A preview visit to Leighton House, the Kensington home built for himself by the Victorian painter Frederic Leighton, which is due to reopen in the spring after a £1.6m refurbishment. It is the gloomiest place I’ve ever been in, everything painted in what a contemporary called ‘peculiar blue’ and actually a dark bottle green. Leighton was the only person ever to live in the sepulchral place, and I can understand why. When he died in 1896, three weeks after being made the only artist baron, his sisters couldn’t sell the enormous pile because it only had one bedroom. It has always been a supposed that the ‘aesthete’ Leighton never married because he was a closet gay, but there were rumours that he had fathered a child on one of his models. Now the refurb has disclosed a backstairs, leading straight into his capacious studio – still gloomy despite the large north-facing picture window – up which he seems to have smuggled the likes of Ada Alice Pullan, the alleged model for Leighton’s chum Bernard Shaw for Eliza in Pygmalion.