(The plate represents the centre portion of the picture, now in the
possession of Mr. Mildmay, M.P., at Ivybridge)
A typical example of the artist's earlier manner--characteristically
suave in line arrangement and dignified in effect--this picture shows
well how he could manage the intricacies of an elaborate composition.
The decorative beauty of the whole design and the grace of individual
figures can be sincerely admired.
[Illustration: PLATE II.--THE SYRACUSAN BRIDE]
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Leighton does not seem to have owed to heredity any of his particular
gifts as an artist. His father and grandfather were both medical men,
and, during several generations preceding his birth, no member of his
family appears to have possessed more than an ordinary degree of taste
in art matters. Yet the desire for the pictorial expression of his
ideas was one of the first of his childish inclinations; and in 1839,
before he was ten years old--he was born at Scarborough on December 3,
1830--this desire had become so strong that his parents began seriously
to consider whether it ought not to be accepted by them as determining
the profession which he was eventually to follow. Their final decision
on the subject was postponed for some years longer, for they felt the
need for caution lest his powers should prove to be insufficient to
justify them in consenting that he should become a professional artist.
But meanwhile his father, himself a man of culture and a lover of the
classics, determined that the boy should receive a good general
education, and that, though art teaching was not to be denied to him,
it should be one only of the subjects in which he was to be trained.
So for the next four or five years his work was very judiciously
varied. In 1840 he had gone with his parents to Rome, and during the
two years he remained there he had regular drawing-lessons from Signor
Meli. Then came a year spent partly at Dresden and partly at Berlin,
which gave him further opportunities for art study, a short stay during
1843 at a school at Frankfort, and another move, in 1844, to Florence.
This wandering life under his father's guidance was of no small
advantage to him, for it not only offered him chances of becoming
acquainted with various types of art, but enabled him to acquire that
command of languages which was of so much service to him in his after
career. It gave him, too, a wide experience of people and things such
as comes seldom enough to a lad of his age, and had undoubtedly a very
valuable influence upon his mental development.
It was in Florence that the question whether he was or was not to be an
artist was finally decided. His father sought the advice of Hiram
Powers, the American sculptor, to whom he showed examples of the boy's
work and asked whether he should "make him an artist." When Powers
declared that Nature had done that already, and, in answer to further
questioning as to young Leighton's chances of success, said that he
would become as eminent as he pleased, the parental doubts and
hesitation came to an end. Immediate steps were taken to give him a
grounding in the rudiments of the profession which opened up to him
such brilliant prospects. His general education still went on, but he
was allowed time for special study, and not only entered the Accademia
delle Belle Arti at Florence, but also set to work to study anatomy
under Zanetti at the hospital in that city; and on these lines his
training was continued for some little while.
When he left Florence it was to return to his school at Frankfort,
where he remained till he was nearly seventeen, and then he spent a
year in the Stadtlesches Institut there. He moved next to Brussels,
where he came in contact with Wiertz and Gallait, and then for a few
months to Paris, to worship at the shrine of Ingres and Ary Scheffer.
But during this period his art work was carried on without the
systematic direction of any master, and though on his travels he had
picked up much useful knowledge, and had acquired sufficient confidence
in himself to attempt two or three pictures of some importance, he felt
at last the need for real discipline. So at the end of 1849 he left
Paris, and returned to Frankfort to put himself under the rigid rule of
Steinle, a master from whom he knew that he would receive just the
drilling which was necessary to bring his somewhat errant youthful
fancies under proper control.
Steinle was an artist who had little sympathy with those redundancies
of style which were at that time characteristic of the Florentine
school. He was a believer in severity of manner, in formality and
strict simplicity, and that Leighton should have chosen him as the one
man from whom he desired to receive tuition is proof enough that the
young artist was fully conscious of the deficiencies in his own early
performance. With this consciousness to spur him on it can well be
imagined that the two years he spent with Steinle were not wasted; he
worked hard, and if he had to unlearn much that he had learned before,
he acquired thereby a sounder judgment of the relative value of
different forms of practice, and added largely to his knowledge of
technical processes. He had, during his earlier wanderings from place
to place, seen and studied many phases of art, and he had gathered
impressions with what was, perhaps, rather dangerous facility; to bring
this mass of oddly assorted information into proper shape, and to sift
out from it what had real value, was a task in which he needed the
assistance of a disciplinarian with high ideals and firm convictions.
He had full confidence in Steinle's judgment, and though his own
aesthetic creed was even then too clearly defined to be changed in
essentials by the asceticism of his master, he responded readily to the
suggestions of a man who could show him plainly just where the
extravagances of this creed required to be curbed, and how what was
best in it could most fitly be developed.
He left Frankfort in the autumn of 1852 and went to live at Rome; and
soon after he had settled there he commenced the picture which was
destined, on its appearance at the Royal Academy in 1855, to put him
instantly among the most prominent of the artists of his time. In this
picture--"Cimabue's Madonna carried in Procession through the Streets
of Florence"--he not only summarised all his previous experience, but
forecasted what was to be his artistic direction during the rest of his
life. Though he had painted other canvases before, and exhibited them
at Frankfort, it was with this one that his career as an artist of
admitted distinction really began. It introduced him dramatically to
the British public; it was bought by Queen Victoria--a fact which
immediately advertised its importance to art lovers in this
country--and it amply justified the hopes and expectations as to his
future, which had been formed by his many friends abroad and by the
judges who had had opportunities of estimating the value of his student
work. This was the picture which Thackeray had seen in progress at
Rome, and which, by the impression it made upon him, induced him to
tell Millais that he had come across "a versatile young dog who will
run you hard for the presidentship one day"--a much-quoted prophecy of
which we have had since the complete fulfilment.
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