Herbert Horne’s life was transformed by his first significant architectural commission from a wealthy philanthropist, Mrs Emelia Russell Gurney, for him and the artist Frederic Shields to design a chapel of meditation, the Chapel of the Ascension, on a site near the Bayswater Road. Mrs Gurney paid for them both to travel to Italy for five weeks between September and October 1889 to research architecture and mural paintings. It was his first visit to Italy, and the effect was immediate,
From 1889 the Century Guild’s base after Southampton Street was ‘Whiteladies’, no 20 Fitzroy Street– known as ‘Fitzroy’– an 18th-century house on four floors which Mackmurdo extended at the back with a studio. The glamour of the Fitzroy ménage amid the gloom of late Victorian London is memorably described by writers and artists who flocked there, among them author Victor Plarr, who recalled the February 1891 meeting: