For some decades around the turn of the 20th century, Tite Street in Chelsea enjoyed such lofty status. It was the symbolic location of the aesthetic movement, as well as home to some of its most prominent figures. It was there, from the late 1870s, that James Abbott McNeill Whistler held court in a series of houses and created some of the most widely debated artworks of the period; there that Oscar Wilde established his “House Beautiful” and then promptly set about dismantling it; and there that John Singer Sargent hosted so many portrait sittings that, by 1909, he was grumbling that he would be willing to paint any subject “but not the human face”.