The forgotten artists of Kensington Town

In the mid-nineteenth century, Chelsea was home to countless writers, painters and cultural figures. Meanwhile, the streets of Holland Park were lined with the studio-villas of celebrated artists and sculptors. But less well known are the large number of painters who settled in what is now the De Vere Conservation Area.

These quiet streets to the south of Kensington Gardens are a mix of Regency houses and Victorian terraces. In the mid-nineteenth century, there were numerous studious scattered round the neighbourhood. Quiet, spacious and inexpensive, it was the perfect place for artists to build their London careers.

Walking round these streets today, you can still see traces of their presence. For instance, a blue plaque records the decade that Samuel Palmer spent living at 6 Douro Place, between 1851 and 1861. Palmer was a landscape painter and printmaker, as well as a key figure in the Romantic movement. While living in London, he worked as a drawing tutor and created a magical series of late watercolours and etchings.

These visionary pastoral paintings were largely forgotten after Palmer’s death. However, in the Sixties his reputation revived, influencing a new generation of British artists. By the twenty-first century, he had received major retrospectives at the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Another blue plaque commemorates Richard Ansdell, who moved to Kensington from his native Liverpool. He lived first at 39-41 Victoria Road, and then at 3 St Alban’s Grove, where he built a studio-villa named Lytham House, after Lytham St Anne’s in Lancashire. Ansdell was a celebrated painter of animals, but when asked to paint Queen Victoria’s dogs, he refused unless they were taken to his studio. He received no more royal commissions after that, and his reputation never recovered.

A second painter of animals lived on Victoria Road: Alfred Hitchin Courbould. His studio-villa was built between 1851-3, constructed from red brick with Tudor detailing, and known as Eldon Lodge. After his death in 1866, the house passed to a cousin called Edward Henry Corbould, who taught art to Queen Victoria’s children at nearby Kensington Palace. This Corbould added a new studio wing, which was such an impressive setting that one magazine called it ‘something between a baronial hall and a refectory in a rich monastery.’

Other local artists included James Prinsep Beadle, James Legrew, and the sculptor John Bell, who designed part of the Albert Memorial. One street, Launceston Place, was home to the painters Thomas F. Marshall and Spirodone Gambardella, the designer and sculptor Alfred Stevens, and even the exiled French artist Charles Francois Daubigny. Meanwhile, the poet Sir Henry Newbolt occupied 14 Victoria Road, and the architect and garden designer Harold Peto also lived locally,

During this period, the reputation of Kensington was transforming, thanks to the Great Exhibition of 1851. By 1857, the Royal College of Art had moved to the neighbourhood and the South Kensington Museum had opened. Later renamed the Victoria & Albert Museum, it hosted visits from the Queen, lectures from the architect Sir George Gilbert Scott, and paintings donated by the artist John Sheepshanks.

This was the start of the city’s museum district, nicknamed Albertopolis. South Kensington became so celebrated for its cultural institutions that people have forgotten the collection of artists who once lived on its western edge. At the same time, these painters mostly worked in a traditional Victorian style, which has proved less enduring than the impressionists and pre-Raphaelites living in Chelsea.

However, their influence on the architecture of the De Vere Conservation Area remains. Many of their houses had inbuilt studios with wide windows and gabled roofs, which can still be seen at addresses like 17b Eldon Road, which was used by James Prinsep Beadle to display his paintings.

There were also dedicated workspaces, such as St Alban’s Studios on South End Row and Kensington Studios on Kelso Place. Most of these buildings have since become residential addresses, but according to rumour one or two remain artists’ studios, providing a last link to the creative colony that made its home in Kensington.