Still-life drama
I am a sucker for Christmas, especially the bits that involve decorations, lights, and carol singing. Readers of this blog may also have noticed that I'm rather a fan of the house museum, meaning that old houses done up for Christmas might just be my favourite thing ever. Highlights in previous years have been the appropriately-decorated period rooms at the Geffrye Museum, the wonderful Victorian decorations at Waddesdon Manor, and the festive cheer at the Dickens Museum.
Imagine my excitement, then, finally to visit the Dennis Severs house in Spitalfields: a unique house brought to life in eighteenth and nineteenth-century style in the eccentric manner established by its mastermind, Severs, and currently decked out for Christmas. The conceit is that you are entering the house of a family of Huguenot silk weavers, who have abandoned their meals half-eaten and their beds unmade at the sound of your arrival. You tour the house in silence, and in my case by candlelight, to experience the set-piece rooms as a sensory whole, complete with smells, sounds and lights (no touching of course). The rooms broadly follow their use in a typical house, with reception rooms on the ground and first floors, a bustling kitchen below, and bedrooms above. At this time of year all show decorations and preparations for Christmas, with wines, splendid foods, carols and cards.
The period moves between Georgian and Victorian. As you ascend the stairs you pass from superficially luxurious rooms, brimming with sweetmeats, Yuletide bows and, in the extraordinary master bedroom, an exuberance of blue and white porcelain, to a garret world supposedly inhabited by penniless lodgers. The palpable reduction in temperature and lighting as you reach this attic world is striking. Everywhere the house is a feast for the senses, with objects carefully displayed to evoke still life paintings, to give the sense of a family in the midst of life, to give the feel of being in a smoky, varnished work of art. It is a magical experience, which I feel will need many repeat visits to be fully appreciated.
Yet, like all magic, it requires an element of belief, which I also felt was stretched rather thin at times. The house is very consciously a stage set, but one in which we are asked to believe a number of competing illusions. We are supposed to feel simultaneously that the family have just gone into the next room, that we are looking at still-life arrangements, and that we have stepped into a painting. There is one room which supposedly brings to life Hogarth's Midnight Modern Conversation, a bad copy of which hangs above the fire, I felt, merely making clear how unlike the painting the room actually is. Likewise, we are presented with the same family living very clearly in spaces that are decades apart: a Georgian dining room with a Victorian parlour. And why is the family in the attic listening to a recording of Dickens?
In essence, I felt there was an odd mixture of asking the visitor to suspend their belief and engage wholly with the house - a marvellous experience - while also slightly pretentiously constantly telling you how to do that. My favourite was the soft little cat who seems to live there, bringing the space to life in a completely different and independent way. Perhaps more (still-)life and a little less drama is needed? A period Christmas rather than one with a touch of soap opera?