Can we know an artist by their house?

Show me your downstairs loo and I will tell you who you are. Better yet, show me your kitchen, bedroom, billiard room and man cave. Can we know a man – or woman – by their house? The ‘footsteps’ approach to biography argues that to really understand a subject, a biographer must visit his childhood home, his prep-school boarding house, his student digs, his down-and-out bedsit and so on through barracks, shacks, flats, garrets, terraces, townhouses and final Georgian-rectory resting-place. Walk a mile in their shoes – then put on their carpet slippers.

So, to know Horace Walpole, we board the 33 bus to Strawberry Hill. For Henry Moore, it’s Hoglands and its cactus house. For Barbara Hepworth, St Ives and sculptor’s dust. For Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and the Sussex Bloomsbury bunch, it’s a train and a pub lunch in Lewes, then on to Charleston to coo over curtains and cushions.