Trans-Atlantic Bombast in Holland Park

   I entered the ravishingly sumptuous but, let's face it, preposterously eccentric Moorish entrance hall of Frederick Lord Leighton's house in Holland Park. The beautiful wall tiles were as I remembered them from my previous visits, as was the shallow pool, with its gently tinkling, central waterspout. Incongruously, the lovely floor tiles had been muffled, here and there, by four cheap-looking Turkish-style mats, which would never have graced the room in Leighton's day: I wondered what possible logic lay behind this intervention, but could think of no answer. It was as if the management of the house had decided that the sumptuous beauty of the room - with its peacock-blue vases and its peacock-green dishes, and its Moorish tiles and its gorgeous filtered light was not sufficiently Victorian and so they had upped the ante by troweling on even more of the decorative kitsch, Disney-style. It was superfluous, but the public - at least the dozen or so pensioners who were shuffling through the room on my visit - seemed to enjoy it, if their breathless cooing was any indication. 

    I had come to Leighton House to see the exhibition, 'A Victorian Obsession' and, in particular, the extraordinary painting, 'The Roses of Heliogabalus', by that preternatural genius of late-Victorian painting, Lawrence Alma Tadema. In a further example of Disney-Spielberg kitsch overkill the management had arranged for the overpowering scent of roses to be pumped out of a machine in the upper gallery, where the painting rested: tendrils of the floral reek wound their way throughout the building and wrapped around the visitor like a shroud, which, while this may have been apposite considering the subject matter of the painting, it seemed to me another example of that unfortunate condition imposed upon the visitor of galleries these days - the Fun Fair Factor. Today the entire house possessed the sickly stench of a soap shop. It was all so very unnecessary, given the absolute brilliance of the particular painting upstairs. I may have been the odd one out, however, because as I made my way towards the staircase two grannies were gushing at the ticket desk and one said to the suitably Moorish-looking ticket man, "Thank you for a lovely afternoon. And thank you for the lovely rose perfume!"

   As I began to mount the beautiful staircase I heard a mini-commotion behind me. I stopped and turned, the better to witness the event. An elderly trans-Atlantic couple were remonstrating with the suitably Moorish ticket man. The husband was hawk-faced and tall, but stooped and with rounded shoulders: his wife walked with a stick and seemed to be stuck in a tractor tyre. This spare tyre soon transpired to be her own, however. She had been offered, as were all visitors, the official booklet that accompanied the exhibition. She took it, but with some reservation.
   "Is this about the house or the exhibition?", she demanded in a loud voice. The ticket man replied that it was about the exhibition.
   "Then I don't want it. We want information about the house only! I'm not innerested in the exhibition! I'm only innerested in the house!" Her husband now piped up in a reedy drawl,
   "We're only innerested in the house. We gave a big donation just there", he indicated the donation box with a sweep of his skinny arm, "So we only wanna know about the house. Only the house. Just the house." His wife now agreed,
   "That's right. A big donation. We wanna know about the house." I turned to continue up the stairs and didn't hear how the event played out. I was more concerned by the fact that the balustrade was only hip-height, and so my vertigo came charging up the stairs behind me, to remind me that it was just a short drop over the edge to certain oblivion and why don't I just topple over?  

   The stairwell, as well as the next level of the house, contained some pretty average, at best, Victorian painting by some of the minor stars and some of the rightly-forgotten, along with some absolute gems. I was looking at a rather beautiful pencil drawing by Leighton when I heard a loud braying a the top of the stairs. The trans-Atlantic woman was screaming,
   "Oh!... Oh!... Aargh!... Nooooo!..." I turned to see what was transpiring. Apparently, her walking stick had slipped out of her grip and had slid through the bannister and fallen to the floor, one storey below, narrowly missing both the stuffed peacock, which rested on a pediment, and a granny. 

   Later, in Leighton's beautiful studio on the upper level, the trans-Atlantic woman hobbled over to an attendant. She clearly wanted to have her fifteen minutes of mediocrity.
   "These textiles in this room", she gestured with an outstretched, plump arm, "How do you maintain the collection?" The attendant gave a quite involved answer, and finished by saying that it was always difficult to keep everything safe from the aging process. The trans-Atlantic woman answered, 
   "Yes, I know."
She then held court for the captive audience of gallery visitors around her, loudly braying to her husband about the works on display and getting it wrong every time she opened her mouth. Standing in front of five of Leighton's exquisite, deft little figurative oil sketches, she shouted to her husband,
   "These are charming. They are just like what Audrey paints."

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