This is Leighton House.
It's the home of the Victorian painter Frederic Leighton,
later Lord Leighton, President of the Royal Academy,
and really the leading figure in British painting of the period.
It was the house that he had built for himself
by the architect George Aitchison
and it was a vehicle for the display of works of art.
It's a palace of art. It's intended to impress.
Leighton was unusual in the context of British painters,
Victorian artists,
because so much of his upbringing had been in Europe.
He was raised in a cosmopolitan culture.
He was multilingual
and his training as an artist was in the art schools of Europe.
Even by the mid-1860s,
he was accumulating works by French artists.
In this room, the drawing room,
Leighton had 'The Four Times of Day' by Corot,
which he bought from a dealer that previously belonged to Decamps,
the French landscape artist.
And Leighton was really proud to have them.
These are four copies of the original paintings by Corot.
They're shown in the positions that Leighton had them in,
so that at the end we've got 'Evening', 'Noon', 'Night', and 'Morning'.
That's the sequence they're shown in.
And the originals, of course, were here
up until the time of Leighton's death in 1896.
They were then dispersed from the collection,
went into a private collection, and now, happily,
belong to the National Gallery.
Leighton's ambitions to be regarded as a public figure,
and the way in which he used this house
to explain to people what his artistic precepts were,
essentially the European project.
He wanted to merge British art into a European academic system,
and he wanted artists to be trained
according to the atelier programme of tuition.
But I think it's true to say that the French artists
of the 1840s and 50s
Corot, Delacroix, Daubigny, others besides
whose works are represented in the collection,
were really the very essence
of what Leighton thought great art should be.
