Streets of Florence,” which appeared at the Royal Academy
in 1855. At this time the works of the Pre-Raphaelites almost
absorbed public interest in art—it was the year of Holman Hunt’s
“Light of the World,” and the “Rescue,” by Millais. Yet
Leighton’s picture, painted in quite a different style, created a
sensation, and was purchased by Queen Victoria. Although,
since his infancy, he had only visited England once (in 1851, when
he came to see the Great Exhibition), he was not quite unknown
in the cultured and artistic world of London, as he had made
many friends during a residence in Rome of some two years
or more after he left Frankfort in 1852. Amongst these were
Giovanni Costa, Robert Browning, James Knowles, George
Mason and Sir Edward Poynter, then a youth, whom he allowed
to work in his studio. He also met Thackeray, who wrote from
Rome to the young Millais: “Here is a versatile young dog,
who will run you close for the presidentship one of these days.”
During these years he painted several Florentine subjects—“Tybalt
and Romeo,” “The Death of Brunelleschi,” a cartoon
of “The Pest in Florence according to Boccaccio,” and “The
Reconciliation of the Montagues and the Capulets.” He now
turned his attention to themes of classic legend, which at first
he treated in a “Romantic spirit.” His next picture, exhibited in
1856, was “The Triumph of Music: Orpheus by the Power of his
Art redeems his Wife from Hades.” It was not a success, and
he did not again exhibit till 1858, when he sent a little picture
of “The Fisherman and the Syren” to the Royal Academy, and
“Samson and Delilah” to the Society of British Artists in
Suffolk Street. In 1858 he visited London and made the acquaintance
of the leading Pre-Raphaelites—Rossetti, Holman Hunt and
Millais. In the spring of 1859 he was at Capri, always a favourite
resort of his, and made many studies from nature, including a
very famous drawing of a lemon tree. It was not till 1860 that
he settled in London, when he took up his quarters at 2 Orme
Square, Bayswater, where he stayed till, in 1866, he moved to
his celebrated house in Holland Park Road, with its Arab hall
decorated with Damascus tiles. There he lived till his death.
He now began to fulfil the promise of his “Cimabue,” and by such
pictures as “Paolo e Francesca,” “The Star of Bethlehem,”
“Jezebel and Ahab taking Possession of Naboth’s Vineyard,”
“Michael Angelo musing over his Dying Servant,” “A Girl
feeding Peacocks,” and “The Odalisque,” all exhibited in 1861–1863,
rose rapidly to the head of his profession. The two latter
pictures were marked by the rhythm of line and luxury of colour
which are among the most constant attributes of his art, and may
be regarded as his first dreams of Oriental beauty, with which
he afterwards showed so great a sympathy. In 1864 he exhibited
“Dante in Exile” (the greatest of his Italian pictures), “Orpheus
and Eurydice” and “Golden Hours.” In the winter of the same
year he was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy. After
this the main effort of his life was to realize visions of beauty
suggested by classic myth and history. If we add to pictures of
this class a few Scriptural subjects, a few Oriental dreams, one
or two of tender sentiment like “Wedded” (one of the most
popular of his pictures, and well known by not only an engraving,
but a statuette modelled by an Italian sculptor), a number of
studies of very various types of female beauty, “Teresina,”
“Biondina,” “Bianca,” “Moretta,” &c., and an occasional
portrait, we shall nearly exhaust the two classes into which Lord
Leighton’s work (as a painter) can be divided.
