Sigismund Christian Hubert Goetze was born in 1866, the youngest son of James Goetze, “a London coffee merchant in Mincing Lane,” and mother Rosina, a musician. He attended University College School, from which he won a scholarship to the Slade School of Fine Art, and then the Royal Academy School. He exhibited at his first works at the Royal Academy and the Paris Salon, winning a gold medal at the latter.

Goetze first established himself as a portrait painter, for which he had a flourishing practice. From 1912-21 he produced a large-scale cycle of celebratory paintings which were installed as murals in the Ambassadors’ Staircase of the British Foreign Office. These murals have received negative reviews over the past 100 years for their explicit sexuality, outlandish British pomposity, and demeaning depictions of colonial subjects.   

During his ownership of the Abercorn Place manor house, Goetze rebuilt the carriage house upstairs studio for himself into a Neo-Classical style 25-foot high artist’s atelier.  In 1907, he and his family moved to the Regent’s Park mansion Grove House, where he entertained fashionable guests, notably the Queen herself in 1938!  Sigismund Goetze died at Grove House in 1939.