There’s something undeniably special about single-artist studio museums and houses. People visit them eager for an insight into how a painter or sculptor lived and worked, hoping to see the light they saw, to find long-forgotten drips of paint, tentative plaster models, and scraps of drawings or images tacked to the wall. These places are shrines as well as museums, and the challenge for curators is how to breathe life into them, how to summon up the presence of the person who once inhabited the building long after their departure, while making it relevant for a modern audience.
In 2013, Nicholas Tromans, the Brice curator at the Watts Gallery Artists’ Village in Compton, Surrey, came up with the idea of establishing an informal network of studio museums so they could share their experiences, pool resources, collaborate on exhibitions, and broadcast their existence and programmes to a wider public. Right from the start, the network was intended to be international. The Artist’s Studio Museum Network is supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Tavolozza Foundation, and its website has now expanded to include more than 125 venues in the UK, Europe and Russia. The network also holds an annual conference, which was attended by museum staff from the UK, France, Spain, Denmark, Russia and Iceland in September 2017.
It was apparent at the conference that, while each studio museum is by definition unique, they share similar concerns beyond the familiar ones of income generation and marketing, and that they are all thinking creatively about the experiences they offer visitors. All of them stress the importance of developing a convincing narrative to help make sense of a place. Where an artist’s home is attached to the studio, there may also be choices about telling the domestic story over the studio story, and whether the narratives should be told chronologically or if visitors should be left to explore and make their own connections.
The staff at Hoglands, Henry Moore’s former home in rural Hertfordshire, have been thinking a lot about this in relation to the new visitor centre they opened this summer, which has altered the way visitors experience the site.
“There are several narratives, and hopefully we manage to tell many if not all of them,” says Hannah Higham, the curator at the Henry Moore Studios and Gardens. “The house offers a more personal story, of Henry Moore as a collector through the artwork he surrounded himself with.
“In the grounds there are some of Moore’s finished bronzes and monumental works, while the studios give a sense of his working practices,” says Higham. “Moore had different studios for different types of work, such as printmaking and carving. We try to let the studios tell their own story and not overlay too much heavy narrative.”
Other venues echo the concern that too much detailed documentary interpretation in a studio or house runs the risk of destroying a sense of intimacy. As a result, many venues prefer to rely on staff or volunteers to provide information.
In May 2017, the Sidney Nolan Trust opened the Australian artist’s last studio near Presteigne in Powys, Wales. Amanda Fitzwilliams, the PR and development manager at the trust, says, “You can see the paintings and then go and see the materials – brushes, squeegees, rags – and piece his process together yourself. The studio is quite small, so we have taken a light touch with interpretation. We’ve got an audioguide and will be building a team of volunteers to help.”
Nolan’s studio contains only the materials that were left there on the artist’s death in 1992, so the process of preparing it for presentation to the public, which took two months and was assisted by an Australian conservator, was not too complicated. But when Francis Bacon’s London studio was entirely reconstructed in Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane, the procedure was positively forensic. The artist’s anarchic studio opened to the public in Dublin in 2001, with every item faithfully recorded and reassembled in its original place, even the piles of dust.
Banbridge Council in Northern Ireland adopted a different approach when it was given the London studio of the Northern Irish sculptor FE McWilliam in the 1990s. The studio was dismantled and transported across the Irish Sea to County Down, where it languished in store until 2008, when European funding enabled the council to construct a purpose-built McWilliam Gallery. “Rather than reconstruct the studio archaeologically, it was decided to use the new studio building as a display space for maquettes and plasters,” says the gallery’s curator Riann Coulter. “There’s also an annexe where you can see the artist’s coats and shoes and some of the larger pieces. But you can’t get into it. It’s a glass box, so visitors have to look into the space.”
Attracting audiences
Members of the Artist’s Studio Museum Network have also been exploring imaginative ways of using their museums’ locations, whether in the city or in the countryside, to attract visitors.
The Musée National Eugène Delacroix in Paris has devised a “promenade” project, featuring walks in the neighbourhood that follow routes the artist would have taken every day, stopping at churches or buildings containing his work, or sites associated with him. The guided walks underline the fact that the museum is not just a place of memory but also a place for living. It’s an approach that the Museo Sorolla in Madrid – devoted to the Spanish impressionist painter Joaquín Sorolla – has experimented with.
