YEAR BY YEAR--1864 TO 1869
In 1864 Leighton was made an Associate of the Royal Academy. To its
summer exhibition he contributed three pictures, showing great and
various power in their composition. _Dante at Verona_, _Orpheus and
Eurydice_, and _Golden Hours_. The first of these, one of the most
remarkable pictures of our modern English school, in which "Dante"
appears, is a large work, with figures something less than life-size. It
illustrates the verses in the "Paradiso":
"Thou shalt prove
How salt the savour is of others' bread;
How hard the passage, to descend and climb
By others' stairs. But that shall gall thee most
Will be the worthless and vile company
With whom thou must be thrown into the straits,
For all ungrateful, impious all and mad
Shall turn against thee."
"Dante, in fulfilment of this prophecy, is seen descending the palace
stairs of the Can Grande, at Verona, during his exile. He is dressed in
sober grey and drab clothes, and contrasts strongly in his ascetic and
suffering aspect with the gay revellers about him. The people are
preparing for a festival, and splendidly and fantastically robed, some
bringing wreaths of flowers. Bowing with mock reverence, a jester gibes
at Dante. An indolent sentinel is seated at the porch, and looks on
unconcernedly, his spear lying across his breast. A young man, probably
acquainted with the writing of Dante, sympathises with him. In the
centre and just before the feet of Dante, is a beautiful child,
brilliantly dressed and crowned with flowers, and dragging along the
floor a garland of bay leaves and flowers, while looking earnestly and
innocently in the poet's face. Next come a pair of lovers, the lady
looking at Dante with attention, the man heedless. The last wears a vest
embroidered with eyes like those in a peacock's tail. A priest and a
noble descend the stairs behind, jeering at Dante."[3]
It was the _Golden Hours_ which, though perhaps less memorable and
imaginative than the others, won the greatest popular success of the
three, a success beyond anything that the artist had so far painted. As
this picture is here reproduced, description is needless, except so far
as regards the colour of the background, which is literally golden. The
dress of the lady who leans upon the spinet is white, embroidered with
flowers. The _Orpheus and Eurydice_ showed that the old friendship,
formed originally in Rome, between the painter and Robert Browning, was
maintained. Some of the poet's lines served as a text for the picture;
and as they are little known we repeat them here:
"But give them me--the mouth, the eyes, the brow--
Let them once more absorb me! One look now
Will lap me round for ever, not to pass
Out of its light, though darkness lie beyond.
Hold me but safe again within the bond
Of one immortal look! All woe that was,
Forgotten, and all terror that may be,
Defied,--no past is mine, no future! look at me!"
[Illustration: HELEN OF TROY (1865)
_By permission of Messrs. Henry Graves and Co._]
[Illustration: ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE (1864)]
To this year, also, belongs a portrait of _The late Miss Lavinia
I'Anson_, a circular panel showing the sky for background. This was
exhibited again in the winter Academy of 1897.
In 1865 the artist showed once again his eclectic sympathies, by the
variety of the subject-pictures that he sent to the Academy, ranging
from _David_ to _Helen of Troy_.
In his tenderly conceived _David_, the Psalmist is seen gazing at two
doves in the sky above; he, sunk in a profound reverie, is seated upon a
house-top overlooking some neighbouring hills. The whole is large in its
handling and treatment, and in the simplicity of its drapery recalls
several of the famous illustrations the artist contributed to Dalziel's
Bible Gallery. It was exhibited with the quotation, "Oh, that I had
wings like a dove! for then would I fly away and be at rest." With the
delightful _Helen of Troy_ we are recalled to the third book of the
Iliad, when Iris bids Helen go and see the general truce made pending
the duel between Paris and Menelaus, of which she is to be the prize. So
Helen, having summoned her maids and "shadowed her graces with white
veils," rose and passed along the ramparts of Troy. In the picture the
light falls on her shoulders and her hair, while her face and the whole
of the front of her form are shadowed over, with somewhat mystical
effect.
To the same year belongs _In St. Mark's_, a picture of a lady with a
child in her arms leaving the church, a lovely and finished study of
colour; _The Widow's Prayer_; and _Mother and Child_, a graceful
reminder of a gentler world than Helen's.
In 1866 the critics had at last a work which seemed to them to follow
the lines of the _Cimabue's Madonna_. This was the radiant and lovely
picture of the _Syracusan Bride leading Wild Beasts in Procession to
the Temple of Diana_. The composition of this remarkable painting
deserves to be closely studied, for it is very characteristic of Sir
Frederic Leighton's theories of art, and his conviction of the
necessarily decorative effect of such works. A terrace of white marble,
whose line is reflected and repeated by the line of white clouds in the
sky painting above, affords the figures of the procession a delightful
setting. The Syracusan bride leads a lioness, and these are followed by
a train of maidens and wild beasts, the last reduced to a pictorial
seemliness and decorative calm, very fortunate under the circumstances.
