| Activity | Frederic Leighton was an artist of historical and mythological subjects and leader of the Victorian neo-classical painters. He was born in Scarborough in 1830, the son of Dr Frederic Septimus Leighton. He had two sisters: Alexandra, who was older than he, and Augusta, who was younger. Although Leighton was enrolled at University College School, the course of his education was disrupted by the frequent travels undertaken by his family in Italy, France, Germany and Switzerland. He later pursued his artistic studies under various teachers in Florence, Rome and Frankfurt, where he received tuition from the German Nazarene painter Edward von Steinle in the Städelsches Kunstinstitut. In 1855 his first Royal Academy picture ‘Cimabue’s Celebrated Madonna is Carried in Procession through the Streets of Florence’, was bought by Queen Victoria for £600, thus launching him on a long and successful career. Initially Leighton lived and worked in both Paris and Rome, but in the summer of 1859 he returned to London to make the city his professional base and his home. This intention was cemented in 1864, when he commissioned the architect George Aitchinson to build his unique studio-home, Leighton House, in the Kensington side street Holland Park Road. In 1877 the artist asked Aitchinson to create an Arab Hall as an extension to the house, which was inspired by Leighton's extensive travels in North Africa and The Middle East, and is partly decorated by textiles collected from these areas. Throughout the 1860s, Leighton turned away from the use of medieval and biblical subjects in his art, towards more classical themes. The emphasis of his work changed also and began to reflect the preoccupations of aestheticism, as the movement gained momentum in England. His most remarkable paintings were of the so-called aesthetic type, without ostensible subject and ambiguous in the identification of the figures in anthropological, social, or even, on occasions, gender terms. It is for these Hellenic and evocative paintings that he is now best known. Among his renowned works are ‘Flaming June’ (c.1895), ‘The Garden of Hesperides’ (c.1892) and ‘The Daphnephoria’ (c.1874-6). Leighton’s working method was meticulous. He made nude and draped studies of each of the figures in his pictures, before finalizing them upon the canvas. He also executed oil sketches of the whole composition, which vividly capture the motivation and emphasis of the design. These works are often more admired than his finished pictures which, in their highly finished state, sometimes lack the vitality of the preparatory sketches. He exhibited yearly at the Royal Academy from 1855 onwards. In 1878 he was elected president of the Royal Academy and by the end of his life Leighton was considered a pillar of the art establishment. He was knighted in 1878 and made a baronet in 1886. In the new years honours list for 1896 he was raised to the peerage as Baron Leighton of Stretton, becoming the first artist ever to be so treated. On the 25th of January of that year, Leighton died of heart failure at his home in Holland Park. He was represented, according to custom, by one work in the Royal Academy’s summer exhibition of 1896 – the unfinished painting ‘Clytie’ (1895-6). A sale of the contents of the artist’s studio was held in July of the same year, and an exhibition for the sale of his drawings was mounted at the Fine Art Society in December. In 1897 a large memorial exhibition of Leighton’s work was shown at the Royal Academy.
Leighton’s working method was highly complex. Each finished picture was preceded by a long series of studies. Every figure, almost every limb of every figure, was separately sketched and not once, but often, and under varying conditions. His practice was to make chalk studies from the nude and the draped figure, so as to ensure an assured treatment of the figurative elements of the painting in small sketches, into which the shapes of the posed figures would be placed. At this stage he would have developed an initial accurate sketch of the whole composition, built up from the previous studies, with figures and background complete. Leighton would then turn to a small canvas and execute his first coloured design in oil. These were swiftly executed and intended to capture the overall impression of tone and colour that the finished painting would possess. The initial paper design was then ‘squared-off’ onto the large canvas; that is to say, by the usual device for enlargement, the design was re-drawn upon this surface, to the scale required for the picture. The primed canvas was prepared with a lighter or darker tone of grey, according to the requirements of the composition. The artist then began to paint the figures in the nude, in monochrome, then would gradually carry them through to a high degree of finish. The background and accessories were similarly treated, initially indicated with light and delicate tones of warm colour. Washes of flat local colour, or their complimentaries, were then added and in this manner the picture in its structure was established. Leighton was then able to continue accumulating detail and colour until his work arrived at a satisfactory stage of completion |