Was Leighton a Romantic or even an Existentialist?

Peter Harrap a practicing artist gives his view from studying the drawings collection

As I write this I think it is only fair to lay my cards on the table. If I am to write on Leighton it is only from the view point as a practicing artist and someone who has spent two years looking at Leighton drawings, making visual comparisons not art historical ones, and also using the drawings collection as a teaching device showing them to students at Leighton House in the Northlight studio.

As I was looking over those two years at the drawings collection a silent rage grew in me that Leighton had been hijacked and pigeon holed in the category of high Victorian art in a way that does take to into account his independence of spirit. The main cause of this is probably his context and our generalised post-modern view of the Victorians as Empire building and exploitative and painters from that era where either moralising or produced self-aggrandising kitsch.

My view is that Leighton is much more in the Romantic vein, an individualistic tradition, doubting and questioning as it goes. In his pursuit of the pagan he was appealing to an atheistic vein that had been developing since the previous century and exploring the universal human condition within those pagan legends. This to my mind is why his paintings went so much out of favour in the century after his death. With the onset of the 20th century out went the grand universal approach appeal to humanity and in came the specifics the everyday in modernism.

I knew Leighton firstly from his paintings which years of art training had taught me to be dismissive of, but then I came across the drawings collection at Leighton House and my view of him has completely changed. I feel that this collection is comparable to Ingres collection of drawings at Montauban in terms of quality but not quantity.

The drawings collection shows Leighton's ideas becoming transformed by his accumulation of knowledge and the transfer of that knowledge into drawings as well as a moving beyond mere knowledge into more abstract qualities.

The early drawings generally show an intense scrutiny of form that is almost painful to look at and take the detailed observation of Ruskin to a new level (see drawings for Cimabue’s Celebrated Madonna at Leighton House Museum, reference numbers LHO/D/2177 and LHO/D/2178). As you look at the drawings you feel that it is not a drawing of leaf or elbow but it is an attempt to know that particular leaf and how it can be understood as well as its scientific functions and processes. A scrutiny that becomes lost in many of the paintings although some of the little head studies and foliage studies dotted around the house still retain that intense passionate scrutiny. These early works including the many studies for the Cimabue’s Celebrated Madonna show a desire to pin things down and fix a contour very much in the French and Italian school of thought where a proper study of the structure is made before flesh is added to bone so to speak. So anatomy, followed by flesh, and by clothing giving the feeling of x-ray vision when put together in combination.

As the drawings develop there is less the concern for a total accuracy of contour there is much more freedom in his range of mark. The study for a nude female figure in the central group of 'And the sea gave up the dead that were in it' (Leighton House Museum, reference number LHO/D/0845) is one such example where the tension comes from the interior forms of the figure rather than the linear contours of the early work.

The method of constructing the figure comes from the centre outward building each form outward in an expansive manner to the contour. Paring each form from the centre-line and working from the largest often backward in space to the contour. This is a truly sculptural way of working and the tensions awkwardness and agonies of this figure are caught in a way that is not dissimilar to Rodin's sculpture. Rodin was an artist whom without Leighton's support and recommendation to the smaller provincial galleries of the UK to purchase his work it would be doubtful if his artistic career would have be as great a success as his supporters in France only materialised after his success in England. This brings Leighton with his support of Rodin firmly toward the modernist rather than the reactionary.

It is in this mid-career drawing that I can see an existential quality in that they are about a sense of being. Recording every aspect of that woman's pose in extremis without flinching, every muscle tendon and tension in her being without fantasy.

Existentialism tries to get at experience from the inside out. Starting with the subject of this drawing, the dead woman, right through to the actual way it is made, it asks the question 'What is it to be a human being?'. Leighton answers this in the chalk marks and choices of his actions, by itching across the flesh recording every direction of each form across the belly, breast, and thigh.

Amongst these mid career drawings are many locomotion studies probably based on Ruben's three or five pose system of getting a model to do a series for movements in one direction pausing between each one and then returning to the first after the third and repeating the sequence until the drawings have enough information for a painting. That way a model can sustain a more difficult posed without loosing the tension or getting cramp. These locomotion studies by Leighton record the limits of human motion in a way that Eadweard Muybridge was to do in the 1880s in a more scientific way with a grid and camera. However the Muybridge photos although they record the positioning of limbs more accurately in motion they are less actuate in their articulation and specificness of the forms and so to my mind less convincing than the Leighton motion studies.

The collection also contains a Whistler drawing which I assume if purchased by Leighton would show keen interest in the process of memory in making an image. Whistler would wander the banks of the Thames first thing in the morning and make jottings and then work up his jottings on a larger canvas from memory. Leighton also used his visual memory to concoct narratives. Like for example the Study for an Illustration 'A Musical Instrument' showing 'The Great God Pan' (Leighton House Museum, reference number LHO/D/0857). Leighton uses his knowledge of anatomy to put together a study of a mythical creature in a way that is wholly convincing but could never have existed

So I have been won over to Leighton by his persistently inquisitive mind and the evidence of his visual explorations through his drawings I think I have also learnt that in order to prevent an artwork from becoming kitsch it is important to retain some of the initial energy, exploration, and inquisitiveness that goes in to investigating a subject when you draw and then later take that information to a painting. I think Leighton was a highly experimental individual who was using classicism to further his own ideas about what it is to be human and the specific nature of the drawings in the Leighton House Collection are the evidence of this journey.

Author

Peter Harrap

Contact information

To contact staff at Leighton House please email [email protected].

Supported by the Heritage Lottery fund

Related sites

Leighton House Museum

18 Stafford Terrace

 

Leighton Drawings home | Collection | History | Background | Essays | Learning and Events | top of page
Leighton House Museum, 12 Holland Park Road, London W14 8LZ, The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea
Telephone: +44 (0)20 7602 3316 | Legal Notices | email: [email protected]

rating button