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. Make a weekend of it. Start at Charleston, then on to Monk’s House where Virginia Woolf played boules and wrote her books, then to Farleys where the photographer Lee Miller and the painter Roland Penrose played host to the surrealists. Don’t miss the Picasso tile above the Aga. (I want one!)

In ‘Great Men’s Houses’, an essay for Good Housekeeping, Virginia Woolf describes a visit to the Chelsea house of Thomas and Jane Carlyle. ‘One hour spent in 5 Cheyne Row,’ she writes, ‘will tell us more about them and their lives than we can learn from all the biographies.’ Yes, no, maybe so.

Take Kettle’s Yard. When I started writing a life of Jim Ede, collector, curator and self-declared ‘friend to artists’, who filled his home in Cambridge with pictures, sculptures, stones, shells, seedheads, feathers, flints, Delft tiles, Tibetan yak bells, Javanese puppets, and, famously, pebbles, I thought: serene interiors, serene soul.