Inside the glorious studio-houses of 19th century London

A landmark on the arterial Talgarth Road in west London is a terrace of brick and terracotta housefronts with unusually tall windows (Fig 2). This set of eight properties was built in 1890–91, when it enjoyed a pleasant aspect across fields to St Paul’s School, from which it took its original name of St Paul’s Studios. Comprising a large studio with artists’ living accommodation set around a central great room — and renumbered late in the 20th century as part of Talgarth Road — these ‘studio-houses’ were a commercial development for letting, funded by art publisher James Fairless and designed by architect Frederick Wheeler. Mostly occupied by working artists until the First World War, they were later converted into houses, flats and dance studios.

The two illustrated in this article, however, are working studios once again, now owned and occupied by young portrait painters who trained at the Charles H. Cecil Studios in Florence, Italy; James Hayes has No 143, and George Clark and Isabella (Bella) Watling No 139. It is wonderful to see the studios used for the purposes for which they were built and they are perfect for artists who work in the sight-size method, where the image and subject are placed side by side and the artist walks away from sitter and canvas to a distance to perceive the whole. In this way, the artist sees a unified image to scale and proportion. The method has been used by masters since the 17th century, including Reynolds, Lawrence and Sargent, yet its origins lie in the practice of Titian, Van Dyck and Velázquez.

Studio-houses were a product of London’s vibrant late-19th-century artistic life, which was underpinned and massively extended by the demands of publishers for prints and illustrations in the global market for English language books and journals. For the first time, being an artist or illustrator was a sound career and practioners’ purpose-built houses consequently became a feature of London. An early cluster was built on the edge of the Holland Park estate; one designed by Philip Webb was built, in 1866, for Val Prinsep, another designed by George Aitchison, for Frederic Leighton (Country Life, February 21, 2024), was completed the same year.

G. F. Watts built himself a house and gallery in the 1870s, on the new Melbury Road, and Richard Norman Shaw designed two memorable studio-houses, in the Queen Anne Revival spirit, on the same road, for Marcus Stone and Luke Fildes. These huge studios would be opened to the respectable public on Show Sunday, the weekend before the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Well-known artists were photographed posing in grand studios so crammed with paintings that they were as much art galleries as working spaces, although the late Andrew Saint (in his book on Shaw) noted that such studios were often more a bid for position than a statement of success.

Smaller buildings aimed at ‘bachelor’ artists soon sprang up around the bigger studios — and these quickly began to accommodate women artists, too. Six brick-built studio-houses, for example, were built in 1878–79 by Arthur Langdale and Co of Brompton around a courtyard on Holland Park Road. Such groups provided the pattern for those erected on Talgarth Road.

The St Paul’s Studios were designed by the highly competent Wheeler, a London-born pupil of Charles Driver. Driver had first trained to be a civil engineer and is best known for the remarkable Cross Ness and Abbey Mills pumping stations associated with Joseph Bazalgette’s development of the Embankment (The legacy, November 19, 2025). By the 1880s, Wheeler had offices in Horsham in West Sussex and Chancery Lane in London. He played a significant role in the development of Streatham, south London, then being built up on the model of the artistic suburb of Bedford Park, and designed several banks in Sussex, as well as a notable Queen Anne Revival convalescent home outside Rustington on the West Sussex coast. In the early 1900s, he also worked for Louise, Duchess of Devonshire, adapting for her a house at No 44, Grosvenor Square.

A confident and artistic designer, Wheeler was well suited to the challenges of creating an ‘artistic’ colony in west London — although the peace of the studios was to be affected by the continuation of the Underground and the opening of a new station at Barons Court. An elevation of St Paul’s Studios and a sample three-storey plan of one of the studio-houses was published in The Builder on March 13, 1891. The details are late-Elizabethan or Jacobean in character (Fig 6), with finials, strapwork friezes under the eaves and mullion transom windows to the lower storeys, as well as bay windows and and four highly decorated arched porches; much of the decorative elements are in a fine buff terracotta. Tall brick chimneys complete the picture.

The studio-houses repeated slight variations of the same plan: the raised basement level contained a kitchen and a bedsitting room (originally intended for a housekeeper or maid); whereas the first floor (or raised ground floor), which was approached up steps from street level, had a sitting room and a bedroom. A well-detailed staircase in fine-grained pine (Fig 4) led up to a glazed inner porch (Fig 5). Beyond was a large studio dominated by the north-light window. A blind system controlled the fall of light. Each studio (30ft long and 22ft wide, with a 20ft-high ceiling) enjoyed two fireplaces, no doubt to keep the artists’ models warm.

St Paul’s Studios were built a few years after a neighbouring studio, Colet House. This was one of the largest studio spaces in London, often sublet to artists who worked on pictures of scale. It contained two studios on the ground floor and an exceptionally large first-floor studio (35ft by 75ft). Colet House is said to have been built for Sir Coutts Lindsay, Bt, founder of the first Grosvenor Gallery on Bond Street, and it was certainly used by Sir Edward Burne-Jones and Sir Frank Brangwyn when working on larger-scale works — both artists had studio-houses of their own nearby.