Leighton House in London is broadening its narrative by offering tours of artists’ houses in the neighbourhood. Partnerships with nearby sister institutions can also work: in Paris, a “Rendez-vous à l’Atelier” weekend in autumn 2017 linked seven studio museums in a shared itinerary, with each offering discounted entry to the others.
Rural settings can provide a different kind of insight into an artist’s work and life. Sandycombe Lodge, the newly opened villa in Twickenham that was designed and lived in by JMW Turner as a refuge from London, reveals a private man who enjoyed fishing trips on his favourite stretch of the Thames. He was a 30-minute walk to the top of Richmond Hill too, which inspired many of his paintings, most notably England: Richmond Hill, on the Prince Regent’s Birthday, painted in 1819. This is now owned by Tate and on display at Tate Britain in London.
At Henry Moore’s Hoglands there is a direct link between the countryside and the artist’s work. “Moore and his wife Irina landscaped the estate so that it offered different types of settings for his sculptures – whether a formal garden, a sheep field, or a backdrop of trees,” says Hannah Higham. “He moved works around the grounds.”
Hoglands is relatively easy to get to, but some of the remote places that artists have historically chosen to reside in can be hard to reach by public transport. Some venues consider providing transport from local towns or cities, following the example of Monet’s House in Giverny, which runs a shuttle bus from nearby Vernon. In any case, beautiful rural locations – especially those with good cafes – are often attractions in themselves. The Johannes Larsen Museum on the island of Funen in Denmark has experimented with offering visitors tickets that include lunch, upselling a trip to the museum as an all-day experience. The Watts Gallery has also found that its tearoom is a draw for walkers in the Surrey Hills Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.
Exhibitions – or not?
Many of the museums in the network are finding that temporary exhibitions are a vital way of attracting new visitors and encouraging repeat visits. Similarly, lending works to other museums helps spread the word about an artist’s work and diversifies audiences. It works best when there is a clear link between the museum collection and the exhibition.
The Museo Sorolla in Madrid has seen visits increase by a third during its exhibitions, which generally last six months. Sorolla and the Paris Years, which closed in March 2017 and was a huge success, was a collaboration with the Musée des Impressionnismes Giverny and the Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung in Munich. Locally themed shows can also be a hit though. Sorolla in his Personal Eden, a photographic portrait of the artist, which closed in January, proved enormously popular because visitors enjoyed seeing images of the artist where he once worked.
Leighton House, which has dedicated exhibition galleries, found that integrating some works into the house itself during its recent Alma-Tadema: At Home in Antiquity exhibition (7 July–29 October 2017) worked particularly well because the paintings complemented Leighton’s work and decoration. But, as senior curator Daniel Robbins points out, because of environmental conditions attached to loans, it was not possible to hire the space for external events during the exhibition. By contrast, the Musée Rodin in Meudon, near Paris, has decided to discontinue exhibitions because the museum staff feel the public want to see the permanent displays – although its sister Musée Rodin in Paris will continue to do small shows.
Visitors will always be drawn to artist’s studio museums for their unique focus on a single person and because they promote an intimate dialogue between memory and life. So, despite often being run on limited budgets and relying on volunteers, their future looks secure.
it to the charitable trust she set up to run it.
The house, which has been awarded a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, will open to the public in 2019. Wimhurst has made a conscious decision not to reconstruct it as it was in Parr’s time, which would have been impossible.
“I persuaded the daughters to leave everything in the house as it was, because I wanted to conserve it as much as possible as a home,” says Wimhurst. “That meant maintaining the ghosts of Elsie and all the people who had lived in it. There is not much evidence of what it would have looked like in David Parr’s time. If I’d tried to take it back to how it was then, it would have been purely from my imagination.”
“He wanted it to be somewhere that would not only look after his work but also provide the kind of top-quality art experiences you have in a city, but which you rarely find in a rural location,” says Amanda Fitzwilliams, PR and development manager for the trust.
The Sidney Nolan Trust fulfils the artist’s vision for the farm as a place for creative exchange by running residencies for artists and workshops for inner-city children. “We invite some mid-career artists and support a lot of graduates,” says Fitzwilliams. “We have artists’ camps – four or five art colleges come and put up tents for a week. They see it as an opportunity to lift their eyes to the skies, think big and try working in a different way.”
