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I had not been at the hotel [in Switzerland] two hours before the parson put it [the Strand] into my hands. Certainly every person in the hotel had read it. It is true that some parts have a sickly flavour, perhaps only to us! I heard many remarks such as, "Oh! How interesting!" The rapture was general concerning your house. Such a house could scarcely have been imagined in London.1
Harry How's "Illustrated Interview" with the Royal Academician Luke Fildes in his luxurious studio house in London's Holland Park may have seemed a little "sickly" to Fildes and his brother-in-law Henry Woods, but such publicity was always welcome in an age when celebrity sold paintings. As Julie Codell demonstrates in The Victorian Artist: Artists' Lifewritings in Britain ca. 1870–1910, late nineteenth-century art periodicals played an important role in building and maintaining the public's interest in living artists. The Magazine of Art, for example, ran "Our Living Artists" from 1878, "The Homes of our Artists" from 1881, and "Half-Hours in the Studios," written by the editor Marion Harry Spielmann, from 1887. Visits to the studio—or "peeps," as the Windsor Magazine called them—were an essential element in the formation of British artists' celebrity. Codell describes how Spielmann's studio visits "upheld the academic values of respectability, institutional validation and national superiority."2 Furthermore, these articles offered "evidence … that artists were thoroughly socialised, not alienated and suffering in garrets."3 But as Woods's letter suggests, this work was not limited to art periodicals. The Strand Magazine also played a part in building the celebrity artist, just as it fuelled the popularity of Sherlock Holmes. Under the ownership of the entrepreneurial George Newnes, the Strand appealed to a wide middle-class readership with a mix of features and fiction that, as I will demonstrate, often focused on art. In its first decade (1891–1902) the Strand copied features from the Art Journal and the Magazine of Art while also positioning artists within a broad class of professionals.4 The long-running series "Portraits of Celebrities" and "Illustrated Interviews" focused on lawyers, politicians, writers, actors, philosophers, and philanthropists, as well as artists. Spielmann's values of "respectability, institutional validation and national superiority" are instantly recognisable in the pages of the