Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Early one morning in March 1990, two men posing as police officers walked into a museum in Boston, tied up the guards and walked out with several Degas sketches, a Manet, a Vermeer and Rembrandt’s “Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee”, the artist’s only painted seascape. The theft remains unsolved; none of the paintings were ever recovered, and by now it seems likely that they are lost for good. You can still go and visit one of them, though. Sort of. In a manner of speaking.At Frameless, a permanent immersive art exhibition in London’s Marble Arch, you can see a motion technology version of “Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee” projected onto the floor, walls and ceiling of an enormous basement room. Rolling waves come at you from all sides, and the simulated roar of the sea is as loud as it can possibly be. Frameless has added lightning to the scene. The goal isn’t just to convince visitors that they are walking around inside the painting. The goal, it seems, is to convince visitors that the 160cm x 128cm painting is a muted and incomplete version of the real thing, that while Rembrandt regrettably did not have the time or the computer access he needed in order to present the scene in its full, terrifying glory, Frameless has had the decency to step in and fill in the blanks. When I visited, I saw a woman excuse herself from the Abstraction room (Kandinsky, Klee, Mondrian) because she’d had an attack of vertigo.These sorts of immersive art experiences are wildly popular (Frameless anticipates 750,000 visitors per year, more than double the number that the Wallace Collection saw last year) and are not going anywhere. It is worth pausing, though, to consider how strange it is to experience art in this way: as an insanely loud movie that makes you carsick. If the idea is simply to make people feel something (the tagline reads “Feel More”), I think the same effect could be achieved by ushering them into an elevator and setting off a whole lot of sirens. It doesn’t have to be like this. There is another way of immersing audiences in an artist’s singular vision, of assailing the senses and gripping hold of the imagination, suspending visitors in the atmosphere of another world. An American called Dennis Severs worked out how to do it in 1979, when he began the work of transforming a derelict Georgian house in Spitalfields, east London, into a kind of living historical fantasy, a simulacrum of 18th-century life as it might have been experienced by a fictional family of Huguenot silk weavers, the Jervises, which he had dreamed up. This explanation is inadequate — it makes the whole thing sound like a twee historical tour, as opposed to the magical and occasionally overwhelming experience that it is, but it is the best I can come up with. There’s no real point of comparison for what Severs did in the house on Folgate Street, no fully effective way of explaining what it’s like that doesn’t involve marching people to the front door and instructing them to step inside. It’s not like anywhere else.Dennis Severs, brilliant, magnetic and by all accounts a real handful, moved to London from California in the late 1960s with a vague plan to study law. Fresh out of university, he threw himself into the city’s gay scene, seeing London as a place where he could build the life he wanted. He loved the city’s history, loved the shadows thrown by its past. One of God’s own showmen, he abandoned the law plan in favour of conducting horse-drawn tours through west London, using whole streets as a theatre to tell vivid, occasionally embellished stories about the past, speaking as if they were happening in the present. He’d found the thing he was born to do.Then he bought a falling-down house from the Spitalfields Trust, which was rescuing properties threatened with demolition by the expansion of the financial district. As soon as he moved in, he began dressing the rooms for performance. On a very tight budget, using whatever he had to hand, he designed the interior as a sort of stage, both for himself and for the successive generations of the imaginary family who lived and worked at 18 Folgate Street from about 1724 to 1900. He opened it up immediately for tours and put a sign on the front door: Aut Visum Aut Non. You either see it or you don’t.Upon entering, visitors were asked to imagine that the Jervis family had just stepped out, leaving behind their half-eaten breakfast and rumpled beds, fires and candles still lit. As he shepherded his audiences from room to room, forbidding them to so much as open their mouths, Severs drew them out of the 20th century and straight into the messy core of 18th- and 19th-century domestic life, via a combination of performance, installation and the wild force of his own belief in what he was doing. He required his audience’s full, rapt attention, not so much inviting visitors into his world as demanding they submit to its rules.Each room had its own distinct texture and spirit, each representing a different period of the family’s history. The first-floor drawing room, for instance, told the story of the family at the height of their wealth and influence in the mid-18th century, held aloft by the money they’d made from the silk trade. He designed it to be richly, oppressively well-decorated, an announcement from the Jervises about their place in the world. The air in there smelt like Turkish delight, in contrast to the tobacco and wine that pervaded the adjoining room, where a Hogarth painting spilled out of the frame. This was the place where Mr Jervis’s male guests would loosen up after