(At Lord Armstrong's seat, Rothbury Castle, Northumberland)
As a technical exercise, searching, precise, and careful, and yet
distinguished by a sumptuous breadth of effect, this memorable study of
a fine type of feminine beauty takes high rank among the artist's
smaller paintings. It bears most plainly the stamp of his correct and
cultivated taste.
[Illustration: PLATE VI.--A NOBLE LADY OF VENICE]
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Into this decade fall two of the greater events of his life, his
election as President of the Royal Academy, and the execution of his
famous wall paintings, "The Arts of War," and "The Arts of Peace," in
the South Kensington Museum. On the death of Sir Francis Grant, who
had held the Presidential office since 1866, Leighton was chosen, on
November 13, 1878, to fill the vacant post. In making this selection,
the members of the Academy did honour to a man who had raised himself,
by sheer strength of personality, to a position of acknowledged
leadership in the art affairs of this country, but they also secured as
their President an artist who was almost ideally fitted to deal with
the many responsibilities which have necessarily to be incurred by the
head of such an institution. Leighton's commanding and yet attractive
presence, his great power of organisation and grasp of details, his
wide knowledge of the world, and his unusual capacity as a linguist,
gave him not only a high degree of authority as an official, but also
ensured to him the sincere confidence of those associated with him. To
every one outside the Academy he was the personification of all that
was best in academic art; and by his breadth of mind, his wise
toleration of all types of earnest effort, and his ready sympathy with
the struggling worker to whom merit had not brought success, he gained
the respect and even affection of the great mass of the profession. No
President since Reynolds has been so worthy to direct the policy of the
Academy, and it may fairly be said that none, Reynolds not excepted,
has ruled over it with more discretion, or with better appreciation of
the possibilities of the position.
The other event, the carrying out of the South Kensington wall
paintings, is specially notable because in these works Sir Frederic
Leighton--he received the honour of knighthood on his election as
President--was able to put to legitimate uses all his capacities as a
decorator, and to prove that in paintings on the largest scale he was
as much a master of his craft as in the easel pictures to which, for
want of greater opportunities, he was obliged to confine himself. He
had made a previous experiment in this direction in 1866, when he
executed the fresco of "The Wise and Foolish Virgins" in the church at
Lyndhurst, an admirable composition treated with rare intelligence and
distinctive originality; but the South Kensington lunettes were more
exacting undertakings, and calculated to test his powers to the utmost.
"The Arts of War" was begun towards the end of the 'seventies and took
several months to finish, the companion lunette was painted two or
three years later; and both of them, though some of the preliminary
work was done by assistants, are substantially from his hand.
In many respects "The Arts of War" is the more satisfying performance.
A scene from mediaeval Italian life, it is handled with something of his
earlier manner, but with an amount of breadth and freshness which he
scarcely approached in his younger days. It has infinite grace without
a hint of weakness, firmness without formality, and style without
conventionality; and it is, above all, a true decoration erring neither
in the direction of excessive pictorial effect, nor in that of dull
unreality. "The Arts of Peace" is less masculine and more studied, and
is neither so ingenious in design, nor so happy in its grouping; though
in parts it shows quite his finest art, and there are in it individual
figures which are delightful examples of his masterly skill as a
draughtsman. It suffers, perhaps, most of all from the want of freedom
of brush-work, and from the substitution of an over-careful precision
of touch for the looser and larger handling which is one of the sources
of the charm of "The Arts of War." Two other decorative achievements
must be added to the record of Sir Frederic's effort in this direction,
the ceiling for the music-room of Mr. Marquand's house in New York,
painted in 1886, and the admirable panel, "Phoenicians Bartering with
Britons," executed nine years later for the Royal Exchange.
It is greatly a matter for regret that it should be possible to include
in such a meagre list practically the whole of the artist's work as a
serious decoration. It is true that he was concerned in one of the
many schemes which have been devised for the decoration of St. Paul's
Cathedral, but this scheme was never advanced beyond the preliminary
stage, and his part in it is represented only by the cartoon symbolical
of the Resurrection--"And the Sea gave up the Dead which were in
it"--which now hangs in the Tate Gallery. The chances which he desired
were denied to him, as they were to G. F. Watts, and to other painters
of like ambitions, and the world has in consequence lost much which
would have been of supreme interest. That he, with his often renewed
memories of the frescoes of the Italian masters, must have felt
resentment at the British indifference to this noble form of art can
well be imagined. He knew that, with his aspirations, and his power,
triumphs as great as any of the old painters achieved were well within
his reach, but with all his earnest advocacy, even he was unable to
induce the stolid patron of art to believe that an artist should be
encouraged to produce anything but canvases of a convenient size, which
would serve for the furnishing of modern houses.
So it comes to this, that his only commission for mural decoration on a
large scale was for the two lunettes at South Kensington; the Lyndhurst
fresco was a gift he made to the church, as a thank-offering, it is
said, for his recovery from an illness, and the Marquand ceiling, the
Resurrection cartoon, and the Royal Exchange panel were only paintings
on canvas. It is a poor record, indeed, and one of which the people in
this country have every reason to feel ashamed. But the thwarting of
his ambitions in one direction did not make him in others a less
conscientious artist. "The Arts of Peace" was finished during 1885,
and for another ten years he went on painting pictures into which he
put all his love of ideal beauty, and all his striving for greater
perfection of technical expression. There is certainly no diminution
of power to be perceived in any of these later works, though for some
while before his death he suffered increasingly from the heart trouble
to which at last he succumbed on January 25, 1896.
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