Merton Russell-Cotes (1835-1921) was a rich and successful hotelier. In 1876 he and his wife Annie moved to Bournemouth, the seaside resort on the Dorset coast, and developed the Royal Bath Hotel as the most luxurious hotel in the town. As well as their business work and their charitable and political activities (he served as Mayor of Bournemouth in 1894-5, and was knighted in 1909), the couple were indefaticable travellers, voyaging all over the world, collecting wherever they went; being particularly keen on Oriental and Islamic art and artifacts.
In 1896 Russell-Cotes commissioned a local architect, John Frederick Fogarty, to design them a new house, to be named East Cliff Hall, in a position high above the beach with a garden in front and large windows and balconies opening to a beautiful view westwards to Poole Bay. Special fireplaces, stained glass and light fittings were ordered, but the house was also to have the most up-to-date electricity, plumbing and central heating, plus a telephone. The house was completed in 1901, but in 1916-19 new galleries were added to house the family's burgeoning art collection.
They had always intended to open their house to public view, and after their deaths it was established in 1922 as the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum.
This is the house and its view today.
This can hardly be bettered, but the contents of the house, while undoubtedly splendidly opulent, verge on the surreal, for they embody everything that the next generation of artists and designers were in revolt against. Walls are heavily panelled, every surface and niche is full of objects or pictures,
and what is one to make of the pictures, such as this enormous late-Victorian potrayal of nudes entirely devoid of any erotic appeal,
or of religious scenes, such as this one by Edwin Longsden Lang of the Holy Family arriving in Egypt (approximately 18 feet by 6, in a style that, fifty years later and in another country, would be termed "Socialist realism"?
If you are ever in Bournemouth, you must go and see it!
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