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[Illustration]
The Life, Letters and Work of
Frederic Baron Leighton
Of Stretton
VOL. II
"_I am a workman first, and an official after._"
--FRED. LEIGHTON, 1888.
"_Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille,
Doch ein Character in dem Strom der Welt._"
--GOETHE.
The Life, Letters and
Work of
Frederic Leighton
BY
MRS. RUSSELL BARRINGTON
AUTHOR OF "REMINISCENCES OF G.F. WATTS," ETC. ETC.
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. II
LONDON
GEORGE ALLEN, RUSKIN HOUSE
1906
[All rights reserved]
Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.
At the Ballantyne Press
[Illustration: LORD LEIGHTON
From the portrait by G.F. Watts]
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION 1
CHAPTER I
FIRST STUDIO IN LONDON, 1859-1863 36
CHAPTER II
ILLUSTRATIONS FOR _CORNHILL MAGAZINE_--FRESCO FOR LYNDHURST
CHURCH--ASSOCIATE OF THE ROYAL ACADEMY--MRS. LEIGHTON'S
DEATH, 1863-1865 91
CHAPTER III
JOURNEYS TO THE EAST--CONSTANTINOPLE--SMYRNA--ATHENS--DIARY
"UP THE NILE TO PHYLAE," 1866-1869 128
CHAPTER IV
ROYAL ACADEMICIAN--MUSIC--ARAB HALL, 1869-1878 188
CHAPTER V
LEIGHTON AS PRESIDENT OF THE ROYAL ACADEMY, 1878-1896 223
CHAPTER VI
LIFE WANING--DEATH, 1887-1896 312
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
VOLUME II
1. PORTRAIT OF LORD LEIGHTON (_Photogravure_) To face Dedication
By G.F. WATTS.
2. HEAD OF YOUNG GIRL (_Colour_) To face page 1
A wedding gift to H.R.H. THE PRINCE OF WALES, who
graciously gave permission for the painting to be
reproduced in this book.
3. "EUCHARIS," 1863 (_Colour_) 9
By kind permission of Mrs. STEPHENSON CLARKE.
4. "A NOBLE LADY OF VENICE," 1866 (_Photogravure_) 10
By kind permission of Lord ARMSTRONG.
5. "GREEK GIRLS PICKING UP SHELLS BY THE SEASHORE," 1871 18
(_Photogravure_)
By kind permission of the Rt. Hon. JOSEPH CHAMBERLAIN.
6. PORTRAIT OF MRS. SUTHERLAND ORR, 1861 57
7. PENCIL SKETCH FOR "MICHAEL ANGELO NURSING HIS DYING
SERVANT," 1862 93
Leighton House Collection.
8. ORIGINAL SKETCH FOR "SAMSON WRESTLING WITH THE LION" 94
Designed as an illustration for Dalziel's Bible. Leighton
House Collection.
9. ORIGINAL DRAWING FOR THE GREAT GOD PAN, ILLUSTRATING MRS.
BROWNING'S POEM, "MUSICAL INSTRUMENT" 102
In "_Cornhill Magazine_," July 1861.
Leighton House Collection.
10. "AN EVENING IN A FRENCH COUNTRY HOUSE," ILLUSTRATING MRS.
ADELAIDE SARTORIS' STORY, "A WEEK IN A FRENCH COUNTRY
HOUSE," PUBLISHED IN THE _Cornhill Magazine_, 1867 103
By kind permission of Messrs. SMITH, ELDER, & CO.
11. "DRIFTING." SECOND ILLUSTRATION FOR SAME 104
12. LORD LEIGHTON 107
Photograph taken at Lyndhurst, 1863.
13. FRESCO FOR LYNDHURST CHURCH--"THE WISE AND FOOLISH
VIRGINS," 1864 111
14. "GREEK GIRL DANCING," 1867 125
By kind permission of Mr. PHILLIPSON.
15. SKETCH FOR A "PASTORAL," 1866 125
Leighton House Collection.
16. SKETCH IN OILS--"EGYPT" (_Colour_) 131
17. "S. JEROME." DIPLOMA WORK, 1869 188
Gallery in Burlington House.
18. "ELECTRA AT THE TOMB OF AGAMEMNON" 189
19. "HERACLES WRESTLING WITH DEATH FOR THE BODY OF ALCESTIS,"
1871 190
By kind permission of the FINE ART SOCIETY.
20. "SUMMER MOON," 1872 193
By kind permission of Messrs. P. & D. COLNAGHI.
21. "A CONDOTTIERE," 1872 193
The Walker Fine Art Gallery, Birmingham.
22. STUDY FOR FIGURE IN FRIEZE, "MUSIC," 1886 193
Leighton House Collection.
23. STUDY OF MAN'S FIGURE FOR THE "ARTS OF WAR," 1872 193
Leighton House Collection.
24. STUDY OF MAN'S FIGURE FOR THE "ARTS OF WAR" 193
Leighton House Collection.
25. STUDY OF MAN'S FIGURE FOR THE "ARTS OF WAR," 1872 193
Leighton House Collection.
26. "ANTIQUE JUGGLING GIRL," 1874 (_Photogravure_) 194
By kind permission of Mr. HODGES.
27. "CLYTEMNESTRA FROM THE BATTLEMENT OF ARGOS WATCHES FOR
THE BEACON FIRES WHICH ARE TO ANNOUNCE THE RETURN OF
AGAMEMNON," 1874 (_Photogravure_) 194
Leighton House Collection.
28. STUDY FOR "CLYTEMNESTRA" 194
Leighton House Collection.
29. STUDY FOR "SUMMER MOON" (_Colour_) 194
Executed by moonlight in Rome. Given by the late A.
WATERHOUSE, R.A., to the Leighton House Collection.
30. "THE DAPHNEPHORIA," 1876 197
By kind permission of the FINE ART SOCIETY.
31. "AT A READING-DESK," 1877 197
By kind permission of Messrs. L.H. LEFEVRE & SON.
32. ORIGINAL STUDY FOR "AN ATHLETE STRUGGLING WITH A PYTHON,"
1876 199
Given by the late G.F. WATTS to the Leighton House
Collection.
33. "NAUSICAA," 1878 201
34. STUDY FOR GROUP IN THE "ARTS OF PEACE," 1873 202
Leighton House Collection.
35. STUDY FOR THE FIGURE OF CIMABUE, CARRIED OUT IN MOSAIC IN
THE SOUTH COURT OF THE VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM, 1868 203
Leighton House Collection.
36. STUDY FOR THE FIGURE OF NICCOLA PISANO, CARRIED OUT IN
MOSAIC IN THE SOUTH COURT OF THE VICTORIA AND ALBERT
MUSEUM, 1868 203
Leighton House Collection.
37. SKETCH OF THE PRINCE AND PRINCESS OF WALES, ATTENDED BY
LORD LEIGHTON, WHEN PRESENT AT A MONDAY POPULAR CONCERT
IN ST. JAMES'S HALL 216
Drawn at the time by Mr. Theodore Blake Wirgman.
38. PORTRAIT OF SIR RICHARD FRANCIS BURTON, K.C.M.G., 1876 218
39. VIEW OF ARAB HALL, 1906 221
Leighton House Collection.
40. PORTRAIT OF PROFESSOR GIOVANNI COSTA 222
Executed at Lerici in 1878.
41. "ELIJAH IN THE WILDERNESS," 1879 255
42. STUDY FOR THE FIGURE OF "ELIJAH" 255
Leighton House Collection.
43. "NERUCCIA," 1879 (_Photogravure_) 255
By kind permission of Mrs. C.E. LEES.
44. "THE BATH OF PSYCHE," 1890 (_Photogravure_) 255
The Tate Gallery.
45. "THE LIGHT OF THE HAREM," 1880 256
By kind permission of the LEICESTER GALLERY.
46. DRAWING OF COMPLETE DESIGN FOR "AND THE SEA GAVE UP THE
DEAD THAT WERE IN IT," 1892 256
47. STUDY FOR "MUSIC." A FRIEZE, 1886 256
Leighton House Collection.
48. STUDY FOR "ANDROMEDA," 1890 256
Leighton House Collection.
49. STUDY FROM CLAY MODEL FOR "PERSEUS," 1891 256
Leighton House Collection.
50. STUDY FOR "PHOENICIANS BARTERING WITH BRITONS" 256
Leighton House Collection.
51. "CYMON AND IPHIGENIA," 1884 (_Photogravure_) 256
The Corporation of Leeds.
52. SKETCH IN OILS FOR "CYMON AND IPHIGENIA" (_Colour_) 256
By kind permission of Mrs. STEWART HODGSON.
53. STUDY FOR SLEEPING GROUP IN "CYMON AND IPHIGENIA" 256
Presented to the Leighton House Collection by G.F. WATTS.
54. FROM BRONZE FROM SMALL MODEL IN CLAY BY LORD LEIGHTON OF
"A SLUGGARD," 1886 258
Leighton House Collection.
55. "NEEDLESS ALARMS," FROM BRONZE STATUETTE, 1886 258
Leighton House Collection.
56. "THE LAST WATCH OF HERO," 1887 259
Corporation of Manchester.
57. SKETCH IN OILS FOR "TRAGIC POETESS," 1890 (_Colour_) 259
By kind permission of Mrs. STEWART HODGSON.
58. "ATALANTA," 1893 261
By kind permission of the BERLIN PHOTOGRAPHIC CO.
59. "FLAMING JUNE," 1895 261
By kind permission of Mrs. WATNEY.
60. STUDY FOR "FLAMING JUNE" 261
Leighton House Collection.
61. "FATIDICA," 1894 261
By kind permission of Messrs. T. AGNEW & SONS.
62. STUDIES FOR "FATIDICA" 261
Leighton House Collection.
63. "MEMORIES," 1883 266
By kind permission of Messrs. P. & D. COLNAGHI.
64. "THE JEALOUSY OF SIMOETHA THE SORCERESS," 1887 266
65. "LETTY," 1884 (_Colour_) 266
By kind permission of Mrs. HENRY JOACHIM.
66. STUDIES FROM DOROTHY DENE FOR "CLYTIE," 1895 268
Leighton House Collection.
67. SKETCH IN OILS FOR "GREEK GIRLS PLAYING AT BALL," 1889
(_In Colour_) 274
By kind permission of Mrs. STEWART HODGSON.
