Dorich House Museum

The North-Facing Sculpture Studio

Dorich House's defining feature is the magnificent first-floor sculpture studio designed by Gordine with soaring double-height ceilings, vast north-facing windows providing steady natural light ideal for sculptors, and open-plan dimensions creating workspace for large-scale works and multiple projects simultaneously.

The studio represents a practical working environment purpose-built for sculpture's specific technical requirements - natural light revealing three-dimensional forms' surfaces and volumes without harsh shadows, high ceilings accommodating life-size or larger figures, strong floors supporting heavy bronze sculptures and equipment, and generous proportions allowing artist and models to move freely.

The dramatic architectural space also functioned as gallery and reception room where Gordine entertained patrons, critics, collectors, and society figures, displaying finished sculptures in settings designed to impress and intimidate.

The studio preserves Gordine's working environment including modeling stands, tools, reference photographs pinned to walls, material samples, and the accumulated clutter of active artistic production frozen at the moment of her death. Completed bronze sculptures inhabit the space alongside works in progress, demonstrating her portrait sculpture specialization and figurative style.

The studio's preservation allows visitors to understand sculptural practice through direct evidence rather than sanitized museum displays - the messy reality of artistic work, the physical labor of modeling clay and casting bronze, and the professional environment where Gordine met clients, developed commissions, and constructed her artistic identity.

The studio architecture's Art Deco modernism - clean lines, geometric forms, industrial materials like steel-framed windows - represents advanced 1930s design thinking applied to artistic workspace. For anyone interested in sculpture processes, studio typology, or artist working environments, the preserved studio offers extraordinary access to spaces usually private or destroyed after artists' deaths.

Gordine's Bronze Portrait Sculptures

Dorich House displays approximately twenty of Gordine's bronze portrait heads and busts demonstrating her distinctive stylized approach to portraiture that synthesized Art Deco streamlining, Egyptian sculpture's simplified geometry, Far Eastern aesthetic influences from her years in Singapore and Malaysia, and European figurative traditions into highly recognizable personal style.

Her portrait heads elongate necks, stylize facial features with smooth surfaces and reduced detail, position heads on elegant geometric bases, and achieve effects simultaneously sophisticated and theatrical. Subjects included society figures, aristocrats, theatrical personalities, artists, and wealthy patrons who paid substantial commissions for portraits that flattered through artistic idealization rather than literal representation.

Major works include her self-portraits showing how she constructed her own exotic artistic persona, portraits of Richard Hare and other family members, society commissions including Lady Ravensdale and various titled subjects, and studies of dancers and performers whose theatrical gestures suited her dramatic aesthetic.

The bronzes' technical quality - smooth patinas, sharp casting detail, careful finishing - demonstrates Gordine's mastery of bronze-casting processes she often performed herself in Dorich House's basement workshop. Her sculpture's commercial success during the 1920s-40s reflected Art Deco taste for stylized elegance and decorative sophistication, though changing post-war tastes toward abstraction and different aesthetic values led to her marginalization by critics who dismissed her work as too commercial or decorative.

Contemporary reassessment recognizes her technical accomplishment, distinctive aesthetic voice, and significance as successful woman sculptor in male-dominated profession. The portraits displayed throughout the house as Gordine arranged them create powerful effects of being watched by these silent bronze presences - emphasizing sculpture's uncanny ability to suggest living presence.

The Art Deco Architecture and Interior Design

Dorich House exemplifies interwar Art Deco modernism adapted to artistic studio-house typology, creating a building that combines avant-garde architectural aesthetics with practical functionality and dramatic visual effects. The exterior's clean geometric masses, horizontal window bands, white rendered walls, and curved elements represent 1930s modern architecture at its most confident - rejecting historical revivalism for machine-age aesthetics celebrating clean lines, industrial materials, and honest expression of building functions.

The interior planning creates dramatic spatial sequences from the relatively modest entrance through the double-height studio volume, with carefully choreographed views, level changes, and architectural surprises.

Gordine's interior decoration combined modernist architecture with eclectic furnishings reflecting her cosmopolitan background and artistic interests - Russian icons on walls alongside modern artworks, Oriental carpets on floors beneath Art Deco light fixtures, European antique furniture mixed with contemporary pieces, and throughout her sculptures and paintings creating total artistic environment.

The decoration's theatricality served Gordine's self-fashioning as exotic artistic figure - the Russian-Baltic sculptor who studied in Paris, worked in the Far East, married into English aristocracy (Hare's mother was Countess of Listowel), and created sophisticated artistic salon attracting cultural figures.

The house's preservation allows studying how artists constructed identity through architecture and decoration - using spatial drama, aesthetic sophistication, and material culture to project seriousness, success, and cultural authority necessary for professional recognition and commercial success.

For Art Deco enthusiasts, architectural historians, or anyone interested in how built environments shape identity and experience, Dorich House demonstrates modernist design's expressive possibilities beyond purely functional approaches.

Richard Hare's Russian Art Collection and Library

Richard Hare, Russian art historian and author of significant scholarly works on Russian painting and literature, filled Dorich House with Russian artworks, icons, books, and cultural artifacts creating a complementary collection to Gordine's sculptures and reflecting his scholarly specialization and personal heritage (born in St Petersburg during the Revolution, educated in England).

His Russian icon collection includes examples spanning medieval through 19th-century periods, demonstrating the distinctive aesthetic of Orthodox religious art with its flattened perspective, gold backgrounds, stylized figures, and spiritual intensity that influenced modern artists including Kandinsky and Malevich.

Russian artworks, folk art objects, and decorative pieces throughout the house create cultural layers beyond Gordine's sculpture.

Hare's extensive library on Russian literature, art, and culture preserved in his ground-floor study represents significant research collection for scholars studying Russian cultural history. The combination of Hare's Russian interests with Gordine's cosmopolitan aesthetic (she was born in Latvia, part of the Russian Empire, though culturally European) created household cultural environment reflecting both partners' backgrounds and interests.

Hare's premature death in 1966 affected Gordine deeply, and she preserved his study and collections as shrine to his memory - adding poignant biographical dimension to the house museum.

For visitors interested in Russian art, the icon collection and cultural artifacts provide unexpected encounter with Orthodox artistic traditions in context of English modernist house. The presence of two distinct but complementary collections from both partners demonstrates how shared households negotiate different interests, creating richer cultural environments than individual aesthetics might produce.