A Victorian Obsession, Leighton House, review: 'Too many inert, semi-naked women' Copies of many paintings returned to the walls in 2010, but now - with the display of Pérez Simón's collection temporarily replacing them - we get perhaps closer than ever to seeing Leighton's house as Leighton inhabited it. Five of his own works return, most strikingly Greek Girls Picking up Pebbles by the Sea. It has an undeniable Classical air, four young females in sculptural poses and period draperies stooping to collect pebbles on a Mediterranean shore. As with so many of the paintings on show, there's no subject per se, no Greek myth Leighton has chosen to adapt. All that matters is the grace of these figures, their fluidity in movement, and the way the red of their billowing garments is complemented by the setting sun. With The Finding of Moses, Frederick Goodall achieved something similar. His subject was the biblical story of the Pharoah's daughter who - going with her maid servants to wash herself - discovers the abandoned Moses in a cradle in the Nile. The narrative, though, very much plays second fiddle to the excuse the scene gave Goodall to revel in Egyptian motifs. Hence the temple of Isis, the frieze incorporating ancient hieroglyphs and cartouches, the grove of palm trees - and the tanned bodies of the naked, local ladies... Style surpasses substance once again. In other works, we retreat into Arthurian territory or, in the case of Henry Albert Payne's The Enchanted Sea, an old Arabian one. Artists consistently turned away from the complex realities of Victorian Britain, preferring to roam in an exotic otherworld. While the Impressionists were depicting modern Parisian life in a modern, optically challenging style, Brits were retreating to far-distant times and places. Perhaps they were simply responding to the questionable tastes of all the new-monied industrialists, in provincial cities like Liverpool and Birmingham, who lapped this sort of stuff up (and were the first buyers of many of Pérez Simón's paintings). Leighton never really intended his paintings to be singled out, but to be seen as part of a greater aesthetic experience chez lui - the canvases were to blend into the "total art work" that was his house. That said, there's undoubtedly a standout work now on show - and it's given a whole room to itself upstairs. John William Godward, Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder, 1912, oil on canvas. Photo: Studio Sébert That is Lawrence Alma-Tadema's The Roses of Heliogabalus, harking back to 220 AD and the debauched reign of the Syria-born Roman emperor, Heliogabalus. Its strength lies in the opposition between the apparent beauty of the scene and actual cruelty being enacted. Out of perverse pleasure, the emperor drowns a set of dinner guests in a torrent of pink rose petals. The viewer is left in the compromised position of feeling aggrieved for the victims, yet exulting in the gorgeousness of those flowers. For added, sensory oomph, the curators have sprinkled the room with actual petals and even scented it with a rose fragrance by Jo Malone. It's a remarkable effect, but a short lived one - like so much Aestheticist art. Any moral one might have drawn from Heliogabalus's story is drowned in unrelenting pink. Such work has little, really, to say to us, offering an escape from life not an account of it. Some argue that Victorian art, in recent years, has been making something of a comeback: Tate Britain's Pre-Raphaelites exhibition, a smash-hit both here and internationally, being the prime example. The restoration of Leighton House and, in 2012, the William Morris gallery suggested the likewise. And, if indeed so, I suppose one explanation might be that the surface aesthetic suits a society as superficial and visually overloaded as our own. Many of its proponents, meanwhile, suggest we should cherish Victorian art, if not for its artistic value, then for its historical one; for the window it opens on this nation's past. But, hard as one looks, that window is usually blocked by luxuriant petals and pebbles. In the late-19th century, Britannia ruled the waves and the sun never set on its empire. Massive advances were made in science, technology, engineering and beyond - yet, British art, unfathomably, remained wholly in the doldrums. No matter how great Leighton House's marketing, it's hard to see the "homecoming" of so many canvases from that period as glorious. It's not as if a consignment of Turners or Constables were coming back - but, then, we probably wouldn't have let them go to begin with. What's more, as already noted, it was the overall impact of the house that mattered for Leighton, above and beyond individual paintings. The substitution of one set of works on the walls for another that looks similar is hardly revelatory. And even if we do dwell briefly on the specific merits of Pérez Simón's collection, I have to say it left me rather cold. His predilection is for a particular type of enigmatic female - and not the intriguing Mona Lisa kind. The majority of his canvases feature women - like John William Godward's Pyrrha, Arthur Hughes's Enid, and John Strudwick's Elaine - who are in various states of undress and usually inert, expressionless and still. In 21st-century Britain, it's hard to find their resonance. There's no denying the collector's passion for Victorian art or his broad appreciation of so many painters of it. The fundamental problem with this exhibition, though, is it tells us nothing new. Compare it, say, to the Royal Academy's recent Radical Geometry show, based on the collection of Patricia Phelps de Cisneros. Where that radically shifted our understanding of 20th-century abstract art, the ground covered in A Victorian Obsession is, to us in Britain, wearingly all too familiar. Until March 29, 2015. Tickets: 020 7602 3316; rbkc.gov.uk/museums