68. "BACCHANTE," 1892 (_Photogravure_) 287
By kind permission of Messrs. HENRY GRAVES & CO.
69. SKETCH IN OILS FOR "BACCHANTE" (_Colour_) 287
By kind permission of Mrs. STEWART HODGSON.
70. "_Der Winter_" 304
Drawing by EDUARD VON STEINLE.
71. SKETCH IN OILS FOR "SOLITUDE" (_Colour_) 310
By kind permission of Mrs. STEWART HODGSON.
72. "SUMMER SLUMBER," 1894 (_Photogravure_) 316
By kind permission of Mr. PHILLIPSON.
73. SKETCH FOR "SUMMER SLUMBER" 316
Presented to the Leighton House Collection by
H.M. THE KING.
74. "THE FAIR PERSIAN," 1896 324
By kind permission of Sir ELLIOTT LEES.
75. "THE SPIRIT OF THE SUMMIT," 1894 334
76. STUDY FOR "LACHRYMAE," 1895 335
Leighton House Collection.
77. "CLYTIE," 1896 336
By kind permission of the FINE ART SOCIETY.
78. MEMORIAL MONUMENT IN ST. PAUL'S CATHEDRAL TO FREDERIC BARON
LEIGHTON OF STRETTON 340
79. VIEW OF HALL AND STAIRCASE OF LEIGHTON HOUSE, GIVEN BY LORD
LEIGHTON'S SISTERS TO THE PUBLIC AS A MEMORIAL TO THEIR
BROTHER 340
By kind permission of Mr. J. HARRIS STONE.
[Illustration: HEAD OF YOUNG GIRL
Wedding present from Lord Leighton to H.R.H. the Prince of
Wales, who has graciously allowed the painting to be reproduced
in this book]
THE LIFE OF LORD LEIGHTON
INTRODUCTION
SIR WILLIAM RICHMOND, R.A., and Mr. Walter Crane have kindly
contributed the following notes:--
It was in 1860 that I first knew Leighton. We met over affairs
connected with the Artist Rifle Corps at Burlington House, and
afterwards at the studios of various artists, where discussions
took place regarding the formation and means of conduct of the
Corps. On several occasions I walked home with Leighton to his
house in Orme Square.
I don't think I have ever known a man who grew more steadily
than Leighton did. The effort of his artistic life was to remove
the effects of a certain mannerism and over-education in his
early artistic life. His knowledge was wonderful, his powers of
design without immediate consultation with Nature were
phenomenal; he feared the facility in himself and went always to
Nature, that out of her manifold gifts he should be inspired
directly by them. And this constant study had its drawbacks as
well as its merits, because in one sense it stood in the way of
the development of an abstract power of invention. If ever an
artist made the most of his conscious abilities, Leighton did.
His character was so curiously simple on the one hand, and so
complicated on the other, that a balance between a very
emotional and extremely accurate temperament had to be found,
and it was found. How far a certain charm of spontaneity was
obscured a little, perhaps by erudition and a sort of
Aristotelian preciseness, it is not for me to say. There is in
all things a balance which, when once obtained, reduces the
weight in both scales. But we must take a life as it has been
made by circumstances, by early training and after influences;
and probably most men who are in earnest,--and Leighton was
pre-eminently in earnest,--find their proper issue finally. That
the best of Leighton's work will live, I am convinced; that it
will hold its own when a great deal of other work praised,
admired, even worshipped during the life of his contemporaries
shall be dead, I feel quite assured; and one may very justly be
asked--Why? The simple answer is that it was thorough, definite,
sincere, accomplished. Leighton never put out his hand towards
the limbo of vulgarity or fashion. Like Virgil, like
Mendelssohn, Leighton was a stylist, and his life's work showed
a perfection of attainment upon the lines which he drew out for
his progress almost to my thinking unrivalled in the work of any
of his contemporaries. Here and there he struck a deep note of
poetry, here and there he was like a Greek for his simplicity,
here and there his work shows the luxury of the Venetians, the
restraint of the Florentines, but never perhaps the majesty of
M. Angelo or the strong charm of Raphael. His art was eclectic;
still it was Leighton, and could have been done only as the
result of great natural gifts, assiduous study, force of
character, and, withal, independence of vision. His love of
beauty was his own personal love, not learnt, hardly perhaps
inherited, but spontaneous and lasting. This devotion to beauty
may have sometimes led his emotions away from character, which
sometimes is very nearly ugly as well as very nearly allied to
the highest beauty, which Bacon says has always something of
strangeness in it. The pursuit of beauty, _per se_, may be
purchased at the expense of character.
But Leighton was always pulling himself up; and when he found
himself too facile, too ornate, he resolutely set his mind to
correct any tendency in that direction by fidelity to Nature,
sometimes even to her ugly movements. Excess was not in his
nature, which was curiously logical; his mind was swift,
far-seeing; in debate he was admirable, always seeing the weak
point of an argument at once, and "partie pris" was his
abomination. A man so gifted in the essence and laws of form, so
learned in the construction of the human frame, so deeply
sensitive to line and movement as well as to structure, surely
would have given to the world great works of sculpture. Indeed
he did, but not enough! One regrets that--still one must accept
the fact that form is but little cared for in this country, and
Leighton sinned by reason of his love of form; by many he was
called not a painter because he did not smear, did not trust to
accidents, did not leave works half done--because he was sincere
to his conviction that a work of art must be, to last, complete
"ad unguem." The present craze for incompleteness, for sketches
instead of pictures, for unripe instead of ripe fruit, must die
as all false notions die; the best, the rightest will live; and
when the present ephemeral fashion has worked itself out, the
nobility of Leighton's works, his best, are certain to take
their place in the estimation of those that know as surely as
that they are good.
How many out of the multitude really, if we could test them,
care one jot for the Elgin Marbles, for the Demeter of Knidos,
for the vault of the Sistine Chapel?--very few. Really great
things never can be accepted by the commonplace. How should they
be? for to understand the highest in music, in architecture,
sculpture, or painting, the observer or listener must have a
spark in his constitution which is a portion of the flame that
burned white heat in the soul of the conceiver. How can such an
attitude of intimate sympathy belong to the many? It never has,
and probably never will. Great men are rare, and those who are
mentally or organically made to comprehend them are rare also.
The great can afford to wait because they are immortal. In all
one's dealings with Leighton what did one find? a noble nature,
restrained, charitable, in earnest; and if in many discussions
as to the desirability of certain events, certain compromises,
certain acts of conformity, one did not agree with Leighton, one
knew "au fond" that the attitude was quite logical, not hastily
arrived at, and the position taken up was to be strenuously
held: and it was that power of consistency which made Leighton
so trustworthy. He was fearless when his principles were
touched, he was loyal to his associates in the Academy even if
he did not see eye to eye with them, and he was loyal to his art
and to his friends. If Leighton had chosen politics for his
career he would probably have been Prime Minister, just as
Burne-Jones might have been Archbishop of Canterbury had he
continued his early and very remarkable theological studies. All
really great men have endless possibilities. It is more or less
chance which decides the direction of ability, which, once
discovered, forcibly, dominantly present, must find
opportunities for its highest development and achievement in the
tenure of the goal. It was ability and natural gifts that made
Leighton great, industry that nourished his greatness, and
stability to principle which made it lasting in his lifetime,
and must for all time stamp his work. The thing that really
engages one's interest about a great man is not so much his
"technique" as his general disposition and character, which
forms for itself a suitable "technique" by which his
achievements have been manifested. Should any one by-and-by
describe the "technique" of Joachim, the supreme violinist, he
would probably interest a few, but in reality he would say
nothing really valuable, excepting inasmuch as he touched upon
first principles. The "modus operandi" of an artist's life is
moulded by his personal aims, the means are those by which he
found his own way of stating them; and one doubts very much if,
after all, the points which differentiate one man's work from
another's are not those which have obliterated the conscious
efforts, preserving just the touches which genius gives beyond
and above all laws that may be learnt. Verse no doubt is much
dependent for its beauty on the system of the arrangement of
syllables, and the music they make when harmoniously handled
upon the final perfection which they reach, and so become
rule-making instead of being the result of rule-following. Hence
lies that unaccountable beauty which is the inexplicable result
of the ego--that taste, that selection, that special word which
creates an impression immediately, and which seems inimitable
even, and obviously the only one which could have been used;
that is style--the very essence of the ego which cannot be
copied, or indeed again brought into relation with the idea. And
isn't that the reason why the copy of a picture can never be
really like an original? even if the "technique" is identical,
it lacks that last touch, that last word which transcends
tradition, almost transcends thought, for it is just the thought
which has been summed up in a moment of inspiration,
uncalculated, spontaneous. Leighton was far too wise a man to
believe in the constant recurrence of inspirations: he knew that
the moment when the whole spirit is ready to act is involuntary;
he knew that to reach the supremacy of that moment, labour was
necessary; that in labour is the foundation of the building for
that moment of inspiration. One may question if the first vision
in Leighton was very strong--strong as Blake's, strong as many
artists whose powers of attainment were much less than
Leighton's, but whose vision was clearer at the outset. Rougher
minds than Leighton's have produced more epic effects, and a
ruder, less accomplished "technique" has borne with it more
original, more trenchant ideas. Leighton was not a mystic; he
dealt with thoughts which he embodied in forms that he saw, but
which he also made his own in their application; that was his
genius of originality. The rugged verse of AEschylus had no place
in his temperament, much as he admired it; the polished diction
of Virgil bore more similitude to Leighton's inspiration.
Sometimes one missed in his work just the touch of the rugged
which would have given more grace by comparison, by contrast.
His grace of diction, his oratory, his writing, was sometimes
over-refined, and missed its mark by over-elaboration. The very
speciality of Leighton was completeness. One has seen pictures
in his study only half finished, which had a charm of freshness
that vanished as each portion became worked into equal value.
But that fastidiousness was his characteristic, it was part of
him; and therefore we must not deplore it. His originality was
exemplified by his power of taking pains, his power of will to
do his very best according to his guiding spirit of
thoroughness. Temperaments are so different. Whistler could not
be Leighton. Because we admire the one, it is not necessary to
decry the other; that is weak criticism, or rather none at all.