Caroline Bugler is a freelance writer
In 2013, Nicholas Tromans, the Brice curator at the Watts Gallery Artists’ Village in Compton, Surrey, came up with the idea of establishing an informal network of studio museums so they could share their experiences, pool resources, collaborate on exhibitions, and broadcast their existence and programmes to a wider public. Right from the start, the network was intended to be international. The Artist’s Studio Museum Network is supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Tavolozza Foundation, and its website has now expanded to include more than 125 venues in the UK, Europe and Russia. The network also holds an annual conference, which was attended by museum staff from the UK, France, Spain, Denmark, Russia and Iceland in September 2017.
It was apparent at the conference that, while each studio museum is by definition unique, they share similar concerns beyond the familiar ones of income generation and marketing, and that they are all thinking creatively about the experiences they offer visitors. All of them stress the importance of developing a convincing narrative to help make sense of a place. Where an artist’s home is attached to the studio, there may also be choices about telling the domestic story over the studio story, and whether the narratives should be told chronologically or if visitors should be left to explore and make their own connections.
The staff at Hoglands, Henry Moore’s former home in rural Hertfordshire, have been thinking a lot about this in relation to the new visitor centre they opened this summer, which has altered the way visitors experience the site.
“There are several narratives, and hopefully we manage to tell many if not all of them,” says Hannah Higham, the curator at the Henry Moore Studios and Gardens. “The house offers a more personal story, of Henry Moore as a collector through the artwork he surrounded himself with.
“In the grounds there are some of Moore’s finished bronzes and monumental works, while the studios give a sense of his working practices,” says Higham. “Moore had different studios for different types of work, such as printmaking and carving. We try to let the studios tell their own story and not overlay too much heavy narrative.”
Other venues echo the concern that too much detailed documentary interpretation in a studio or house runs the risk of destroying a sense of intimacy. As a result, many venues prefer to rely on staff or volunteers to provide information.
In May 2017, the Sidney Nolan Trust opened the Australian artist’s last studio near Presteigne in Powys, Wales. Amanda Fitzwilliams, the PR and development manager at the trust, says, “You can see the paintings and then go and see the materials – brushes, squeegees, rags – and piece his process together yourself. The studio is quite small, so we have taken a light touch with interpretation. We’ve got an audioguide and will be building a team of volunteers to help.”
Nolan’s studio contains only the materials that were left there on the artist’s death in 1992, so the process of preparing it for presentation to the public, which took two months and was assisted by an Australian conservator, was not too complicated. But when Francis Bacon’s London studio was entirely reconstructed in Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane, the procedure was positively forensic. The artist’s anarchic studio opened to the public in Dublin in 2001, with every item faithfully recorded and reassembled in its original place, even the piles of dust.
Banbridge Council in Northern Ireland adopted a different approach when it was given the London studio of the Northern Irish sculptor FE McWilliam in the 1990s. The studio was dismantled and transported across the Irish Sea to County Down, where it languished in store until 2008, when European funding enabled the council to construct a purpose-built McWilliam Gallery. “Rather than reconstruct the studio archaeologically, it was decided to use the new studio building as a display space for maquettes and plasters,” says the gallery’s curator Riann Coulter. “There’s also an annexe where you can see the artist’s coats and shoes and some of the larger pieces. But you can’t get into it. It’s a glass box, so visitors have to look into the space.”
Attracting audiences
Members of the Artist’s Studio Museum Network have also been exploring imaginative ways of using their museums’ locations, whether in the city or in the countryside, to attract visitors.
The Musée National Eugène Delacroix in Paris has devised a “promenade” project, featuring walks in the neighbourhood that follow routes the artist would have taken every day, stopping at churches or buildings containing his work, or sites associated with him. The guided walks underline the fact that the museum is not just a place of memory but also a place for living. It’s an approach that the Museo Sorolla in Madrid – devoted to the Spanish impressionist painter Joaquín Sorolla – has experimented with.
Leighton House in London is broadening its narrative by offering tours of artists’ houses in the neighbourhood. Partnerships with nearby sister institutions can also work: in Paris, a “Rendez-vous à l’Atelier” weekend in autumn 2017 linked seven studio museums in a shared itinerary, with each offering discounted entry to the others.
Rural settings can provide a different kind of insight into an artist’s work and life. Sandycombe Lodge, the newly opened villa in Twickenham that was designed and lived in by JMW Turner as a refuge from London, reveals a private man who enjoyed fishing trips on his favourite stretch of the Thames. He was a 30-minute walk to the top of Richmond Hill too, which inspired many of his paintings, most notably England: Richmond Hill, on the Prince Regent’s Birthday, painted in 1819. This is now owned by Tate and on display at Tate Britain in London.