The procession is seen approaching the door of the temple, and a statue
of Diana serves as a last note in the ideal harmonies of form and colour
to which the whole is attuned. As compared with the _Cimabue's Madonna_,
it is a more finished piece of work, and the handling throughout is more
assured. It was as much an advance, technically, upon that, as the
_Daphnephoria_, which crowned the artist's third decade, was upon this.
According to popular report, it was this picture of the _Syracusan
Bride_ which decided his future election as a full member of the
Academy; but as a matter of fact, it was in 1869 that this election took
place. The picture, let us add, was suggested to the painter by a
passage in the second Idyll of Theocritus: "And for her then many other
wild beasts were going in procession round about, and among them a
lioness." _The Painter's Honeymoon_ and a _Portrait of Mrs. James
Guthrie_ were also exhibited this year; and the wall-painting of _The
Wise and Foolish Virgins_, at Lyndhurst, in the New Forest, was executed
during the summer.
[Illustration: VENUS DISROBING FOR THE BATH (1867)]
[Illustration: ELECTRA AT THE TOMB OF AGAMEMNON (1869)]
In its next exhibition, that of 1867, the Academy held five pictures by
the artist, including the delightful _Pastoral_, two small
full-length figures standing in a landscape of a shepherd and a
girl--whom he is teaching to play the pipes. This again might be
considered a painter's translation from Theocritus, and the _Venus
Disrobing for the Bath_, one of the most debated of all the artist's
paintings of the nude. The paleness of the flesh-tint of this Venus
aroused a criticism which has often been urged against his
pictures--that such a hue was not in nature. In imparting an ideal
effect to an ideal subject, Leighton always, however, followed his own
conviction--that art has a law of its own, and a harmony of colour and
form, derived and selected no doubt from natural loveliness, but not to
be referred too closely to the natural, or to the average, in these
things.
To the 1868 Academy Leighton contributed another biblical theme,
_Jonathan's Token to David_. With this were four others, as widely
varying in subject and conception as need be desired. One was a very
charming portrait of a very pretty woman, _Mrs. Frederick P. Cockerell_.
Then follow three more in that cycle of classic subjects, of which the
painter never tired. The full title of the first runs, _Ariadne abandoned
by Theseus: Ariadne watches for his return: Artemis releases her by death_.
In it the figure of Ariadne, clothed in white drapery, is seen lying on a
rocky promontory overlooking the sea. _Acme and Septimius_ is a circular
picture, with two small full-length figures reclining on a marble bench.
This extract from Sir Theodore Martin's translation of Catullus was
appended to its title in the catalogue:
"Then bending gently back her head,
With that sweet mouth so rosy red,
Upon his eyes she dropped a kiss,
Intoxicating him with bliss."
A love song on canvas, a pictorial transcript from Catullus, it was
perhaps the most popular picture of the year. The last of the three was
_Actæa, the Nymph of the Shore_. It represents a small full-length nude
figure lying on white drapery by the sea-shore. Actæa is a lovely
figure, full of that grace which Leighton so well knew how to impart to
his idealized figures.
After this year, at any rate, there could be no longer any doubt but
that the artist's power really lay in the creation of ideal forms;
whether presented in monomime or combined in poetic and decorative
groups, called up from the wonderful limbo of classic myth and history.
With 1869 came _Electra at the Tomb of Agamemnon_, a memorable picture,
full of characteristic effects of colour and composition, and a notable
exercise in the grand style. This work, considered from any side, must
be seen to be the outcome of a unique faculty, so unprecedented in
English art as to run every risk of misconception that native
predilections could impose upon those who stopped to criticise it. The
figure of Electra clad in black drapery offered a problem of peculiar
difficulty.
Another painting shown this year was _Dædalus and Icarus_, a strikingly
conceived picture. The two figures are singularly noble conceptions of
the idealized nude; the drapery at the back of Icarus is typical of the
painter in every fold, while the landscape seen far below the stone
platform on which the figures stand, shows a bay of the blue Ægean sea
in full sidelight, with a lovely glimpse of the white walls of a distant
town.
The same exhibition of 1869 saw, also, the vigorously painted diploma
picture, _St. Jerome_, which marked his election as R.A. In it the
saint, nude to the waist, kneels with uplifted arms at the foot of a
crucifix, his lion seen in the background. _Helios and Rhodos_,
another painting exhibited at the same time, shows Helios descending
from his chariot, which is in a cloud above, to embrace the nymph
Rhodos, who has risen from the sea.
[Illustration: DÆDALUS AND ICARUS (1869)]
[Illustration: ST. JEROME (1869)]