The Street of Wonderful Possibilities: Whistler, Wilde and Sargent in Tite Street

This fascinating, absorbing, and beautifully illustrated work tells the story of one small London street which played host to some of the greatest artistic and intellectual minds of the Victorian era.

Quiet and unassuming on first glance, Tite Street in Chelsea, West London was nevertheless one of the most influential and important streets in the cultural life of the capital during the 19th and 20th centuries.

Playing host to the likes of Oscar Wilde,John Singer Sargent, James Whistler and Radclyffe Hall, the rich cultural history of this street is explored in characterful and captivating detail by acclaimed art historian Devon Cox. This brilliant and lively biography gets inside the lives of those who lived here, creating a vivid image of one small street which became the beating heart of London’s artistic life.

Throughout its turbulent existence, Tite Street mirrored the world around it. From the Aesthetic movement and its challenge to Victorian values, through the Edwardian struggle for women’s suffrage, to the bombs of the Blitz in the 1940s, it remained home to innumerable artists and writers, socialites and suffragettes, musicians and madmen.

With beautiful and insightful writing, Cox paints a vibrant picture of a street where artists and intellectuals flocked, exploring the connections, rivalries and competing artistic visions of the great minds who lived and thrived here.

The Street of Wonderful Possibilities reveals this complex history, tying together private and professional lives to form a colourful tapestry of art and intrigue, illuminating their relationships to each other, to Tite Street and to a rapidly modernising London at the fin de siècle.