Ivy House
In Artists at Home, J. P. Mayall photographs Sir John Gilbert in his studio in Ivy House, Vanbrugh Park Road West, in Blackheath, London, where Gilbert settled in March 1863 and lived for the rest of his life.[1] Blackheath was an emerging suburb, then designated part of northwest Kent, now labeled as southeast London, belonging to the boroughs of Greenwich and Lewisham.[2] Though Blackheath was not the center of the city, it represented an appealing suburb for the middle class, attracting mainly educated professional men and their families.[3] One of the reasons for Blackheath's appeal was its proximity to Greenwich Park,[4] one of the single largest green spaces in southeast London. The arrival of the railway in Blackheath in 1849 made the commute to London more convenient for London-based professionals.[5]
When Sir John Gilbert’s father, George Gilbert, opened his land and estate office in the 1830s, there had been no more than two churches and a chapel in Blackheath. Some fifty years later, Blackheath had established itself as one of the most attractive and desirable suburbs of London, featuring sporting and cultural societies, a railway station with fast trains to central London, and four horse-bus services. The Blackheath High School for Girls had joined the Blackheath Proprietary School to offer educational opportunities to both the boys and girls who lived in the neighborhood. Blackheath also included an Art School and a Conservatoire, a 900-seat concert hall, its own newspaper, the Blackheath London Guide and District Advertiser, which still exists today, a hospital, a post office, a Metropolitan fire brigade station, and at least seventeen churches of various Christian denominations.[6] Blackheath remains a highly sought-after place of residence, but it comes with a steep price tag. Although documentation on how much Sir John Gilbert took part in these development efforts has not come to light, it is likely that the Gilbert family played a significant role in transforming the social and cultural enterprises of Blackheath.
Ivy House, situated on the north side of the Heath, was built in the 1860s as part of the development of the Vanbrugh Park estate. It is possible that Gilbert's brother Alfred, an architect, designed the house, but there is no conclusive evidence. At the time of the 1881 Census, Gilbert was living there with several members of his family, none of whom were married: his younger brother George, then age 61, an R.A. Fundholder; his two sisters, Oriana and Ellen, ages 59 and 49, both artists themselves; a cook, and a housemaid.[7] The house was demolished in the late 1950s as part of a larger municipal development plan.[8]
Gabriella Meier
[1] Vivien Knight and Mark Bills, "Sir John Gilbert: A Biographical Sketch," in Sir John Gilbert: Art and Imagination, edited by Spike Bucklow and Sally Woodcock (Burlington, VT: Lund Humphries, 2011), 42. At the time he bought the house, Gilbert worked in a studio at 21 Berners Street.
[2] Neil Rhind, “The Blackheath of John Gilbert,” in Sir John Gilbert: Art and Imagination in the Victorian Age, edited by Spike Bucklow and Sally Woodcock (Farham: Lund Humphries, 2011), 66.
[3] Rhind, “The Blackheath of John Gilbert,” 70.
[4] Ibid., 66.
[5] Ibid., 71.
[6] Ibid., 78.
[7] UK Census Online, “London Census Transcript 1881,” accessed November 13, 2016, http://www.UKCensusOnline.com/. At one time or another, all of Gilbert’s siblings lived with him. His sister Oriana Pond Gilbert was said by some to be a better artist than her brother John: Rhind, "The Blackheath of John Gilbert," 70.
[8] Rhind, “The Blackheath of John Gilbert,” 71.
John Gilbert was born in 1817 at Blackheath, and at Blackheath, with few intervals, he lived all his life. Perhaps no more favourable spot could have been chosen for the fostering of his genius than this still unspoiled suburb, set on the debatable border of town and country, and breathing, as suburbs do to the unprejudiced, that border atmosphere of sharp stress and conflict which has ever made for romance. Another man of genius, Nathaniel Hawthorne, dwelt at Blackheath for a while, and experienced on the great desolate common "a strange and unexpected sense of desert feeling." And he has given us a picture of London, seen from the heath at sunset, rising immense under its smoky canopy--"a glorious and sombre picture, dusky, awful, but irresistibly attractive, like a young man's dream of the great world, foretelling at that distance a grandeur never to be fully realized."
Charles Lee, "Sir John Gilbert, R.A.," The Leisure Hour (London), 1897–98, p. 32.