William Lever, the soap manufacturer and founder of Port Sunlight, was a highly successful businessman and a generous philanthropist, though some of his decisions were ill-advised. For instance, he became enmeshed in the Belgian King Leopold II’s brutal private Congo Free State in order to secure palm-oil plantations to supply his works.
One decision he never regretted was his marriage to Elizabeth Hulme in 1874 when they were both 23. She died in 1913, two years after her husband was made a baronet, and when he was ennobled as a baron in 1917 he took as his title Lord Leverhulme, incorporating her maiden name with his surname. He was further elevated as Viscount Leverhulme in 1922.
Elizabeth Lever was a quiet, practical personality who gave her husband unstinting support throughout their climb to prosperity: their son wrote that “her contribution was sympathy and understanding – an unquestioning belief in the rightness of all her husband undertook. She never asked for any altered mode of life which might have distracted him from the work he had in hand…” He added that “my parents used to say that they never remembered a world without each other in it”: they had known in each other since childhood.
William Lever commemorated her by commissioning William & Segar Owen to design the Lady Lever Art Gallery (1914-22), a cleverly designed classical monumental building, filling the vista at the end of The Diamond in the centre of Port Sunlight.
It’s an imposing structure, low and solid enough to sit comfortably in the context of vernacular-style cottages and picturesque layout. The 364-foot-long building is constructed of reinforced concrete faced with Portland stone, a choice apparently influenced by Lever’s admiration for the part-completed buildings of the World’s Columbian Exposition that he visited in Chicago in 1892, and probably encouraged by his connection with Professor Charles Reilly at the Liverpool School of Architecture.
This long corridor of a building has a rotunda at each end, north and south, with a top-lit main hall flanked by a series of smaller rooms. These include five “period” rooms, chosen by Lever to display furniture and other objets d’art: three, ‘Tudor & Stuart’, ‘William & Mary’ and ‘Early Eighteenth Century’ are made up from historic material purchased from London dealers; the ‘Adam’ room is pastiche, designed by Percy Mcquoid and constructed by the decorators White, Allom & Co; the ‘Napoleon’ room was designed by Segar Owen.
William Lever frankly declared that “I am blind on music and poetry. The whole of my artistic tastes are in colour, representing pictures, porcelain and furniture”. He had built up a considerable collection, much of it consisting of the contents of others’ collections – three separate collections of water-colours and Chinese porcelain successively purchased from the surgeon-dentist James Orrock in 1904, 1910 and 1912, together with paintings from George McCullough in 1913, Wedgwood ware from the first Lord Tweedmouth (1820-94) and Greek and Roman antiquities originally belonging to the Regency collector Thomas Hope (1769-1831).
His choices for the Gallery reflect the taste of his time. There are paintings by Frederic, Lord Leighton, Edward Burne-Jones, Sir John Everett Millais and William Etty alongside earlier artists such as Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, George Stubbs, George Romney, John Constable and J M W Turner. Lever’s purpose was not to reflect his own preferences, but “to cater for all tastes…for those who do not particularly admire pictures, statuary etc…”
The statuary complements the pictures, with a number of beautiful nudes, which the supposedly prudish Victorians enjoyed – Lorenzo Bartolini’s Venus, Edward Onslow Ford’s Echo and Frederick William Pomeroy’s The Wood Nymph.
This is a serious collection, weighty and rich, yet even visitors with little knowledge of fine art may recognise such eyecatchers as Holman Hunt’s The Scapegoat and Millais’ Bubbles, which Lever acquired with the rival soap manufacturer, Pear’s, that famously used the image in its advertising.
Ironically, the gallery also shows the Augustus John portrait, Lord Leverhulme, which its subject disliked so much he took a penknife to it: the face was quietly kept hidden until it could be reunited with the rest of the canvas and restored in 1954 by Philip, 3rd Lord Leverhulme.