The Pattle sisters took Victorian London by storm. As a new exhibition opens at Watts Gallery exploring their celebrity-studded world, historian and Pattle descendant William Dalrymple talks to Richard Nye..
Everyone who was anyone was there: artists, writers, actors and musicians from beyond the conventional fringe. It could have been the Bloomsbury Group in full Edwardian spate.
In fact, however, this was Little Holland House, in the still rural outpost of Kensington, fully 50 years before.
At its heart was a gaggle of sisters: the six surviving Pattle girls, Anglo-Indians of French maternity, blown in from Calcutta to stun Victorian London with their jewellery, silks and exotic Bengali charm.
William Dalrymple
Sara, the third born, is the lady of the house, married to a director of the East India Company, the ravenous trading corporation which controlled most of India for the century leading up to the Raj.
It was Sara’s Sunday salons, with her sisters in regular attendance, that put Little Holland House on the map. Thackeray, Tennyson, Darwin and a host of adoring Pre-Raphaelites were all among the pilgrims to the shrine. And now a new exhibition – Women of Influence, at Compton’s Watts Gallery, near Guildford – is set to bring this lost world to life.
Comparisons with Bloomsbury are not idle: Virginia Woolf and the artist Vanessa Bell, leading lights in that circle of social and aesthetic disruptors, were the granddaughters of sister number four, Maria.
© Collection of Watts Gallery Trust
Nor are they the only famed descendants of the tribe. William Dalrymple, the lauded historian, writer, podcaster and walking encyclopaedia on the British East India Company, is the great-great-grandson of Sophia, the youngest and, by common consent, the sweetest and gentlest of the Pattles.
“I was always fascinated by her,” he tells me, Zooming in from Hong Kong, where the Royal Geographical Society dinner awaits.
“My father was obsessed with family history, but most of our ancestors were bewigged Scottish types – very unartistic. The Pattles were a striking contrast. I longed to know more.”
There was plenty to know. Not least about the antics of James Pattle, the girls’ incorrigible father, whose predilection for booze, lies and general misdemeanour earned him a variety of unflattering sobriquets, but failed to check his rise to the top of the East India Company. At his demise, he was pickled in a cask of rum, reputedly popping out at intervals to the dismay of his long-suffering widow.
© Collection of Watts Gallery Trust
This was Adeline de L’Etang, the French connection, whose mother lived in Versailles and arranged for her granddaughters to attend a school founded by a reader to Marie Antoinette.
Sadly, Adeline did not long survive her pickled spouse: she died two years later on a voyage to England with her three youngest daughters, Louisa, Virginia and Sophia. It was a trio of orphans that disembarked into the cheerless uncertainty of midwinter 1845.
But the sister act was just warming up. The new arrivals were a social sensation: at one London ball, Virginia and Sophia – “Elgin marbles with dark eyes”, according to writer and art critic John Ruskin – clocked up a total of 16 marriage proposals between them. And in Mayfair, and from 1850 at Little Holland House, Sara was busy creating her extraordinary world, an alternative Victorian reality where art was king.
© Collection of Watts Gallery Trust
“Little Holland House seemed to me a paradise,” wrote the actress Ellen Terry, “where only beautiful things were allowed to come.” Nowhere in buttoned-up Britain was the Keatsian notion that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” more in vogue than at LHH.
Here, the Pre-Raphaelites rode the third wave of English Romanticism, frequently painting the Pattles in idealised form. Edward Burne-Jones, who fell for the (now married) Sophia during his puppy love summer of 1858, created a whole album for his adored muse, complete with a picture of himself in medieval costume, insubtly inscribed AMOR.
But it was GF Watts – he of the eponymous gallery and a long-term resident of LHH – who pushed the envelope to its extremes, portraying Sophia as everything from the Byzantine Empress Theodora to an intense personification of the Arts.
© Collection of Watts Gallery Trust
“At the time he was England’s Michelangelo,” says William Dalrymple. “So his being there was a great prize for Sara. She made him the honey for all the artistic bees in society. It was because of him that Little Holland House developed into party central.”
Later, the presence of Julia, celebrated Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron and the oldest surviving sister, added yet another dimension to a phenomenon which, courtesy of the novelist Thackeray, had by now acquired a name of its own: Pattledom.
“If you were an extraordinary-looking man, like Tennyson, Julia would dress you up as King Arthur and make you sit for a photo. It was all an idyll, a summer world of lawns and loveliness and strawberries and cream where art had become the fashion.
© Collection of Watts Gallery Trust
“It was also very consciously Indian, with its lobster curries, its rattling bracelets and the sisters’ loose-fitting clothes. They played that card to a surprising extent. It would have been less striking in the Georgian era, when attitudes were more enlightened, but by about 1820 things had changed – intermarriage was out and the British saw Indians as ripe for being civilised and converted to Christianity.”
Never was the sisters’ mixed identity more challenged than in 1857, when news of the so-called Indian Mutiny reached these shores. Lurid reports of atrocities visited upon British civilians filled a foaming, indignant press: of Britain’s sadistic retributive measures, there was not an enquiring word. Anglo-Indians found themselves in an invidious position. The Pattles, suddenly suspect in a society that had previously embraced them, saw discretion as the better part of valour.
“They very much took the government’s side in order to fend off criticism,” says William, whose scorching critiques of imperial excess have long been a feature of his work. “But it would certainly have been a crisis of identity.”
© Collection of Watts Gallery Trust
Education, education, education: the general cloud of unknowing which surrounds the British story in India, insists William, is something we need urgently to dispel.
“None of this stuff is taught today,” he laments. “The empire was the most significant thing we’ve ever done, but we know more about Rome and the six wives of Henry VIII than we do about our imperial past.
“We roll up at some gorgeous stately home, where at any minute Colin Firth might appear, and we gaze at all its wonderful treasures. But we forget how they got there. We don’t seem to recognise that Britain became top dog through slavery and the looting of Indian assets. All this should be central to our education – not least because it is the instrumental cause of so much global turmoil today.”
In Pattledom, however, the sense of harmony holds. At Little Holland House, for a few short years, the cultures of East and West merged. Now that daring Victorian marriage is back on display at the Edwardian temple of Pattledom’s highest priest.
© Collection of Watts Gallery Trust
Women of Influence: The Pattle Sisters is at Watts Gallery, Compton from Nov 27 – May 3. Visit: wattsgallery.org.uk