The spirit which inspires the impressionist is not the spirit of
design, but a limited observation in a very restricted area. We
can have the Academic as well as the Impressionist: both are
useful as foils to each other, and it is just as narrow of the
Impressionists to want all men to see nature and art as they see
them, as it has been for the Academics to see "nothing" in the
newer if more limited system. I believe that Leighton's real
love was early Italian art; all that came to him after was the
result of growth. His enthusiasm for Mino da Fiesole, for the
earlier Raphaels, for Duccio of Siena, for Lorenzetti, was
evident and absorbing; other enthusiasms were more branches from
the stem than its roots. He loved line; he found it there: he
loved restraint of action, pure sensuous beauty; he found it in
early Italian Art. The reserve of emotions touched him in Greek
Art--its suavity, its almost geometrical precision, the
tunefulness and melody of its rhythmical concords. His love of
music was on the same lines: Wagner never appealed to him as
Mozart did; it was too strenuous, too busy in changes of key,
too incomplete in the finish and development of phrases. It was
not that he liked dulness--not a bit; he was emotional, often
gay, often depressed--excitable even; but to him Art was an
intellectual more than a purely emotional system, and he liked
it to be finished, consistent, perfect--and those qualities he
strove for, without a doubt he obtained in a high measure. It
will be long before we see again the like of Frederic Leighton,
a man complete in himself.
W.B. RICHMOND.
_June 1906._
* * * * *
I first met Leighton about 1869 or '70, I think. I went to one
of his receptions at the Studio in Holland Park Road, at the
time he was showing his pictures for the Academy. I think his
principal work of that year was "Alcestis," or "Heracles
Wrestling with Death." About the same time Browning's poem of
"Balaustion's Adventure" appeared, in which he alludes to
Leighton and this very picture in the lines beginning:
"I know a great Kaunian painter"
(if I remember rightly).
I availed myself of a friend's introduction, and presented
myself. One recalls the courteous and princely way in which he
received his guests on these occasions, and the crushes he had
at his studio--Holland Park Road blocked with carriages, and all
the great ones of the London world flocking to see the artist's
work.
About this time, or shortly before, he had done me the honour to
purchase two landscape studies I had made in Wales from among a
number in a book, which was shown him by my early friend George
Howard (now Earl of Carlisle), and I remember his kind words in
sending me what he deemed "the very modest price" I had asked
for them.
His kindness to students and young artists was well known. He
would take trouble to go and see their work, and he was always
an admirable and helpful critic.
I remember, on my first visit to Rome in the autumn of 1871 (on
our marriage tour), going into Piali's Library one evening to
look at the English papers. No one was there, but presently
Leighton came in. He did not remember me at first, but I
recalled myself to him. He was very kind, in his princely way,
and gave me introductions to W.W. Storey, the sculptor, and his
great friend, Giov. Costa, and he called at our rooms to see my
work, in which he showed much interest. In a letter I had, dated
March 1st, 1872, written from the Athenaeum Club, he speaks of
some drawings I had sent to the Dudley Gallery, one he had seen
on my easel in Rome, and he says: "I have seen your drawings,
all three--one was an old friend; of the other two, the 'Grotto
of Egeria,' with its 'sacrum numes,' most attracted me through
its refined and sober harmony. _The quality of your light_ is
always particularly agreeable to me, and not less than usual in
these drawings"; he goes on to say he is glad to hear I have
"made friends with my excellent Costa, who as an artist is one
in hundreds, and as a man one in thousands"; he adds, "Have you
sketched in the 'Valley of Poussin'? It strikes me that old
castle would take you by storm."
I saw Leighton again in Rome in 1873, meeting him on the
Palatine, among the ruins of the Palace of the Caesars. He was
with a lady who, I believe, was the author of the story
published in _The Cornhill_, "A Week in a French Country House,"
for which Leighton made an illustration. (His black and white
work was always very fine, and I recall seeing some of his
drawings on the wood for Dalziel's Bible and "Romola.")
Later, he came to see us when we settled in London, in Wood
Lane.
I had further relations with him about the time he was building
the Arab Hall, when (through George Aitcheson, his architect) I
designed the mosaic frieze. On some sketches I made for this he
writes: "Cleave to the Sphinx and Eagle, they are
_delightful_--I don't like the duck-women." With regard to these
Arab Hall mosaics, he said that he hoped to have more, and
eventually "to let us loose (Burne-Jones and myself) on the
dome."
After this, I saw something of Leighton on the committee of the
South London Fine Art Gallery, Peckham, in its earlier days,
when he was chairman, and helped to pilot the institution from
the somewhat exacting proprietorship of its founder towards its
ultimate position as a public institution.
From the aristocratic point of view, he certainly had a keen
sense of public duty, and probably laid the motto "Noblesse
oblige" to heart.
I met him again at the Art Conference at Liverpool, when a
trainful of artists of all ranks went down together, and some
notable attacks were made on the Royal Academy. Leighton was
tremendously loyal to that institution, which I notice is always
stoutly defended by its members, whatever opinions they may have
expressed while outsiders.
I suppose we differed profoundly on most questions, but he was
always most courteous, and, whatever our public opinions, we
always maintained friendly personal relations; and I may say I
always entertained the highest admiration for Leighton's
qualities, both as an artist and as a man.
At the time when the election for the presidency of the Academy
was in view (after the death of Sir Francis Grant), it was said
that Leighton was the _only_ man, and that if they did not elect
him the institution would go to pieces; but probably as
president he had less power of initiative than before.
I remember, after one of our committees at his studio, he drove
me home to Holland Street in his victoria; and as he set me down
at my door, he pointed to a little copper lantern I had put up
over the steps, and said, "Is that Arts and Crafts?"
His fondness for Italy was well known, and I think he went every
autumn. I recall meeting him at Florence in 1890, while staying
at the delightful villa of Mrs. Ross (Poggio Gherardo), when he
came to luncheon.
In death he was as princely as in life; and on the day of his
burial at St. Paul's I was moved to write the following as a
tribute to his memory, which will always be vivid in the hearts
of those who had the privilege of his friendship:--
Beneath great London's dome to his last rest
The princely painter have ye borne away,
Who still in death upholds his sumptuous sway;
Who strove in life with learned skill to wrest
Art's priceless secret hid in Beauty's breast
With alchemy of colour and of clay,
To recreate a fairer human day,
Touched by no shadow of our time distrest.
What rank or privilege needs art supreme--
Immortal child of buried states and powers--
Who can for us the golden age renew?
Let worth and work bear witness when life's hours
Are numbered: honour due, when, as we deem,
To his ideal was the artist true.
WALTER CRANE.
[Illustration: "EUCHARIS." 1863
By permission of Mrs. Stephenson Clarke]
* * * * *
Having settled in England in 1860, Leighton found that there, contrary
to his expectations, his sense of colour became developed; and with
this his individuality as a _painter_ asserted itself. Between the
years 1863 and 1866 he painted pictures which proved that, as a
distinct artificer in painting, he had found himself, and was no
longer under the controlling influences of German or Italian Art,
though, unfortunately, hints of German methods in the actual
manipulation of his brush clung more or less to his painting to the
end. From boyhood Leighton's power of designing, his sense of beauty
in line and form and of dramatic feeling, his extraordinary facility
in drawing with the point, proved his genius as an artist; but it was
not till the early sixties that his pictures proved him to be
possessed of individual distinction as a painter, probably because the
method of handling the brush associated with the teaching which, in
other respects, commanded his reverence and admiration, were alien to
his finest artistic sense. No later works are to be found more notable
in luminous quality of painting than "Eucharis," 1863, and "Golden
Hours," 1864; none in strength and solidity of texture, or in beauty
of distinguished handling, than "A Noble Lady of Venice," about 1865;
none in richness of arrangement combined with the fair aerial
atmosphere appropriate to a Grecian scene, for which Leighton had so
native a sympathy, than "A Syracusan Bride Leading Wild Beasts in
Procession to the Altar of Diana," 1866.[1] Later works may claim a
greater public prominence among his achievements, but for actual
individuality and feeling for the beauty which appealed most strongly
to Leighton in colour as in form, none he painted after evinced any
fresh departure.
[Illustration: "A NOBLE LADY OF VENICE." 1866
By permission of Lord Armstrong]
As early as 1852, at the age of twenty-one, Leighton wrote to Steinle
from Venice: "I must candidly confess that great as my admiration for
Titian (& Co.) was, yet the well-known art treasures here have seized
me and entranced me anew. You, dear master, are so familiar with all
these things that there is nothing I can write you about them; but on
one point I am fairly clear, namely, that the admirers and imitators
of Titian (particularly the latest) seek his charms quite in the wrong
place, and I am convinced that the impressiveness of his painting lies
far less in the ardour of his colouring than in the stupendous
accuracy and execution of the modelling." In another letter to Steinle
he refers to the necessity of mastering the capacities of the brush in
order to render form in a complete manner independently of the
function of the brush to render colour.
"Those who place the brush behind the pencil, under the pretence
that _form_ is before all things, make a very great mistake.
Form _is certainly all important_; one cannot study it enough;
_but_ the greater part of _form_ falls within the province of
the tabooed _brush_. The everlasting hobby of _contour_ (which
belongs to the drawing material) is first the _place_ where the
_form_ comes in; what, however, reveals true knowledge of form,
is a powerful, organic, refined finish of modelling, full of
feeling and knowledge--and that is the affair of the brush
(_Pinsel_)."
In January 1860 Leighton wrote to Steinle: "You will perhaps be
surprised, but, in spite of my fanatic preference for colour I
promised myself to be a draughtsman before I became a colourist," and
in fact Leighton was fighting, throughout his whole career, against
allowing the sensuous qualities in his art to override those which the
teaching of Steinle had proved to his nature to be the most truly
elevating and ennobling. Up to the age of thirty he had been
overshadowed by the influence of others in the matter of actual
technique in painting. From the time he settled in London he freed
himself from the tutelage of all masters. As we have read in his
letters, his intention was to do so in 1856 when he painted "The
Triumph of Music;" but at that time he failed in finding his real self
in his painting of that picture, and fully realised that he must
_reculer pour mieux sauter_, returning in the autumn of that year to
Rome to be fed by the greatest art of the past, and to study again,
"face to face with Nature--to follow it, to watch it, and to copy,
closely, faithfully, ingenuously--as Ruskin suggests, choosing nothing
and rejecting nothing." The studies of a Pumpkin Flower (Meran),
Branch of Vine (Bellosquardo), Cyclamen (Tivoli), reproduced in
Chapter III., and others, were made during this autumn of 1856.
