Created for Merton Russell-Cotes’s wife in 1901 and then given to the town, the dazzling interiors of the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum in Bournemouth capture the spirit of the Victorian seaside, says Kathryn Ferry. Photography by Paul Highnam for Country Life. In June 1909, Country Life reported on the Lord Mayor of London’s official visit to Bournemouth.
It judged the event to be ‘of more than local interest because lovers of Bournemouth and people who owe their restoration to health to its mild climate...
are to be found all over the country’. After a ceremony on the pier, dignitaries walked to East Cliff Hall, where Merton and Annie Russell-Cotes gave a tour of the house they had generously presented to the town, together with its contents, the previous year. To mark the occasion, the Lord Mayor received a beautiful souvenir album illustrating what would become the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum, ‘a building which occupies a commanding position overlooking the sea’.
More than a century later, this Victorian house museum continues to thrive. The sumptuous interiors of the house, which was created as a birthday present from husband to wife in 1901, are astonishingly well preserved and reflect a rich businessman’s vision of the Aesthetic or ‘Art at Home’ Movement. Displayed here are works of art and sculpture, together with ethnographic objects, amassed over a lifetime of travel.
The collection offers an extraordinary window into late-Victorian.