Lord Leighton

Lord Leighton by Frederick Wedmore

Frederic Leighton, later Lord Leighton, has died, and his passing marks the loss to the Royal Academy of a great President and to England of a many-sided artist whose combination of qualities, rather than one single vein of genius, had come to define him, as Sir John Millais's phrase "our dear President, our admirable Leighton" captures. His painter's and designer's craft, shown in his youth about forty years earlier in the "Procession of Cimabue," never fell into disuse even as many other interests, official and personal, filled his life. Unlike the dilettante who takes up pursuits and drops them, Leighton was systematic and excelled outside his art as linguist, student, antiquary, man of fashion, administrator and philanthropist, with accomplished oratory, faultless tact and decided opinions that rarely gave offence. He was the son of a physician and grandson of Sir James Leighton, a doctor long resident at the Court of St. Petersburg, and was born at Scarborough on 3rd December 1830. Though a Yorkshireman by birth, like William Etty and Thomas Collier, he was unlike one in character, a trait possibly owed to a Jewish strain in his blood that was linked to his early and dominant artistic inclinations. He received drawing lessons in Rome in 1842, entered the Academy of Berlin two years later, had general education at Frankfort, then moved to Florence, where the sculptor Hiram Powers, consulted on his ability, predicted he "could become as eminent as he pleased," after which his father withdrew his objections to painting as a profession. Sojourns in Brussels and Paris followed, where he attended a life-school and copied at the Louvre, then Vienna, where he studied under Steinle, himself a pupil of Overbeck, though Leighton owed more to Cornelius than to Overbeck's religious unction. Returning to Rome, he sent the "Procession of Cimabue" to the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1855, depicting the procession through Florence to Santa Maria Novella honouring Cimabue's Madonna; the picture succeeded immediately. In Paris he associated with Ary Scheffer and Robert Fleury, and contributed to the Royal Academy for some eight or nine years before his 1864 "Orpheus and Eurydice" brought election to the Associateship, followed by full membership in 1869. In 1864 also appeared "Golden Hours." In 1869 came "Electra at the Tomb of Agamemnon," and in 1876 "The Daphnephoria." The fresco "Arts of War" was finished for South Kensington in 1878, joining "The Industrial Arts of Peace" of 1873, while "The Wise and Foolish Virgins" had earlier been placed in a Hampshire parish church. In 1878 he was elected President of the Academy, succeeding Sir Francis Grant, and was knighted the same year; a baronetcy followed in 1886. In this period he completed his self-portrait for the Uffizi, the canvas of Elisha raising the Shunamite widow's son, the painting "Cymon and Iphigenia," and the sculpture "The Sluggard." He remained an upholder of the Classic without partisanship, buying drawings from young artists who valued him as President more than as fellow practitioner. He was aware his brush-work was not strictly modern, that his flesh-painting could be porcelain-like, and that he was little occupied with colour values, yet he pursued the Academic graces of composition and draughtsmanship, valuing Bouguereau for these qualities even where younger artists objected.

By Frederick Wedmore · First published 1899 · Genre: Biography, Art History, Obituary · 2,589 words

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By the death of Lord Leighton, the Royal Academy loses a great President and England a many-sided artist, who was certainly not far removed from being a great painter. It was more, perhaps, by the combination of so many various qualities of character and talent than by the firm possession of one especial vein of genius, that ‘our dear President, our admirable Leighton' -- to use the words most fittingly applied to him by Sir John Millais -- had come, of recent years at least, to be distinguished and known. The painter's and designer's art, evidenced in his youth, about forty years ago, by the ‘Procession of Cimabue,' had not only never fallen into disuse, but had never come to occupy, in his mind, a secondary or comparatively unregarded place. But, along with the well-maintained devotion to the craft to which he had first vowed his affections a full generation ago, there had sprung up, partly of necessity and partly by reason of Lord Leighton's exceptional temperament, many interests, exclusive of merely official duties, which occupied time and thought -- so much so that if he had not added to the tastes of an artist the habits and qualifications of a great man of affairs, it would have been impossible for him to have successfully crowded into his life all the pursuits that engrossed it. It is easy for the ‘admirable Crichton,' in these modern times, to degenerate into the Mr. Brook of _Middlemarch_ -- the not unamiable dilettante who was pretty certain to have once ‘taken up' everything, and was pretty certain also to have dropped it. But Lord Leighton, great as was the diversity of his interests, was absolutely systematic and thoroughgoing; and, outside his especial art (in which his place, whatever may have been his deficiencies, was peculiar and unquestioned), he not only practised but excelled.

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obituary · art criticism · biographical essay · Royal Academy · 19th century · English art · academic painting · Classicism · Renaissance revival · history painting · classical mythology · narrative art

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