Artist-fever was considerably fuelled by the grand houses in which they lived and worked. These were extravagant buildings that were designed to give confidence to every patron or sitter who entered. They surrounded themselves with antiquities, taxidermy and tapestries, promulgating the idea of an artistic laboratory in which ideas were, in the words of contemporary journalist Harry How, “melted down and boiled up; turned out on canvas by magic, the paint-pot and brushes being the wizard’s apparatus.”