In a letter written to Mr. M. Spielmann, a few years before his death,
Leighton describes the procedure he pursued in accomplishing a serious
work.
"In my pictures,--which are above all decorations in the real
sense of the word,--the design is a pattern in which every line
has its place and its proper relation to other lines, so that
the disturbing of one of them, outside certain limits, would
throw the whole out of gear. Having thus determined my picture
in my mind's eye, in the majority of cases I make a sketch in
black and white chalk upon brown paper to fix it. In the first
sketch the care with which the folds have been broadly arranged
will be evident, and if it be compared with the finished
picture, the very slight degree in which the general scheme has
been departed from will convince the spectator of the almost
scientific precision of my line of action. But there is a good
reason for this determining of the draperies before the model is
called in; and it is this. The nude model, no matter how
practised he or she may be never moves or stands or sits, in
these degenerate days, with exactly the same freedom as when
draped; action or pose is always different--not so much from a
sense of mental constraint as from the unusual liberty
experienced by the limbs to which the muscular action invariably
responds when the body is released from the discipline and
confinement of clothing.
"The picture having been thus determined, the model is called
in, and is posed as nearly as possible in the attitude desired.
As nearly as possible, I say; for, as no two faces are exactly
alike, so no two models ever entirely resemble one another in
body or muscular action, and cannot, therefore, pose in such a
manner as exactly to correspond with either another model or
another figure--no matter how correctly the latter may be drawn.
From the model make the careful outline on brown paper, a true
transcript from life, which may entail some slight corrections
of the original design in the direction of modifying the
attitude and general appearance of the figure. This would be
rendered necessary probably by the bulk and material of the
drapery. So far, of course, my attention is engaged exclusively
by 'form,' colour being always treated more or less ideally. The
figure is now placed in its surroundings, and established in
exact relation to the canvas. The result is the first true
sketch of the entire design, figure, and background, and is
built up of the two previous ones. It must be absolutely
accurate in the distribution of spaces, for it has subsequently
to be 'squared off' on to the canvas, which is ordered to the
exact scale of the sketch. At this moment, the design being
finally determined, the sketch in oil colours is made. It has
been deferred till now, because the placing of the colours is,
of course, of as much importance as the harmony. This done, the
canvas is for the first time produced, and thereon I enlarge the
design, re-draw the outline--and never departing a
hair's-breadth from the outlines and forms already obtained--and
then highly finishing the whole figure in warm monochrome from
the life. Every muscle, every joint, every crease is there,
although all this careful painting is shortly to be hidden with
the draperies; such, however, is the only method of insuring
absolute correctness of drawing. The fourth stage completed, I
return once more to my brown paper, re-copy the outline
accurately from the picture, on a larger scale than before, and
resume my studies of draperies in greater detail and with still
greater precision, dealing with them in sections, as parts of a
homogeneous whole. The draperies are now laid with infinite care
on to the living model, and are made to approximate as closely
as possible to the arrangement given in the first sketch, which,
as it was not haphazard, but most carefully worked out, must of
necessity be adhered to. They have often to be drawn piecemeal,
as a model cannot by any means always retain the attitude
sufficiently long for the design to be wholly carried out at one
cast.[2] This arrangement, is effected with special reference to
painting--that is to say, giving not only form and light and
shade, but also the relation and 'values' of tones. The
draperies are drawn over, and made to conform exactly to the
forms copied from the nudes of the underpainted picture. This is
a cardinal point, because in carrying out the picture the folds
are found fitting mathematically on to the nude, or nudes, first
established on the canvas. The next step then is to transfer the
draperies to the canvas on which the design has been squared
off, and this is done with flowing colour in the same monochrome
as before over the nudes, to which they are intelligently
applied, and which nudes must never--mentally at least--be lost
sight of. The canvas has been prepared with a grey tone, lighter
or darker, according to the subject in hand, and the effect to
be produced. The background and accessories being now added, the
whole picture presents a more or less completed
aspect--resembling that, say, of a print of any warm tone. In
the case of draperies of very vigorous tone, a rich flat local
colour is probably rubbed over them, the modelling underneath
being, though thin, so sharp and definite as to assert itself
through this wash. Certain portions of the picture might
probably be prepared with a wash of flat tinting of a colour
the opposite of that which it is eventually to receive. A blue
sky, for instance, would possibly have a soft, ruddy tone spread
over the canvas--the sky, which is a very definite and important
part of my compositions, being as completely drawn in monochrome
as any other of the design; or, for rich blue mountains a strong
orange wash or tint might be used as a bed. The structure of the
picture being thus absolutely complete, and the effect
distinctly determined by a sketch which it is my aim to equal in
the big work, I have nothing to think of but colour, and with
that I now proceed deliberately, but rapidly."
So far Leighton explained the conscious processes he went through in
creating his pictures; but does this explanation record truly the real
agencies which brought about the result we see in his finest
achievements? I should say no,--most emphatically no. Where we can
trace the sign of these processes, there the picture fails in the
power of convincing. No such process produced "Eucharis" nor the
"Syracusan Bride." The process may have been gone through in painting
the procession, but it is obliterated by touches instinct with a true
painter's inspiration. All _teachable_ qualities Leighton could
_teach_ on the lines of soundest principles. His extreme modesty left
others to find out that where his preaching left off the real work
began in his own pictures. No one knew better than Leighton that no
theoretic knowledge ever made an artist; no teachable processes ever
made a beautiful picture; no one knew better that head without heart
never produced any work that was truly cared for.
"God forgive me if I am intolerant," he wrote to Steinle, "but
according to my view an artist must produce his art out of his own
heart; or he is none."
"The chord that wakes in kindred hearts a tone,
Must first be tuned and vibrate in your own"
were the words with which he ended his first address to the students
of the Royal Academy.
In the world's estimate of things and people, classification plays at
times a pernicious part. Classification in art matters may be tolerated
as useful only in the education of the non-artistic. Invariably the
most convincing touches escape the possibility of being reduced to so
dull a process of reckoning. Art marked by individual spontaneity,
emanating from the ego of the artificer, refuses to be levelled down
into a class. Critics seem at times to be strongly tempted to fit an
artist's achievements into certain classes, because they have
previously made up their minds as to the class the work belongs to.
Hence the perversion often of even an intelligent critic's estimate:
certain squarenesses exist which will not fit into round holes, so, for
the sake of classification, the corners must be shaved off. Surely no
artist ever existed who evaded being comfortably fitted into either a
square or a round hole more completely than did Leighton. Every serious
work he undertook was an entirely separate performance from any
previous invention--a new venture throughout--and, once decided on,
carried through with absolute conformity to the original conception.
Therefore any classification, beyond his mere method of working, is
more sterile in producing a just estimate of Leighton's art than of
those workers who are in the habit of painting pictures in which the
same motive recurs. Essentially original in his conceptions as in his
aims, and vibrating with receptiveness, he sounded nevertheless every
impression he received by unchanging principles adhered to as implicit
guides. He had within him at once the steadiest rock as a foundation,
and the most fertile of serial growths on the surface. Abiding rock and
surface flora alike had had their earliest nurture, it must be
remembered, in foreign parts, under other skies than that of our veiled
English light--under other influences of nature and of art than that of
our English climate and schooling--and it is partly owing to this fact
that it is not realised by those who have never seen nature under the
aspects which most delighted him, that Leighton's conceptions were
directly and invariably inspired by nature. Those who are conversant
with Italy and other Southern countries will possess the key to much
that is misjudged by others in Leighton's work. Scenes which entranced
his sensibilities as a boy, and, lingering ever in his fancy, gave
subjects for his paintings when his art was mature, may appear to one
without special knowledge of the South as mere echoes of classic art.
When he was thirty-one Leighton exhibited the picture "Lieder ohne
Worte."[3] It is no record, probably, of any particular place, nor of
any particular fountain; but when strolling on a road in or near a
southern town or village in Italy, a view which might originally have
inspired the motive may be seen at any moment. Encased in a wall near
Albano is a fountain which certainly recalled to me the picture as, in
the bright light of a May morning, the song of nightingales in the
grand foliage of overhanging magnolia trees echoed the sound of the
water springing from the glistening lip, and flowing over the clean
curve of the marble basin into the trough below. There was the same
lion's head which served as spout, the same arrangement of ornament
encircling it; also a finely shaped pitcher placed below to catch the
water, and--more recalling than any detail--was the echo of the real
motive of the picture--the dream-like poetry of the sunlit scene, with
the musical accompaniment of trickling water. Had Leighton painted a
Discobolus, it would probably never have occurred to most English
critics that nature and living action had inspired the work. Above the
lake of Albano is a road--"the Upper Gallery"--where every day are to
be met men playing the game. Any one watching it may see repeated over
and over again the action in the well-known statue. Nature inspired the
creations of the great ancients, and it was also invariably first-hand
impressions from nature that inspired Leighton's creations, whatever
superstructure of learning he added in the course of their development.
Living in Italy when his feelings were most sensitive to impressions,
the origin of the suggestions he imbibed is to be found in her
atmosphere, colouring, and the scenes which surrounded him when his
imagination was most free and fertile. Later, when he lived in England,
his travels in Italy and Greece supplied him with the subjects for the
most beautiful sketches he made direct from nature. No one, I believe,
has ever painted the luminous quality of white, as it is seen under
heated sunlight in the South, with the same charm as Leighton. The
sketches he made of buildings in Capri[4] are quite marvellously true
in their rendering of such effects. He made equally beautiful studies
of mountains and sea, under the rarefied atmosphere of Greece. He
seemed always happiest, I think, when the key of his pictures and
sketches was light and sunlit; in such pictures, for instance, as
"Winding the Skein," "Greek Girls Picking up Shells by the Seashore,"
"Bath of Psyche," "Invocation," and others remarkable for their
fairness and their light, pure tone.
Leighton's sympathies were adverse to the more sensuous qualities in
painting. Often, in discussing the works by Watts, he would strongly
discourage those who were, he considered, unduly influenced by the
charm of the great painter's quality and texture, from endeavouring to
aim at it in their own work. Such a treatment, Leighton maintained,
might be legitimate as the natural expression of the intuitive genius
of one gifted individual, but was not the treatment to copy by the
student on account of any intrinsic merit. He had almost an aversion
to any process which obtained effects through roughness and inequality
of surface. His genuine youthful predilection, which he retained
consistently throughout his life, was for the early Italian art and
Italian method of painting _al fresco_. "To see the old Florentine
school again is a thing which always enchants me anew, for one can
never be sated with seeing the noble sweetness, the child-like
simplicity, allied with high manly feeling, which breathes in it. But
I speak to you of plain things which you know far better than
I."--(Letter to Steinle from Florence, 1857.)