Amongst the finest of his classical pictures were—“Syracusan Bride leading Wild Beasts in Procession to the Temple of Diana” (1866), “Venus disrobing for the Bath” (1867), “Electra at the Tomb of Agamemnon,” and “Helios and Rhodos” (1869), “Hercules wrestling with Death for the Body of Alcestis” (1871), “Clytemnestra” (1874), “The Daphnephoria” (1876), “Nausicaa” (1878), “An Idyll” (1881), two lovers under a spreading oak listening to the piping of a shepherd and gazing on the rich plain below; “Phryne” (1882), a nude figure standing in the sun; “Cymon and Iphigenia” (1884), “Captive Andromache” (1888), now in the Manchester Art Gallery; with the “Last Watch of Hero” (1887), “The Bath of Psyche” (1890), now in the Chantrey Bequest collection; “The Garden of the Hesperides” (1892), “Perseus and Andromeda” and “The Return of Persephone,” now in the Leeds Gallery (1891); and “Clytie,” his last work (1896). All these pictures are characterized by nobility of conception, by almost perfect draughtsmanship, by colour which, if not of the highest quality, is always original, choice and effective. They often reach distinction and dignity of attitude and gesture, and occasionally, as in the “Hercules and Death,” the “Electra” and the “Clytemnestra,” a noble intensity of feeling. Perhaps, amidst the great variety of qualities which they possess, none is more universal and more characteristic than a rich elegance, combined with an almost fastidious selection of beautiful forms. It is the super-eminence of these qualities, associated with great decorative skill, that make the splendid pageant of the “Daphnephoria” the most perfect expression of his individual genius. Here we have his composition, his colour, his sense of the joy and movement of life, his love of art and nature at their purest and most spontaneous, and the result is a work without a rival of its kind in the British School.
Leighton was one of the most thorough draughtsmen of his day. His sketches and studies for his pictures are numerous and very highly esteemed. They contain the essence of his conceptions, and much of their spiritual beauty and subtlety of expression was often lost in the elaboration of the finished picture. He seldom succeeded in retaining the freshness of his first idea more completely than in his last picture—“Clytie”—which was left unfinished on his easel. He rarely painted sacred subjects. The most beautiful of his few pictures of this kind was the “David musing on the Housetop” (1865). Others were “Elijah in the Wilderness” (1879), “Elisha raising the Son of the Shunammite” (1881) and a design intended for the decoration of the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, “And the Sea gave up the Dead which were in it” (1892), now in the Tate Gallery, and the terrible “Rizpah” of 1893. His diploma picture was “St Jerome,” exhibited in 1869. Besides these pictures of sacred subjects, he made some designs for Dalziel’s Bible, which for force of imagination excel the paintings. The finest of these are “Cain and Abel,” and “Samson with the Gates of Gaza.”
Not so easily to be classed, but among the most individual and beautiful of his pictures, are a few of which the motive was purely aesthetic. Amongst these may specially be noted “The Summer Moon,” two Greek girls sleeping on a marble bench, and “The Music Lesson,” in which a lovely little girl is seated on her lovely young mother’s lap learning to play the lute. With these, as a work produced without any literary suggestion, though very different in feeling, may be associated the “Eastern Slinger scaring Birds in the Harvest-time: Moon-rise” (1875), a nude figure standing on a raised platform in a field of wheat.
Leighton also painted a few portraits, including those of Signor Costa, the Italian landscape painter, Mr F. P. Cockerell, Mrs Sutherland Orr (his sister), Amy, Lady Coleridge, Mrs Stephen Ralli and (the finest of all) Sir Richard Burton, the traveller and Eastern scholar, which was exhibited in 1876 and is now in the National Portrait Gallery.
Like other painters of the day, notably G. F. Watts, Lord Leighton executed a few pieces of sculpture. His “Athlete struggling with a Python” was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1877, and was purchased for the Chantrey Bequest collection. Another statue, “The Sluggard,” of equal merit, was exhibited in 1886; and a charming statuette of a nude figure of a girl looking over her shoulder at a frog, called “Needless Alarms,” was completed in the same year, and presented by the artist to Sir John Millais in acknowledgment of the gift by the latter of his picture, “Shelling Peas.” He made the beautiful design for the reverse of the Jubilee Medal of 1887. It was also his habit to make sketch models in wax for the figures in his pictures, many of which are in the possession of the Royal Academy. As an illustrator in black and white he also deserves to be remembered, especially for the cuts to Dalziel’s Bible, already mentioned, and his illustrations to George Eliot’s Romola, which appeared in the Cornhill Magazine. The latter are full of the spirit of
