The Resistant Materiality of Frederic Leighton's Arab Hall

Abstract

Frederic Leighton's Holland Park home, a collaboration with George Aitchison, William De Morgan, and Walter Crane, was one of London's most famous nineteenth-century orientalist interiors. Built between 1877 and 1879, Leighton's Arab Hall houses historic tiles of exceptional quality from İznik, Damascus, and Persia, distinguishing his orientalist project from the homes of his peers.The Arab Hall was conceived as a Gesamtkunstwerk, a secular aestheticist fantasy of suspended time in which historic Near Eastern craft production was synthesized into an harmonious aesthetic present tense. De Morgan undertook the challenge of replicating tile fragments to repair some of these historic panels. In doing so, he submitted to an apprenticeship across time, as the products of his kiln were answerable to the superb precedents of Near Eastern master craftsmen. But the dislocation of these historic tiles is often legible in their fragmentary remnants and scarred surfaces. In this article, Roberts addresses the ways in which this obdurate materiality posed an impediment to an aesthetics of synthesis.

Worlding on the Hudson: Frederic Church and Global Histories of Art

“…Leighton collected over 1,000 early modern Damascus, I żnik and Persian tiles that came to form the skin of his Arab Hall in his internally focused aestheticist gesamtkunstwerk in Holland Park. 44 Church's stencilled walls, by contrast, bore ornament distilled, not accrued, from its Near Eastern sources. Leighton's Arab Hall was designed to wall out the metropolis in which it was located, whereas Church's aesthetic integrated exterior landscape views with interior optical effects throughout his home.…”