[Illustration: GREEK GIRLS PICKING UP SHELLS BY THE SEASHORE. 1871
By permission of The Right Hon. Joseph Chamberlain]
After Leighton became President of the Royal Academy he made Perugia
his halting-place for some weeks during his autumn travels, while he
wrote his biennial discourses for the students. He invariably stayed
at the well-known Brufani Hotel,--Mrs. Brufani, with whom he made
great friends, always reserving the same two rooms for him, from the
windows of which he could watch the sun set behind the glorious piles
of Umbrian mountains to the west of Perugia. From these windows he
also made sketches in silver point of the distant ranges, each form
modelled with exquisite delicacy and perfection, though in faintest
tones. Other inmates of the Brufani supposed he lived in his two
rooms, as he was seldom seen elsewhere in the hotel; but Leighton had
found a restaurant which, like his old quarters in Rome--the _Cafe
Greco_--was the resort of the artists living in Perugia. There he
would lunch, and then repair to the Sala del Cambio. Sitting on the
raised seat near the window, he would, day after day, spend an hour or
more revelling in the beauty of the frescoes by Perugino. Then he
would mount to the Pinacoteca and take a deep draught of enjoyment
from the tempera paintings of Perugino's master, Benedetto Bonfiglio,
Leighton's favourite of favourites ("They are all my _Bonfigli_!" he
would exclaim), whose angels' aureoles rest on wreaths of roses, and
whose lovely work Perugia seems to have monopolised. The old paintings
of Martino, Gentile da Fabiano, Pietro da Foligno, and their
followers Leighton also loved, likewise the later work of Bernardino
Pinturicchio and Lo Spagna, pupils with Raphael of Perugino. Among his
greatest favourites were the painted banners--the _Gonfalone_--which
are peculiar to the Umbrian cities. He loved the freshness of their
quality--the result of a first painting never retouched--the masterly
ease of the workmanship, full of tender, gracious beauty. These days
were Leighton's real holidays, where, in rapturous admiration of the
art he loved so profoundly, he put behind him for the time the weight
of official responsibility, and the no less exhausting social duties
of his life.
Had Leighton been able to devote himself to the method of painting in
fresco, and to work in a warm, dry climate, which admits of painting
into the wet surface of plaster without danger of the wall retaining
the moisture, he would, undoubtedly, have felt a freer impulse to work
rapidly and more spontaneously than when his touch was controlled by
the complicated procedures in oil painting. In the process of painting
_al fresco_, colour, in a sense, models itself--its absorption into the
wet plaster softening the edges of one touch into another; hence, over
a first painting no half obliteration is necessary, and any elaborate
finish is avoided. Being obliged to complete before the plaster was
dry, Leighton could not have yielded to the temptation to over-refine
his surface; and his splendid power as a draughtsman, allied to his
sense of beauty, would have found a perfectly spontaneous, happy
utterance. As a boy he had imbibed one great principle, and from this
principle he never deviated. He wrote, "The thoroughness of all the
great masters is so pervading a quality that I look upon them all as
forming one aristocracy." In his sketches alone did Leighton relax from
the strain which absolute thoroughness involves; and then, in all the
fervour of aesthetic inspiration, colour would fly on canvas, chalk or
paper, with a charm of quality and exquisite grace of line and form
which, as Mr. Briton Riviere remarks, is the very best that can be
obtained from a great artist thoroughly trained, but which condition
Leighton would never admit into what he considered his serious work. He
writes to his father from Rome, January 1853: "I was deeply impressed
with the glorious works of art I saw in Venice and Florence, and was
particularly struck with the exquisitely _elaborate_ finish of most of
the leading works by _whatever_ master; the highest possible finish
combined with the greatest possible breadth and grandeur of disposition
in the principal masses. Art with the old masters was full of love,
refined,--sterling." Leighton formed his standard from these old
masters, and never for a moment allowed his standard to be replaced by
another. In certain types of Englishmen chivalric loyalty develops at
times into obstinacy. Leighton, with all his passion for Italy, his
artistic sensitiveness, his excitability, his finely wrought nervous
temperament, and his intense power of sympathy, had also in his blood
something of the old English Tory, which made him adhere and remain
loyal to the strongest impressions of his youth. Catholic and generous
as he always proved himself to be when it was a question of considering
the work of others, when he was considering his own he ever maintained
absolute consistency with the tenets of his early illuminations.
Speaking of his extraordinary sense of duty and the consequent tension
involved, Mr. Briton Riviere writes:--
"No doubt the constant wear and tear occasioned by the perpetual
strain of mental and physical watchfulness did much to shorten
his life; I think it sometimes injured his own work as an
artist, because, though a great artist can never be evolved
except by years of patient work and strenuous effort to do his
very best always, yet, on the other hand, it is often the happy,
easy work and absolutely spontaneous effort of the moment by
such a hand which is his very best. Such happy, easy work
probably Leighton would seldom allow himself to do, and never
would leave at the right moment, but would still strive to make
better and more complete. He must still elaborate it and try to
make it more perfect; and this it was that made his enthusiastic
admirer Watts sometimes say, 'How much finer Leighton's work
would be if he would admit the accidental into it.'"
A fact, little suspected by the public, certainly affected the element
of strength in some of Leighton's works. Besides often suffering from
a positive want of health, his normal physical condition was far from
robust; and, as appears in his letters, he suffered much through
weakness and irritation in the eyes from the time he was a boy. He did
not wear his physical (or any other) distress on his sleeve, and
experienced many hindrances in his work never dreamt of, even by his
intimate acquaintances. These might not have been so serious had he
been willing to sacrifice all other duties in life to his own special
vocation; but though he realised that Art, the language of beauty, was
his main passion, his conscience would not allow him to make this
passion an excuse for avoiding help to his generation on other lines,
if he distinctly felt he could do so. In the happiest of surroundings,
with his life unburdened by public responsibilities, he painted
"Cimabue's Madonna"; and, for pure vigour in the manipulation, this
painting has a robust quality which is scarcely to be found in any
other of the larger works which followed, though these may possess
many other virtues, and evince a more definite individuality, than
does the early work.
Leighton's art appeals to the artists (comparatively few in England)
possessed of cosmopolitan culture--also to many who love beauty, a
sense of refined distinction in feeling and in form and in the
arrangement of line. Beyond these it appeals also to the great public
outside the radius of specialists, a public which is impressed by a
sense of beauty and achievement without possessing the knowledge of
experts. It is not much cared for by the disciples of either of the
latest schools in England, and in France, which have governed fashion
in the matter of taste for the last twenty years. In the first place,
it appeals but little to those to whom the highest province of art
appears to consist in conveying didactic sentiments and poetic ideas
through a language of form and colour--to suggest thought to the brain
rather than beauty to the eye. Respecting this theory of the province
of art, Leighton expresses himself clearly in his second address to
the Royal Academy students in December 1881:--
"Now the language of Art is not the appointed vehicle of ethic
truths; of these, as of all knowledge as distinct from emotion,
though not necessarily separated from it, the obvious and only
fitted vehicle is speech, written or spoken--words, the symbols
of ideas. The simplest spoken homily, if sincere in spirit and
lofty in tone, will have more direct didactic efficacy than all
the works of all the most pious painters and sculptors from
Giotto to Michael Angelo; more than the Passion music of Bach,
more than a Requiem by Cherubini, more than an Oratorio of
Handel.
"It is not, then, it cannot be the foremost duty of Art to seek
to embody that which it cannot adequately present, and to enter
into a competition in which it is doomed to inevitable defeat."
That so great a painter as Watts should have taken a contrary view,
and preached this contrary view as that which inspired his own
_conscious_ aims, was quite sufficient to secure to it many adherents.
He preached his doctrine, moreover, with a most convincing argument,
but one which cannot logically be used in favour of it, namely, his
own great genius as a _painter_. Watts was essentially a
_painter_--one who at his best ranks with the best painters of all
times.
Mr. Arthur Symons, writing on "The Psychology of Watts,"[5] quotes a
popular preacher who affirmed that "Critics who approach his (Watts')
work from the side of technical excellence do not interest him at all.
His endeavour has been to make his pictures as good as works of art as
was possible to him, for fear that they should fail altogether in
their appeal; but, beyond that, their excellence as mere pictures is
nothing to him." "Now," writes Mr. Symons, "it is quite possible that
Watts may have really said or written something of the kind; he may
even, when he set himself down to think, have thought it. The
conscious mental processes of an artist have often little enough
relation with his work as art; by no means is every artist a critic as
well as an artist. But to take a great painter at his word, if he
assures you that the excellence of his pictures 'as mere pictures' is
nothing to him; to suppose seriously that at the root of his painting
was not the desire to paint; to believe for a moment that great
pictorial work has ever been done except by those who were painters
first, and everything else afterwards, is to confuse the elementary
notions of things, hopelessly and finally. And so, when we are told
that the technical excellence of Watts' pictures is of little
consequence, we can but answer that to the 'painter of earnest
truths,' as to all painters, nothing can be of more consequence; for
it is only through this technical excellence that 'Hope,' or 'The
Happy Warrior,' or 'Love and Life,' is to be preferred to the picture
leaflet which the district missionary distributes on his way through
the streets."
All who knew Watts intimately and watched him working day by day can
testify that he spared no labour, time, or patience, in working over
and over on a picture in order to attain the finest quality in the
actual surface which his material--paint--could possibly produce.
Neither the disciples of the original brotherhood of the
pre-Raphaelites nor those of Burne-Jones care, as a rule, for
Leighton's art. Though starting as one with the pre-Raphaelites,
Burne-Jones, possessing a remarkably fine intellect, a subtle fancy, a
rich inventiveness in the detail of design, an exquisite sense of
grace, and great genius as a colourist, developed so distinct an
individuality that his followers cannot be precisely identified with
those of the pre-Raphaelites. Leighton fully appreciated the genius of
Burne-Jones, and did all in his power to secure his adherence to the
Academy; but he had no sympathy for that feeling in art evinced by
Burne-Jones' followers, which is so essentially rooted in purely
personal moods that even distortion of the human frame is condoned, so
long as prominence is given to the suggestion of such moods.
