New Little Holland House
The studio-house of the English painter and sculptor George Frederick Watts stood at 6 Melbury Road in the borough of Chelsea & Kensington,London. Watts named it "New Little Holland House” after the dower house of the Holland Estate, where he had previously lived with his friends the Prinseps; that house, known as Little Holland House, had been demolished to make way for Melbury Road. The artists in the neighborhood became known as the “Holland Park Circle.” Watts’s house was close to those of many of his artistic colleagues, including Luke Fildes at No. 11, Hamo Thornycroft occupying No. 2 (Moreton House), and Marcus Stone at No. 8 Melbury Road, and Val C. Prinsep and Sir Frederic Leighton on Holland Park Road, around the corner.
Watts commissioned F. P. Cockerell (1833–1878), the architect of his friend Reginald Cholmondeley, to build a studio-home in the spring of 1874. Completed in February of 1876, the house consisted of a bedroom and a single spare, a large painting room, and a small sculpting studio; there was no dining room. The resulting structure resembled, as Giles Walkley puts it in Artists' Houses in London, "a collision between a London Board school and a commercial laundry." Watts’s dissatisfaction with the design became apparent when he asked George Aitchison (1825–1910), the architect of his friend and neighbor Frederic Leighton, to make alterations in 1878: the new spaces included a top-lit picture gallery with an adjacent storage room, a major painting studio with a viewing gallery, and a minor sculpting room. On the ground floor was the picture gallery, a small studio, a major studio with a joined gallery, and a sculpture studio. The latter two studios occupied two floors of Watts’s house, extending from the ground floor to the first floor. The three imposing studios dominated the house, while the kitchen, sitting room, pantry, and wine cellar were small-scaled and strictly practical. As Walkley observes, a “spirit of ‘plain living, high thinking’ . . . pervaded the house as a whole.”[1]
The inclusion of the picture gallery allowed Watts, a diligent man who was “not so materially minded,”[2] to keep his working and private life separate; the gallery functioned to discourage unwanted visitors from disturbing his working process in the studios. It comes as no surprise, then, that for Artists at Home, Joseph Parkin Mayall chose to photograph Watts in his gallery rather than in one of his working studios.
Watts’s New Little Holland House was demolished in 1965 and replaced by a nondescript block of flats called Kingfisher House.
Albertine Lee
[1] Giles Walkley, “Establishment Kensington: Melbury Road,” in Artists’ Houses in London 1764-1914 (Aldershot, Hants, England; Brookfield, VT: Scolar Press, 1994), 65–66.
[2] Ibid.
Melbury Road, that pleasant, macadamized thoroughfare, which curves and slopes from Kensington Road to where the gigantic façade of Olympia looms through the mist, is graced with about a dozen substantial homes. Of these five are owned by artists. About half-way down on the left-hand side stands No. 6, the home, when he is in London, of-- MR. G. F. WATTS, R.A. It is a house of show studios and work studios. To gain admittance to the former is not difficult, but to the latter few only have the privilege of entry. The way to the show studio is from the hall, through a room hung mainly with replicas of the painter’s works, with a little turreted room above the level of the floor, and looking out on to the Melbury Road. The show studio itself is square, and as high as a suburban house, windowless, but gathering a temperate grey light from the glass roof. The walls are covered with pictures and portraits, which overflow to easels dotted about the room. Here is quite a national portrait gallery—Salisbury, Carlyle, William Morris, Gladstone, Joachim, together with such well-known works as “Death crowning Innocence,” “After the Deluge,” “Paolo and Francesca,” “Fata Morgana,” and a dozen others, all part of that great and growing collection which one day will be the heritage of the nation.
--C. Lewis Hind, “Painters’ Studios,” The Art Journal 52 (1890): 135–36.