Frederic Leighton #5

Frederic Leighton’s Studio (detail of west wall), Leighton House Museum, Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.

"A Door to Nowhere

Upstairs at Leighton House, in the artist’s studio, is a door to nowhere. This oversized aperture was created in 1868 to facilitate the passage of large canvases out of the studio—the processional paintings on which Frederic Leighton (1830–1896) staked his reputation as an ambitious artist.
....
Four years before Leighton created Cymon and Iphigenia in his Holland Park studio, the function of the door in its west wall had been obviated by the construction of his orientalist interior, the Arab Hall, between 1877 and 1879. The protrusion of this domed structure, sited to the west of the studio, blocked the transit of artworks through the opening. Later, when prints of Leighton’s paintings Solitude (exhibition 1890) and The Bath of Psyche (1890) were hung on that door frame, it became an aestheticized threshold.
...."


The Arab Hall west wall, Leighton House Museum, Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.


The Arab Hall, east wall, Leighton House Museum, Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.
(bron: British Art Studies)