Imbued with a rare, peculiar refinement all its own, a kind of
aesthetic creed sprang up in the later days of the nineteenth century
apart from the arid soil of commonplace respectability and tasteless
materialism. Burne-Jones painted it, Kate Vaughan danced it,
Maeterlinck wrote it, the "Souls" (rather unsuccessfully) attempted to
live it, the humourists caricatured it, the Philistines denounced it
as morbid and unwholesome. Leighton was tolerant and amused, but could
not be very solemn over it. And, assuredly, already this creed has
been whisked away into the past by fashions diametrically opposed to
it in character. Its text may be found in Melisande's reiterated
refrain, "I am not happy"--though the unhappiness does not seem ever
to have been of the nature of the iron which entered into the soul,
but rather the shadow of sadness, adopted with the idea that such a
condition betokens a more rare and tender grace than the radiance of
joy can give. Every mood of the subjective has been lately in fashion
in aesthetic circles, and is still rampant in much of the up-to-date
(or down-to-date, as it may be) conditions of the present taste. This
is probably consequent on the leadership of those artists who
possessed not only genius and sense of beauty, but a peculiar charm of
texture in their work which seems a native adjunct to certain
temperaments. It is a purely personal manner, and crops up without
reference apparently to any special school of art. In Sodoma we find
it allied to a development of the splendid completeness of Italian
Art; again in the Celt, Watts, to a lofty imagination and to a
Pheidian sensibility for noble form; it appears in the work of the
Jew, Simeon Solomon; and is an element in Burne-Jones' lovely quality
of painting especially noticeable in his water-colour drawings--and,
on a smaller scale of workmanship, in the pictures by Pinwell. It is
more a matter of quality than of colour, and yet it is only colourists
who have possessed it--most obviously, however, where the key of
colour is restrained almost to monochrome. A hint of it can be found
in Tintoretto's paintings, where few positive tints are prominent, as
in some of the ceiling paintings in the Ducal Palace at Venice. There
is a something which this special handling suggests which possesses a
very subtle charm, the charm of dreamland,--less tangible, less real
than direct appeals from nature. A slight mystery seems to veil the
vision like a reflection swayed by the surface of the water. It is
less explicit than any real object, and only suggests completion
without quite achieving it; there is something left out from the
aspect of nature, something added from the ego of the artist. There
are those to whom such a treatment suggests a deeper truth than can
any wholly explicit expression, because they feel forcibly that
mystery is the soul of all earthly conditions--"we see through a glass
darkly." There are others--and Leighton was among these--who are so
strongly imbued with a sense of the wonderful and marvellous in actual
creation that they need no art, no veiled suggestion of the hidden,
in order to realise that our lives are wrapped in mystery from the
cradle to the grave. This quality in painting alluded to, fits in with
that taste in literature which prefers hints to assertions--that
insistency on the value of what is, after all, but a _fugitive_ phase
in special temperaments--that setting most value on the principle of
suggestion rather than of definition, of which we hear so much. The
devotees of Maeterlinck delight in the shadow of a thought rather than
the thought _arrete_; they feel that a further stage of refined
culture is reached in worshipping a style you have to get somehow
behind, rather than one in which thoughts are fully and frankly
expressed. Doubtless it requires a more subtile weapon to catch the
fleeting aroma, the hint of a thought trembling in the brain and
giving it permanent existence in Art, than to carve the expression of
a complete idea explicitly with cameo-like precision, be it in the
form of words or a visual impression--the wise sayings of a Solomon or
a Bacon, the sculpture of a Pheidias or the painting of a Leonardo da
Vinci. The actual visible facts in the aspects of nature, which were
of such entrancing interest to Leighton, become of less and less
interest to the wide public as the human intelligence is trained more
and more through books, less and less through the eye; our modern
conditions making the world we live in, more and more ugly and
uninspiring to the echoing tune of nature within us. Even if we recede
into the depths of the country, we find the signs all round us of the
sense of beauty being deadened, the revulsion against ugliness having
ceased--corrugated iron supplanting thatched roofing, and the
loveliest, most rural spots in England year after year newly deprived
of some special charm they have possessed for centuries. Those who
seek for beauty have been led to find it in the unreal--the things
which might be, but are not. We cannot help it, but we certainly
become more artificial as our civilisation becomes more complicated,
and everything we see around us grows uglier. It is because the
general public has so little genuine interest in Art or love of
beauty, however great may be its professions, that the tendency has
developed to care for the art which appeals rather to the mind and the
aesthetic sensibilities generally, than to the actual vision.
This reign of the subjective has brought in its train the undue
monopolising of the world's most ardent interest in one passion.
French novels of great literary power secured to it the monopoly in
France, and magnates in aesthetic culture have grafted it on to our
English taste. This strongest and most beautiful feeling in human
nature has been so monotonously forced upon us in literature _a tort
et a travers_--the assumption that this is the only feeling worth
serious consideration has been dwelt on with such a tiresome
pertinacity--it has been so often caricatured, so often debased in
books and pictures, that even the real thing itself runs a danger of
palling. This human passion may be the greatest, but it is not the
only great feeling with which the lives of men and women are enriched;
and surely the absorbing prominence which has been given to it
latterly in literature is out of proportion with its real position in
healthy lives. Little sympathy seems left for other deep and stirring
emotions. In Leighton's art we find no monopoly of this kind either
recorded or suggested. He painted the passion of lovers in the "Paolo
and Francesca," but with no more sincere interest than he did other
feelings; than, for instance, his fervent and reverent worship of art
in "Cimabue's Madonna," or in the ecstasy of joy in the child flying
into the embrace of her mother in "The Return of Persephone," or in
the exquisite tender feeling of Elisha breathing renewed life into the
Shunammite's son, or in that sense of rest and peace after struggle in
the lovely figure of "Ariadne" when Death releases her from her pain;
or in the yearning for that peace in the "King David": "Oh that I had
wings like a dove! for then would I fly away and be at rest."
As the climax of nature's loveliest creations Leighton treated the
human form with a courageous purity. In his undraped figures there is
the same total absence of the mark of the degenerate as there is in
everything he did and was; no remote hint of any _double-entendre_
veiled by aesthetic refinement, any more than there is in the Bible,
the _Iliad_, or in the sculpture of Pheidias.
To quote lines that were written about Leighton very shortly before
his death:--
"There is truly to be traced in the feeling of his art that
'seal on a man's work of what is most inward and peculiar in his
moods'; the sign of individual intimate preferences and of the
moving power which certain aspects of beauty have had upon the
artist's innermost susceptibilities, though these may be
somewhat veiled and distanced by being translated through the
reserved form of a classic garb. Perhaps it is this reserve
which invests Sir Frederic Leighton's art with the special aroma
of poetry which Robert Browning found in it to a greater extent
than in any other work of his time.[6] Whether in his larger
compositions, in the complicated grouping of many figures, such
as the Cimabue picture being led in procession through the
streets of Florence, the 'Daphnephoria,' 'Heracles struggling
with Death,' the 'Andromache,' the 'Cymon and Iphigenia,' and
others; or those simpler compositions, such as the 'Summer
Moon,' 'Wedded,' 'The Mountain Summit,' 'The Music Lesson,'
'Sister's Kiss,' in all can be traced the sentiment of a poet
inspiring the touch; not overriding by any assertiveness of
sentiment the complete scheme of the picture, but lingering here
and there with a wistful loveliness which has to be sought for
within the barriers of the formal classic design. And it is this
reticence in the expression of individual sentiment, this
subduing it to the larger conditions of a more abstract style
of art which, though it will never make Sir Frederic Leighton's
work directly popular, gives to it a quality of distinction. In
such reticence is an element of greatness which probably will
only be duly appreciated when the more transient moods of
thought in the present generation have passed. His work lacks
altogether the sentimental, brooding-over-self quality, which,
when allied to genius, is contagious, and gives an interest of a
subtle, but perhaps not altogether wholesome kind to some of the
best work of this era."
And again after his death:--
"Beauty of every kind played on a very sensitive instrument,
when it made an appeal to his nature, giving him very positive
joy: no complication of subtle interest beyond the actual
influence being required before a responding echo was sounded,
because so pure and innocent was this joy he had in the charm of
beauty;--so also attendant on his personal influence, there was
no power of mesmerism, nor of the black arts. In every direction
it was healthy and bracing. Even a Nordau could have discovered
no remotest taint of the degenerate!"
It is the emotions which art suggests outside itself which have been
viewed by one school as more interesting than art itself, and it is
the sensuous qualities in painting--colour and texture--which are the
visible agents, and convey more readily these suggestions of emotions
in our northern temperaments than do beautiful lines and forms. Our
northern temperaments also love symbolism and mysticism, therefore are
apt to favour the art that meets a veiled condition of things; and the
perfection of complete finish in nature's form is no longer held up as
a standard for the student to aim at. Leighton had no sympathy with
the artificial, neither had he any with the shadow put in the place of
the substance. The actual was ever sufficient for him, for in nature
herself he never failed to find sufficient inspiration. The mind of
the Creator in matter is what the ingenuous artist temperament
searches for and is inspired to record; whereas it is, on the one
hand, phases of human moods, selections from human passions, good,
bad, and indifferent, which are made to saturate the feeling in much
of our modern art, or, on the other hand, aspects of nature's moods
given without the framework of her structure, and without the detail
of her perfection.
It may be argued, however, that there are among the most beautiful
effects in nature those which are not fully distinct to the sight--the
shimmering iridescence on a shell, where one colour is seen sparkling
against another through a film, or the waving branches of a willow,
the liquid shifting of a flowing stream, or the endless effects of
cloud and mist in a northern sky. To express this in paint requires an
appropriate treatment in the manipulation of the pigment itself.
Watts' theory was that you have to unfinish the record of certain
facts in order to render the truth of the whole fact (see also
Steinle's criticism on Leighton's head of "Vincenzo," 1854). He would,
therefore, film his painting over with a scumble of white, and only
partially repaint the surface, in order to get at that whole truth
which includes the bloom of atmosphere and the veil of northern mists.
Leighton is thought at times to have erred on the side of
explicitness, and the texture of his surface is apt undoubtedly to
lack the vibrating quality which carries with it a beauty of its own.
