8 Melbury Road

"Mr. Stone's House from the Garden," photographed by Ralph W. Robinson for The Idler, 1894

Ralph W. Robinson, Resting, 1894.

At the time Artists at Home was published, Marcus Clayton Stone was living at 8 Melbury Road in London’s Kensington neighborhood. In 1870 he became the second artist--but the first on Melbury Road—to have a house built by the architect Richard Norman Shaw (1831–1912). The Strand Magazine’s “Illustrated Interview” from 1899 features Marcus Stone himself describing the process:

With that reverence for which we professional men have for one another . . .  I took my plans to Norman Shaw, who was good enough to approve them as a working basis, and I left the whole building of the house in his hands, so that it is his house—architecturally. In this studio I can verify all my effects, even out-of-door effects, for I can put my models on the balcony if necessary, as it is quite shut out from the outside world.[1]

The crowning feature of Stone’s house, which stands today at its original address, is the  studio, which occupied in the entire top level of the house. Stone designed it himself and proudly showcases the room in the Mayall photograph. Forty-five by twenty-five feet, the studio was connected to a glass house, his winterized studio: Stone was the first to imagine and execute such a feature, which allowed him to work in outdoor conditions during the winter months, with as much natural light as possible.[2] As a painter of romantic, outdoor scenes, the artist needed to ensure his productivity and profit. He painted from models, but fret not: they were kept warm in the glass studio with heating from hot-water pipes.[3]

In furnishing the studio, Stone carefully curated his space: “The tapestry in the studio was made probably before Shakespeare was born,” he explained in 1899. “That chair. . . was the chairman’s seat of the Hell Fire Club, while the other chairs came from Medmenham Abbey. That looking-glass on the wall belonged to the beginning of the last century.”[4] Maurice Adams’s 1883 publication, Artists’ Homes, provides further information on Stone’s studio: “The woodwork of the studio is finished in white, while the brilliant bits of colour obtained here and there, in the old tapestry hangings with which the studio is surrounded, afford ample relief to the eye, and furnish a constantly changing series of effects for the mind to dwell upon.”[5] Three large oriel windows illuminated that unique space.

A floorplan of the studio level shows a room made specifically to store Stone’s easels and props, which also housed a staircase for his models to use, separate even from the servants’ back staircase. (This was in contrast to the practice of his neighbor Val Prinsep, whose models used the main staircase along with everyone else.) In this adjacent room, “there is an enormous wardrobe, some 12 ft. to 14 ft. long, reaching from the floor to the ceiling, in which Mr. Stone keeps the costumes which he paints in his pictures.”[6] Stone’s custom-built studio home is described by his biographer, A. L. Baldry, as exemplifying a man who understands “with earnest recognition . . . what a life of endless endeavor a painter is committed to.”[7]

Stone’s famous neighbors included George Frederic Watts, Frederic Leighton, Hamo Thornycroft, Albert Moore, William Holman Hunt, and Val Prinsep, who were drawn to the area for its space and situation in nature. The artists developed the neighborhood into a place full of Queen Anne-style homes--lofty, elegant, and decked out in red brick with white wood trim.