Several well-known artists have lived in St Paul’s Studios over the years. Occupants before 1914 included the Australian-born Impressionist George Grosvenor Thomas; Herbert Sidney, who studied in Antwerp, Belgium, and in Paris, France, at the École des Beaux-Arts; Abraham Altson, who had studied at the Académie Julian in Paris; Miss E. C. Adlington and Gertrude McMurdie Hammond, a well-known book illustrator. William Logsdail lived at No 5, St Paul’s Studios (now No 143, Talgarth Road, currently occupied by Mr Hayes) and had studied in Antwerp and worked for a few years in Venice, Italy — there are examples of his work in both the Royal Collection and Tate Britain. Punch cartoonist Edward Tennyson Reed lived for a time at No 3, St Paul’s Studios — now No 139, Talgarth Road, the studio of Mr Clark and Ms Watling — as did, after Reed, the prolific Dutch illustrator Frédéric de Haenen.

Mr Hayes, who studied in the Cecil Studios from 2003 to 2007, takes enormous pride in No 143, which he has occupied since 2010. The house was partly restored in the 1980s by architect Alan Day, who used the studio as an architect’s office. Mr Day reintroduced William Morris wallpapers to the house, including that in the staircase hall, based on research suggesting the house had been originally decorated by Morris & Co.

The main studio (Fig 1) is a spacious workroom that doubles as an art gallery and great drawing room. Here, the sitter feels they are in a place where art and representation is taken seriously. The walls are painted in a muted green — against which the portraits look especially good (Fig 3) — as does a collection of plaster casts of antique sculpture (Mr Hayes has a large cast of Gaddi Torso from the Uffizi in Florence) and a collection of Hellenistic bronze sculptures and coins. Recently, in this room, he painted Heather Hancock, the first female master of St John’s College, Cambridge, and Field Marshal Lord Guthrie, the former head of the UK’s Armed Forces.

Mr Clark and Ms Watling, who met at the Cecil Studios in 2009 and studied there until 2014, moved into No 139, Talgarth Road in the summer of 2021 and were married in 2022. They share the home with their two children, Audrey and Agnes. Much of the repair work was done by Mr Clark’s father, Andrew Clark, a retired engineer. The couple remain in close touch with Charles Cecil and return to teach in Florence, as well as hosting students for tuition. Ms Watling’s portrait of the Pakistani education campaigner Malala Yousafzai, painted in this room, has recently been unveiled in Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford; Ms Watling was also awarded the second prize for her portrait Zizi in the 2024 Herbert Smith Freehills Portrait Award in the National Portrait Gallery, London.

The Clarks have decorated their studio room in Charleston Gray and off white (Fig 7); hues that are without colour and are similar to the colours Mr Cecil has specially mixed for the studios of his art school in Florence. Deliberately mid-tone, they are suitable for teaching drawing from casts and from life. The room is an excellent backdrop for portraiture, including works by both occupants, alongside a fine portrait of Bishop John Porter, a distinguished Arabic scholar, by Sir Thomas Lawrence.

The links to Florence remain strong. Mr Cecil himself has been based in the Tuscan city since 1978 and began teaching in 1983. He founded his eponymous studios in 1991 to help continue the atelier tradition, ‘a historic practice in which a master painter opens a studio to a select group of dedicated students who can work alongside them,’ he says, Mr Cecil runs this with assistant director Sam Good, a former pupil and artist, and has made the Cecil Studios the best place to study the sight-size method today.

Mr Cecil himself studied in the ateliers of R. H. Ives Gammell in Boston and Richard F. Lack in Minneapolis in the US. The author of Twilight of Painting (1946), Gammell was a pivotal figure in reviving atelier training in the mid 20th century and had studied with Boston painter William Paxton. Paxton, in turn, was an alumnus of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and worked in the studio of Dennis Bunker, a friend of Sargent who had painted alongside him.

These links are important to Mr Cecil, who turned 80 last year. His influence on the world of portraiture is widely recognised in the UK and across Europe and he personally supervises the progress of each student, assisted by experienced former students. Central to the atelier training is the discipline of working from Nature without recourse to photography and students are diligently taught the sight-size method.

The Florentine Charles H. Cecil Studios operate over two locations. One of these is the former Chiesa di San Raffaello Archangelo, which was adapted as a studio complex by sculptor Lorenzo Bartolini in the early 19th century. Bartolini left this space to his student Romanelli, whose descendants still live and work on the same premises. The other is a set of purpose-built north-lit painting studios built in the 1870s in the Piazzale Donatello, flanking the English Cemetery. These are all part of the same tradition that produced the Talgarth Road studio-houses in the early 1890s. How remarkable that they are all now linked by painting activity and output of the highest standard recognised by awards, exhibitions and continuing commissions from institutions up and down the country.

This feature originally appeared in the March 4, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.