Introducing Take 5 by Dr Melanie Gibson and her five highlights from the upcoming
Antiquities & Islamic Arts auction taking place on Friday 26 April.
Melanie Gibson is Editor of the Art Series at GINGKO and lectures at SOAS, London University and at the V&A.
Melanie’s research has largely focused on the ceramics of the Islamic world, and she has published on several different topics, but especially on figural sculpture which was the subject of her PhD dissertation. Her most recent publication is a chapter entitled ‘Animals and Birds in Islamic Art’, in Masterpieces of Islamic Art from the Farjam Collection, 2024.
Melanie is closely involved with Leighton House Museum, and acts as a trustee of the Friends of Leighton House. She is currently working on a history of Frederic Leighton’s travels around the southern Mediterranean, looking closely at the collection he built and how he incorporated his purchases into the ‘Arab Hall’ and elsewhere in his studio house in Kensington.
"My 5 favourite objects in the upcoming sale relate to Leighton House, a studio house in Kensington built by Frederic Leighton (1830‒1896). He was a great traveller and collected similar objects while in Egypt, Turkey and Syria―many of these ended up in the ‘Arab Hall’ which he had built between 1877 and 1881, while others were displayed in his studio and elsewhere in the house."
Lot 297: A lustre and cobalt blue figural pottery eight pointed star tile
The eight-pointed shape of this tile encloses two figures sitting under an arch within a building with a crenellated roof. The composition compares with one of the two lustre tiles that are set into a central wooden display panel in the ‘Arab Hall. In the late 19th century there was a huge demand for this type of lustre tile and Leighton showed the two examples he was able to acquire in this prominent position.
Lot 334: A Kubachi tile with tree, Safavid Iran, 17th century
This square tile was probably made in Isfahan at the time of Shah ‘Abbas. It is painted in a loose style to show a windswept tree in colours that include a brick red that was probably inspired by the ceramic being produced at Iznik in Turkey. In the ‘Arab Hall’ the two lustre star tiles in the central wooden panel flank four tiles also made in Isfahan at this time.
This hexagonal tile is painted in shades of blue and turquoise in a complex interlace pattern over a bright white ground and is typical of the style of tiles being produced at Iznik in the first half of the sixteenth century. A bath house in Istanbul, commissioned by the Ottoman admiral known as Barbarossa from the court architect Sinan, was tiled on the interior with similar blue and white hexagonal tiles. After a fire damaged the building, the tiles were dispersed and Leighton was able to acquire some that were then arranged on the walls of the ‘Arab Hall’, and set into the William De Morgan turquoise tiles in the adjoining hall.
Although we associate Leighton’s collecting passion with ceramics – some 2000 of the tiles he collected were arranged around the ‘Arab Hall’ and elsewhere – he was equally interested in buying textiles and woodwork. In a painting dated 1877 (At a Reading Desk, Sudley House, Liverpool), the very year he started to build his ‘Arab Hall’ we see a young girl dressed in an embroidered pink silk coat, sitting on a patterned rug and carpet intently looking at a book supported on an X-framed stand similar in shape to this one. Since both the carpet and the Qur’an stand appear in photographs of the interiors of his house it is clear that these were objects that belonged to him.
Lot 399: Walid Siti, Kurdistan, Iraq b.1954- From the White Cube Series
Walid Siti is an artist who was born in Iraqi Kurdistan but in 1984 moved to London to escape the political situation in his home country. He too has a connection with Leighton House, where he had a solo show in 2008. In an interview printed in the catalogue to this show, ‘Land on Fire’ he describes how ‘life starts evolving around stone’. The conical stone or rock in the drawing is exerting a centrifugal force around which the Arabic words and letters, thickly drawn around the perimeter and fainter as they near the centre, are spinning.
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