin (Davies 398), whether they came from sacred or domestic interiors, is bound to trouble us now. Their removal inevitably damaged not only the tiles themselves, but the surfaces from which they were prised. Indeed, Robert tells us that most of the tile panels here came from a troubled Damascus in the 1860s, a time when "many historic domestic interiors were dismantled in part to satisfy demands by European collectors." But this does not detract from De Morgan's part in shaping the tiles at Leighton House into a whole new aesthetic experience.

Of the tiles Leighton had collected, which dated from the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries, more than a few had indeed been broken or damaged over their long journeys in time and space. Individual patterns had been spoiled, and settings were incomplete. Mary Roberts, Professor of Art History at the University of Sydney, and a specialist in Ottoman art and European Orientalism, well understood the demands this made on the London-based ceramicist, and the inevitable imperfections that even his best efforts betrayed:

De Morgan experimented over an extended period to create the replacement pieces for the Hall and discarded many of his failed attempts. When he looked at these walls, with the eyes of a maker, the shortcomings would have been as obvious to him as the seamless repairs he had created working with this fine collection of historic tiles by Near Eastern master craftsmen — even more so for the man who would eventually become one of Britain’s most successful ceramicists, renowned for his spectacular glazes.

Yet such "scars," Roberts suggests, had not simply to be accepted, but appreciated, as a way of acknowledging history: "scarring was part of the aesthetics of beauty in the Arab Hall," writes Roberts — a way of bringing the originals into the present.

Replacements and repairs, however, were only one part of De Morgan's challenging task. Inspired by "[t]he aestheticist fantasy of synthesis, of rendering the distant historic time of production into a harmonious aesthetic present tense," as Roberts explains, he worked for the larger effects with a true artist's eye. Symmetry of design extended from the individual patterns to the larger effects: writing generally of his vision, Sarah Hardy draws attention to "De Morgan's particularly intuitive use of symmetry" (10). His surviving drawings, for various placements, show just how much thought and geometric precision went into the coherent assembly of the tiles not only inside but outside the Hall itself.

Outside the Arab Hall. Left: De Morgan's own tiles in the passage into the Arab Hall. Right: Tile panels at the foot of the stairwell.

Tile design by De Morgan, using watercolour. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London, collection item O1103825.

The result both in and around the Arab Hall was stunning, then as now. In his contemporary description of this most singular of artists' homes, Wilfrid Meynell focussed on the colours: "Blue is the reigning colour, but nothing could be more unlike the blue of “blue-and-white” china. The colour of the tiles inclines to purple at times and to green at others, and the white of the ground is very subtly tinted, but the magnificence of the tints enhanced by the lustre of the material, some of the tiles producing an effect between marble and velvet — more lucid than the one and deeper than the other" (171). Meynell, it seems, found it hard to convey the unique effect of the tiles.

So successful was the project that it is hard to separate De Morgan's own tiles from the historic tiles on which he worked. Even his peacock blue tiling in the passage, and the differently patterned panels along the main staircase, are so much in harmony with the rest that prior knowledge is needed in order to identify them as late nineteenth-century productions. That, surely, is what De Morgan would have wished.

Links to related material

Bibliography

Davies, Philip. London: Hidden Interiors. London: Atlantic Publishing, 2012 [Review].

Hardy, Sarah. Sublime Symmetry: The Mathematics behind De Morgan's Designs. Compton, Guildford, Surrey: The De Morgan Foundation, 2016 [Review].

Meynell, Wilfrid. "The Homes of Our Artists: Sir Frederick Leighton's Huse in Holland Park Road." Magazine of Art. Vol. 4 (1881): 169-176. Internet Archive. Sponsored by the Kahle/Austin Foundation. Web. 20 November 2022.

Roberts, Mary. "The Resistant Materiality of Frederic Leighton’s Arab Hall." British Art Studies. Issue 9. Web. 20 November 2022.

Tile Design. Victorian and Albert Museum. Web. 20 November 2022.

Created 20 November 2020