This is partly accounted for by the fact that he had imbibed the
rudiments of his teaching in a school whose followers were not
sensitive to the finest qualities in oil painting, but also probably
from his extreme desire to give expression to his sense of the intense
finish in nature.
Doctrinaires of the very latest fashion in art insist that nothing
comes legitimately within the province of the pictorial, except the
impression of nature transmitted to the physical organ detached from
memory, experience, and mind. By this faction the eye is treated
solely as a machine. Sound as may be the doctrine that art has
nothing to do with what the eye cannot see, or with those facts which
experience alone teaches us are there, it is also no less true that
the human eye sees, according to its intuitive power of transmitting
to the brain, the different component parts of the actual object of
its vision. It was no knowledge of anatomy which enabled Pheidias to
see every subtilty of form in the human figure with consummate
insight--any more than it was a knowledge of the laws of the flow and
ebb of the tides, which enabled Whistler to give an actual sense of
the swaying surface of the waves in "Valparaiso Bay"; again, it was no
knowledge of botany which enabled Leighton and Millais to reproduce
the structure of plants so perfectly, that they evoked unmitigated
admiration as botanical studies from so high an authority on botany as
Sir W.C. Thistleton Dyer. We may be told that what we really see is
only the relation of tone, of light and shadow; but the fact that the
architecture of the whole visible world, the meaning-full construction
of all things that nature builds, is being constantly realised by our
sight, makes the truth of this theory at least doubtful. That our eye
cannot discern these natural objects without light goes without
saying; further, that light and shadow shape the forms to be rendered
by the brush is also true: but the assertion that what we see is only
light and shade playing upon form, is shutting the door on another
equally obvious truth. The eye, gifted with a natural sense of form,
records ingenuously to the brain the sense of projecting and receding
planes, the foreshortening of masses, the straightness, slant, or
curve in a surface or in a line. A complete and exhaustive result may
be achieved in a painting through this sense of form, as in the work
of Van Eycke and of Leonardo da Vinci; or a shorthand record may be
made, as in that of Phil May's sketches. But we feel that in both the
sense of the whole form has been felt. However, volumes would not
exhaust the arguments for and against the so-called impressionist's
view of art; so-called--but surely a term unfortunate and misleading,
and in nowise explanatory. Every touch a true artist ever puts upon
canvas is a record of an impression--whether that impression comprises
the structure, light and shade, true colour and tone, all
combined,--or only certain surface qualities extracted from its
entirety and enforced so that the most obvious appearances start into
relief, giving doubtless a sense of vitality to a work, but remaining
nevertheless only a partial record of the object. Needless to say,
Leighton sought to record his impressions of nature in their entirety,
and this necessitated a balancing of their component attributes. The
startling element is never found in his art.
He viewed the influence of art as one which should perfect the life of
every class; should purify in all directions the debasing elements of
materialism and self-interest; should put zest and gratitude into the
hearts of all men and women who can see and feel, by awakening a sense
of the perfection and beauty of nature, art forming an explanatory and
illuminating link between her and mankind--a translation of her
perfection transmitted with all reverence by the artificer;--a
perfecting beautiful pinnacle in the erection and development of a
noble human being.
No words could better describe Leighton's high endeavour in training
his own mind and those whom he tried to influence, than the following,
written by Lord Acton and quoted by his friend, Sir M. Grant Duff.[7]
"If I had the power," writes Sir M. Grant Duff, "I would place upon
his monument the words which he wrote as a preface to a list of
ninety-eight books he drew up, and about which he still hoped to read
a paper at Cambridge when he wrote to me on the subject last autumn.
'This list is submitted with a view to assisting an English youth,
whose education is finished, who knows common things, and is not
training for a profession, to perfect his mind and open windows in
every direction; to raise him to the level of his age, so that he may
know the forces that have made the world what it is, and still reign
over it; to guard against surprises and against the constant sources
of errors within; to supply him both with the strongest stimulants and
the surest guides; to give force and fulness, and clearness and
sincerity, independence and elevation, generosity and serenity to his
mind, that he may know the method and lay of the process by which
error is conquered and truth is won, discerning knowledge from
probability and prejudice from belief; that he may learn to master
what he rejects as fully as what he adopts; that he may understand the
origin as well as the strength and vitality of systems, and the better
motives of men who are wrong; to steel him against the charm of
literary beauty and talent, so that each book, thoroughly taken in,
shall be the beginning of a new life, and shall make a new man of
him.'" In a like spirit Leighton sought to arrive at viewing art; and
what Lord Acton sought to effect by the general culture of men's minds
and natures through reading, Leighton sought to effect in his special
vocation by inducing other artists to study all that was greatest in
Art from a wide and unprejudiced point of view--making it their own,
so to speak, by thoroughly realising and appreciating the qualities in
it which make it great. Each true masterpiece in Art, he urged, should
be thoroughly taken in, and should be the beginning of a new effort.
On the other hand, he sought to make the student "learn to master what
he rejects as fully as what he adopts, that he may understand the
origin as well as the strength and vitality of systems, and the better
motives of men who are wrong." His desire was to guide art into the
current of the world's best interests--the current in which good
literature is so forcible an agent--on the highest, broadest, most
catholic lines. He endeavoured to do so by his example as a working
artist, by his Discourses, by his labours for the public in every
direction where the Art of his country was concerned, and more
directly by his influence on those with whom he personally came in
contact.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] This picture has, I believe, unfortunately left the country. It was
suggested 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." Sketches for portions of the picture and the
squared tracing for the complete design can be seen in the Leighton
House Collection. The full-length portrait of Mrs. James Guthrie was
exhibited the same year as this second processional picture, which
appeared on the walls of the Academy eleven years after the "Cimabue's
Madonna." The head of the central figure, the Bride, Leighton painted
from Mrs. Guthrie. The following charming letter from Mrs. Norton, the
most notable of Sheridan's three beautiful daughters, refers to this
picture:--
3 CHESTERFIELD STREET,
_April 9_.
DEAR MR. LEIGHTON,--I was so amused by the little grandson's
observation on the picture that I cannot help writing about him.
I asked him "what he thought of it"? He said, "Oh! it was
_beautiful_! but you told me it would be beautiful--_Mr.
Leighton_ was like a _man in a story_! you did not look so much
at him as Carlotta and I did, but I suppose you have seen him
before, and you did not seem to _pity the little panther_! There
was, in the picture, a little young _puppy_ panther, and one of
the young brides was coaxing it so tenderly, and looking down at
its head; and she was one of the prettiest and kindest looking
of all the brides (it was the side of the picture furthest from
the screen); and I could not help thinking, 'Ah, my poor little
panther! you little know when the brides get into that temple,
and she gets married, how she'll forget all about you, and get
coaxing other things, her husband and her children'; and I felt
quite sorry for the panther." So spoke my grandson (just as I
felt sorry for the cripple beggar).
Now, as I am quite sure no one else will take this view of what
is the principal interest in your glorious procession of youth
and hope, I thought it as well to let you know, that you might
give that little panther his due importance (a little leopard, I
think he is), and not suppose him a subordinate accessory! That
whole procession was tinged with mournfulness in Richard
Norton's eyes for that little leopard's sake. I shall see that
"Dream of Fair Women" again in the Exhibition, and admire it, as
I did to-day, in a crowd of other admirers, I know. I do not
mind the crowd. I see over them and under them, and through
them, when there is anything so worth being eager
about.--Believe me meanwhile, yours very truly,
CAROLINE NORTON.
[2] In a letter from Leighton to his mother, the following sentence
occurs:--"Will you please explain to him" (his father) "that I am not
going to model the _drapery_ of my figures, but the _figures
themselves_ to lay the drapery on, as my models could not fly
sufficiently long for me to draw them in the act; it is of course a
very great delay, but the result will amply make up for the extra
trouble, I hope."
[3] The picture has left the country, but sketches of the complete
design are among those in the Leighton House Collection.
[4] Lent by Lady Wantage to the Exhibition, in Leighton House, of the
smaller works and sketches in 1903.
[5] _Outlook_, July 15th, 1905.
[6] When standing with me before Leighton's picture "Wedded" in the
studio Robert Browning exclaimed, "I find a poetry in that man's work I
can find in no other."
[7] "The Late Lord Acton." _The Spectator_, July 5, 1902.
CHAPTER I
FIRST STUDIO IN LONDON
1859-1863
In 1858 Leighton was represented on the Royal Academy walls by two
pictures, "The Fisherman and the Syren"--a subject from Goethe's
ballad,
"Half drew she him,
Half sunk he in,
And never more was seen"--
and by a scene from "Romeo and Juliet," both small canvases painted in
Rome and in Paris.[8]
Leighton at this time received an encouraging letter from Robert
Fleury, from whom he had learned much:--
Que parlez vous de reconnaissance, mon cher Monsieur Leighton?
de l'amitie je le veux bien, et je recois, a ce titre seulement,
le dessin que vous m'avez envoye. Ne me suis je pas fait plaisir
en vous reconnaissant du talent et en vous rendant la justice
qui vous est due? si vous m'avez donne l'occasion de vous faire
part de ma vieille esperance n'est ce pas une preuve de l'estime
que vous faites de mes conseils? Puisque vous m'offrez
genereusement votre amitie, je l'accepte de bien bon coeur, et
votre petit dessin me restera comme un gracieux souvenir de
vous.
ROBERT FLEURY.
PARIS, _le 18 Mars 1858_.
In the autumn of 1858 Leighton was back in Rome, and it was at that
time the King, then Prince of Wales, first visited his studio. "I
myself had the advantage of knowing him (Leighton) for a great number
of years--ever since I was a boy--and I need hardly say how deeply I
deplore the fact that he can be no more in our midst," were the words
spoken by the King--thirty-nine years after this first meeting--at the
Royal Academy banquet, which took place after Leighton's death, 1st
May 1897.
He worked in Rome till his pictures were finished for exhibition in
the spring, 1859.
He wrote to his mother:--
It is my particular object and study to go to no parties, in the
which I have succeeded admirably. I go often to Cartwright's in
the evening, that don't count; now and then to Browning, now and
then to the play, see a good deal of Lady Hoare; and that
reminds me that Hoare sent you some game the other day, which,
however, was returned, as you were not forthcoming. By-the-bye,
when I say I have made no acquaintances of interest, that is not
true; Odo Russell, son and brother of my friends, Lady William
and Arthur Russell, and our diplomatic agent here, is a great
friend of mine, and particularly sympathetic. I see him often at
Cartwright's, who is his _alter ego_; also I know and like Miss
Ogle, who wrote that (I hear) exceedingly remarkable novel, "A
Lost Love." She is a country clergyman's daughter in a remote
corner of Yorkshire, and wrote this book when she had, I
believe, never lived out of a circle of "kettles." She is not
young, but agreeable and quaint.