dinner, getting drunk and comfortable enough to air their more controversial opinions. Chairs were overturned, as if drunk guests had just walked out, and the punch bowl held remnants of some sticky cocktail. Upstairs, audiences tiptoed into the elegant master bedroom, a much more private space, with a grandly over-the-top canopy bed (unmade) and a fireplace that belonged in Delft heaven. Severs used the top of the house to tell the story of the family at its lowest ebb, when the money was all gone and a generation of Jervises were sleeping six to a room. It was dirty and dusty up there, and the air smelled fetid, so that visitors longed to push open a window. He used every inch of the space to communicate a cramped sense of worry and fear: children’s shoes scattered on the floor spoke of too many mouths to feed, mattresses were improvised out of pushed-together chairs, once-beautiful dresses had been used and reused until they were on the verge of disintegration. The tour could go on for as long as three and a half hours.It takes a powerful charm and domineering presence to successfully pull something like this off, to stop it from feeling embarrassing or like a horrible thing you once had to do at school. Severs could do it. He’d roar at visitors that he was going to bombard their senses, that if they wanted to learn, they could read a book. The house was not intended to be a factual representation of the past, but rather to summon what was in the air, the very feeling of its inhabitants’ presences. There’s an old YouTube clip where you can watch Severs explaining what he wanted visitors to see. “You’re going into a collection of atmospheres,” he says to the interviewer as they stand in the flickering candlelight of the entrance hall, intended to reflect “the spirit of the day: politically, religiously, in manners.”The house wasn’t a museum at all, and was never meant as one. Severs lived there. He threw parties there. He left a baseball cap on a hall tableAchieving this required a fanatical attention to detail, an extraordinary resourcefulness and a disdain for convention. What look like Grinling Gibbons carvings above the fireplace in the first-floor drawing room are actually walnuts strung together with fishing wire. The china above the baroque fireplace is a mix of “real 18th-century junk”, as he called it, and souvenirs he’d picked up at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport. Simon Pettet, the gifted ceramicist who was his partner for many years, made the Delft tiles on the fireplace, each painted with beautiful comic portraits of their friends and neighbours. The ornate plasterwork on the hall ceiling is made out of spray-painted plastic fruit. Severs co-opted people he knew into working behind the scenes. They’d walk up and down the creaking stairs during his performances and slam doors, aiding in the impression that the Jervises were just out of sight somewhere. His friends’ children helped out, being the right size to stand inside cupboards and pull on a fishing wire attached to Mrs Jervis’s fan, which would drift to the floor at the right dramatic moment.Not everyone liked the smoke-and-mirrors aspect of the house, especially not National Trust types, who were sometimes scandalised and sometimes just perplexed to find that it wasn’t like the museums they were used to. But the house wasn’t a museum at all, and was never meant as one. Severs lived there. He threw parties there. He purposely left a New York Yankees baseball cap on a hall table as a way of jarring people’s sensibilities.The house was full of beautiful objects, some of them quite valuable. But their beauty or their provenance was not the point; above all, their presence served as “signposts to the thinking and feeling of other times”, as Severs put it in the book he wrote about the house. The story they told was “aimed at those who want to make sense of the picture of being alive”. I did the tour earlier this year, and the whole street felt different after it was over, the layers of its past exposed like the rings of a tree.“He thought about every aspect of the Jervises’ lives,” said Rupert Thomas, the current director of Dennis Severs’ House. “There are other houses, with far better holdings, but they don’t have that same immediacy, that visceral ability to communicate the past.” Severs had no patience with people who didn’t understand what he was doing. He’d throw people out if they talked, or if they seemed like they didn’t get it. His imperiousness and unpredictability, as well as his cult-leader levels of charisma, were key to the thrill of the performance. He had a gift, as Thomas put it, “for corralling people into his brain”. Severs died of cancer in 1999 at the age of 51 after years of being HIV positive. The house is now run by Thomas and his team, and the tours are still going. Actors perform from a script based on hundreds of tapes of Severs’ performances, and the story of the Jervises is now intertwined with the story of Severs’ life, and of Pettet’s, who died of Aids in 1993. The performance is different to what it was, but the house is still alive. It is still lit by candlelight, and walking into the pitch-black darkness on the stairs still feels like crossing some sort of temporal line. The Jervis family have still just stepped out of the room. The house is old and fragile, and someday the world Severs created will cease to breathe with the same life. Go and see it while you can. It will leave you with a feeling that lasts longer than vertigo. dennissevershouse.co.ukFollow @FTMag to find out about our latest stories first and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