At Henry Moore’s Hoglands there is a direct link between the countryside and the artist’s work. “Moore and his wife Irina landscaped the estate so that it offered different types of settings for his sculptures – whether a formal garden, a sheep field, or a backdrop of trees,” says Hannah Higham. “He moved works around the grounds.”
Hoglands is relatively easy to get to, but some of the remote places that artists have historically chosen to reside in can be hard to reach by public transport. Some venues consider providing transport from local towns or cities, following the example of Monet’s House in Giverny, which runs a shuttle bus from nearby Vernon. In any case, beautiful rural locations – especially those with good cafes – are often attractions in themselves. The Johannes Larsen Museum on the island of Funen in Denmark has experimented with offering visitors tickets that include lunch, upselling a trip to the museum as an all-day experience. The Watts Gallery has also found that its tearoom is a draw for walkers in the Surrey Hills Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.
Exhibitions – or not?
Many of the museums in the network are finding that temporary exhibitions are a vital way of attracting new visitors and encouraging repeat visits. Similarly, lending works to other museums helps spread the word about an artist’s work and diversifies audiences. It works best when there is a clear link between the museum collection and the exhibition.
The Museo Sorolla in Madrid has seen visits increase by a third during its exhibitions, which generally last six months. Sorolla and the Paris Years, which closed in March 2017 and was a huge success, was a collaboration with the Musée des Impressionnismes Giverny and the Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung in Munich. Locally themed shows can also be a hit though. Sorolla in his Personal Eden, a photographic portrait of the artist, which closed in January, proved enormously popular because visitors enjoyed seeing images of the artist where he once worked.
Leighton House, which has dedicated exhibition galleries, found that integrating some works into the house itself during its recent Alma-Tadema: At Home in Antiquity exhibition (7 July–29 October 2017) worked particularly well because the paintings complemented Leighton’s work and decoration. But, as senior curator Daniel Robbins points out, because of environmental conditions attached to loans, it was not possible to hire the space for external events during the exhibition. By contrast, the Musée Rodin in Meudon, near Paris, has decided to discontinue exhibitions because the museum staff feel the public want to see the permanent displays – although its sister Musée Rodin in Paris will continue to do small shows.
Visitors will always be drawn to artist’s studio museums for their unique focus on a single person and because they promote an intimate dialogue between memory and life. So, despite often being run on limited budgets and relying on volunteers, their future looks secure.
Preserving a domestic interior: the David Parr House, Cambridge
The artist David Parr lived in a modest terraced house in Cambridge from 1886 until his death in 1927. He worked for the Cambridge firm of decorators FR Leach and Sons on a number of prestigious projects, and in his spare time decorated the walls of his home in an exuberant gothic revival manner. After his death, his granddaughter, Elsie Palmer, lived there with her family and she made very few changes to the remarkable interiors. Tamsin Wimhurst, who was working at the Museum of Cambridge, got to know Elsie and her children, bought the house from the family in 2013, and gave it to the charitable trust she set up to run it.
The house, which has been awarded a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, will open to the public in 2019. Wimhurst has made a conscious decision not to reconstruct it as it was in Parr’s time, which would have been impossible.
“I persuaded the daughters to leave everything in the house as it was, because I wanted to conserve it as much as possible as a home,” says Wimhurst. “That meant maintaining the ghosts of Elsie and all the people who had lived in it. There is not much evidence of what it would have looked like in David Parr’s time. If I’d tried to take it back to how it was then, it would have been purely from my imagination.”
A living legacy in rural Wales
A number of studio museums are striving to perpetuate their artist’s legacy by inviting contemporary artists to work on site. These include the Sidney Nolan Trust, based at Rodd Farm in Wales, where the Australian artist spent the last nine years of his life.“He wanted it to be somewhere that would not only look after his work but also provide the kind of top-quality art experiences you have in a city, but which you rarely find in a rural location,” says Amanda Fitzwilliams, PR and development manager for the trust.
The Sidney Nolan Trust fulfils the artist’s vision for the farm as a place for creative exchange by running residencies for artists and workshops for inner-city children. “We invite some mid-career artists and support a lot of graduates,” says Fitzwilliams. “We have artists’ camps – four or five art colleges come and put up tents for a week. They see it as an opportunity to lift their eyes to the skies, think big and try working in a different way.”
Caroline Bugler is a freelance writer