Leighton House at 100 — Three exhibitions for its centenary
- Anna Lilli Garai
- Oct 2
- 2 min read
Location: Leighton House, London
Date: Oct 11 – Nov 23, 2025
Project: Centennial programme featuring Ghost Objects, A Journey Through 100 Years, and The View from Here
Why it Matters: Revisits Leighton House’s past while opening the historic site to contemporary voices and new commissions
For its centenary as a museum, Leighton House stages a trio of exhibitions that look both backward and forward. Once the home of Victorian painter Frederic Leighton, the house became a public museum in 1925 and has since grown into one of London’s most distinctive cultural landmarks, known for its extraordinary Arab Hall and richly ornamented interiors.
The programme begins with Ghost Objects: Summoning Leighton’s Lost Collection, a new commission by Dutch-born, London-based artist Annemarieke Kloosterhof. Working entirely in paper, she reimagines four artworks from Leighton’s dispersed collection — among them a fifteenth-century shrine reconstructed with over 8,000 hand-cut elements.
Leighton House: A Journey Through 100 Years traces the museum’s transformation with photographs, archives, and ephemera, showing how the “private palace of art” endured wartime damage, post-war decline, and eventual restoration to prominence.
Finally, The View from Here: Contemporary Art from the Middle East and North Africa situates the house in a wider cultural frame, with artists from the MENA region exploring heritage, identity, and migration through assemblage and collage.
Together, the exhibitions underscore the paradox of sanctuary: Leighton built his house as both retreat and spectacle, yet its afterlife as a museum has turned it into a space for collective memory. Marking a century of public life, the centennial programme asks what kinds of histories — and futures — can be sheltered within its walls.