I am just finishing the largish studies of a very handsome model
here, and am about to send them off for exhibition. They seem
very popular with all who see them, and are, I think, my best
things.
1859.
DEAREST MAMMY,--I find to my annoyance that I have mislaid your
kind letter, so that I must answer as best I can from memory.
That the French and Austrians have been formally requested by
the Pope to withdraw their troops from the States of the Church
is, I have ascertained from good authority, true, though how on
earth you can have known in Florence so long ago a thing which
has only just happened, and which is still in great measure a
secret here, is what I can't make out; but, dear Mamma, I trust
this won't prevent your coming to Rome in April, as there is no
chance of the evacuation being carried into effect by that time.
There will be particularly (indeed exclusively) on the side of
Austria a great demur and _pourparler_, inasmuch as the
consequences of this step will probably be most serious to her;
so that for the next few months we need fear nothing. I trust
you will come; however, of course I dread the responsibility of
insisting too much. You will see how matters look in a few
weeks. I am just about to despatch to the Royal Academy some
studies from a very handsome model, "La Nanna." I have shown
them to a good many people, artists and "Philistines," and they
seem to be universally admired. Let us hope they will be well
hung in the Exhibition. Talking of exhibitions, you will be
rather amused to hear that my "Samson" has been _refused_ at the
British Institution, which this year is particularly weak and
insignificant. It is gone in to the Suffolk Street now, unless
too late. Neither I nor anybody else has the least idea what is
the cause of this strongish measure. I have sent my "Negroes" to
Paris, and if it is not too late the "Juliet" and "Paris" will
go there also. I think they will be well hung, as they are
godfathered by Mr. Montfort, my kind and valuable friend. This
afternoon the Prince of Wales came to my studio, with Colonel
and Mrs. Bruce, Gibson, &c. &c. Gibson spoke in the very highest
terms of my pictures, so of course all the others were
delighted!
_Tuesday Morning._
I have not been able to answer your letter till now, and indeed
even now I am interrupting my work to do it; I will answer all
your questions categorically. First, about the brigands--I have
made inquiries, and have heard of nothing new since these two
cases about five weeks back, and am told that now the roads may
be considered safe; indeed, no time is generally so good for
travelling as just after an accident of that kind, as the
authorities are on the look out: if you go by _vetturino_, there
will in all probability be other _vetturini_ on the road, and
you will start together and arrive together from and to the
different stations on the road. You quite misunderstood the
sense of my letter, dear Mamma, if you imagined that I knew
nothing of rumours of war, &c. &c.--so far from not knowing what
is going on, I live in a hot-bed of politics, what with
Cartwright and what with Odo Russell. I expressed my surprise
that you should speak with confidence of the withdrawal of the
French troops when the official news of the Pope's _formal
request_ to that effect could not yet have reached Florence, for
the reason that it had not taken place; with the Florentine
politicians the wish must have been father to the thought. What
really will happen is impossible to say; they won't withdraw
till the Austrians do--that is pretty certain; the French, I
think, like to mislead people about it. A French general told a
friend of mine that in _six weeks_ they would all be gone, but
_Antonelli_, who ought to be the best authority, told Odo
Russell they would not go for six _months_, though the
occupation has already ceased (as the _Moniteur_ expresses it)
"en principe." You see, dear Mamma, that it is entirely
impossible for me to give you any _definite_ information at a
moment when nobody seems to know what is coming next. I should
be very much disappointed if you could not come; if you settle
to come, let me know in time to look for rooms at an Hotel, and
tell me what you expect to give. My work would not allow me to
go to Florence. My pictures for the R.A. this year are three
portraits in different sizes and attitudes from the same model,
all _dressed_--one a small half-length, the other a kit-cat, the
third a small head the size of my hand--this I have sold to Lady
Hoare for forty guineas. It has been much coveted--Lady
Stratford de Redcliffe wanted a repetition (I never do
repetitions), and Mrs. Phipps seemed quite distressed it was
sold. The Prince and his party told O. Russell they liked my
studio better than any they had seen in Rome. My "Pan" and
"Venus" are stowed away in London.
Besides the three portraits of a model mentioned in his letter,
exhibited at the Royal Academy, 1859, Leighton sent "Samson and
Delilah" to Suffolk Street. For studies of this picture, see Leighton
House Collection.
Later, from Naples, he wrote:--
_Wednesday Morning, 1859._
I scribble two lines in haste before starting to Capri to
announce my safe arrival here in the middle of the day on
Monday. I found here several letters from England; but, as I
had presumed, that report about the sale of all my pictures was
a _canard_. Lord Lansdowne wishes very much for a repetition of
my small profile of Nanna, but as I refused to make one for Lady
Stratford, I of course can't for him. George de Monbrison has
very kindly consented to give up his Nanna to the Prince,[9] but
is evidently sadly disappointed--so much so, that I have written
to offer to do what I could not under any other circumstances,
_i.e._ copy it for him.
This place is in great beauty. I have been received with the
greatest hospitality by the Hollands, with whom I have dined and
supped both days.
Yesterday I breakfasted with Augustus Craven,[10] who
photographed me. He is a great adept at this art, and devotes
much time to it. He has a most lovely house here, looking out on
to the sea.
I have nothing to add for the present, and I will write again
from Capri.
This visit to Capri produced the famous drawing of the Lemon Tree.[11]
Mr. Ruskin wrote: "Two perfect early drawings are of 'A Lemon Tree'
and of a 'Byzantine Well'" (see List of Illustrations), "which
determine for you without appeal the question respecting necessity of
delineation as the first skill of a painter. Of all our present
masters, Sir Frederic Leighton delights most in softly-blended
colours, and his ideal of beauty is more nearly that of Correggio than
any since Correggio's time. But you see by what precision of terminal
outline he at first restrained and exalted his gift of beautiful
_vaghezza_." In letters to Leighton, Ruskin refers to these
drawings:--
1860.
DEAR LEIGHTON,--Unless I write again I shall hope to breakfast
with you on Friday, and see and know evermore how a lemon
differs from an orange leaf. In cases of doubtful temper, might
the former more gracefully and appropriately be used for bridal
chaplet?--Most truly yours,
J. RUSKIN.
_15th December 1882._
DEAR LEIGHTON,--Of course I want the lemon-tree! but surely you
didn't offer it me before? May I come on Tuesday afternoon for
both? and I hope to bring "Golden Water," but I hear there's
some confusion between the Academy and the Burlington Club.
"Golden Water" is perhaps too small a drawing for the
Academy--but you'll see.
I wish the lecture on sculpture you gave that jury the other day
had been to a larger audience, and I one of them.--Ever
affectionately yours,
J. RUSKIN.
_17th November._
DEAR LEIGHTON,--I brought up the "Byzantine Well,"[12] but was
forced to trust my friend, John Simon, to bring it across the
Park to you, and then forbid him till I wrote you this note,
asking you to spare a moment to show him the "Damascus Glass and
Arab Fountain." He is, as you know, a man of great eminence,
with a weakness for _painting_, which greatly hinders him in his
science.--Ever your loving,
J.R.
I can't get lectures printed yet.
With reference to differences of opinion which had arisen between them
on certain art questions, Ruskin wrote in 1879: "I expected so much
help from you after those orange (lemon) trees of yours!" Later (1883)
he wrote: "The Pre-Raphaelite schism, and most of all, Turner's death,
broke my relations with the Royal Academy. I hope they may in future
be kinder; its President (Leighton) has just sent me two lovely
drawings (the 'Lemon Tree' and the 'Byzantine Well') for the Oxford
Schools, and, I think, feels with me as to all the main principles of
Art education."
After his visit to Capri Leighton returned to London. He stayed with
Mr. Henry Greville, and while there wrote to his mother the following
letters:--
19 QUEEN STREET,
_Wednesday Morning, 1859_.
I have so far altered my plans that I stay on until Saturday
morning instead of going to-morrow with Mrs. Sartoris as I had
intended. I have still a call or two to make, and, besides, am
going to dine to-morrow with Mario and spend the evening of
Friday at Lord Lansdowne's, whose invitation I got though I had
not called on him. I suppose that a card was sent me because my
name was on the old list. I have since met him (at Henry's
party), and he made himself very amiable, renewing the
invitation by word of mouth. I have just been spending two or
three days at Old Windsor with Miss Thackeray, who has been
kindness itself as usual; the weather was divine, and we took
exquisite drives. Chorley[13] also has been a kind friend to me;
he took me twice to the Handel Festival, seating me, conveying
me, breakfasting me, and, but that I was engaged, would have
dined me. The Festival was, as you have no doubt read in the
papers, most successful, the choruses, considering the enormous
difficulty of training such masses of people (2000!) were
excellent; the quantity of sound produced was, of course,
enormous, still there was no _din_, nothing stunning, only an
exceedingly dense and close-textured quality of sound. The solo
singers varied in excellence. Clara Novello shone by the quality
of her voice, which carries any distance, and by the correctness
of her singing, but to me she is entirely without charm, and
left me as cold after the great song of the Nativity in the
"Messiah" as if she had not sung at all. Miss Dolby sang well
throughout; she was remarkable for the excessive decorum and
simplicity of her singing. She finishes a phrase with great
breadth; her voice, to some people disagreeable, is to me very
_simpatica_, and she gave me altogether the greatest pleasure.
Sims Reeves, whom but a few days back I heard sing so badly at
Liverpool, astounded me here by the remarkable care and study he
brought to bear on his solos. He sang in the "Messiah,"
beginning with "Behold and see if there be any sorrow," &c. He
sang exquisitely; and in the "Israel" he sang "The enemy said"
(a very ungrateful song) as well as possible. He was
vociferously encored, and well deserved it. ---- was simply
abominable, without a redeeming point. ----, though less
aggressively bad, was too insignificant to say much about at
all. Of course, altogether, the solos, especially the more
vigorous ones, were too weak for the choruses; that could not be
otherwise short of having four pair of Lablache lungs. Costa led
to perfection; it was a sight to see him.
_Friday_, PARIS.
DEAREST MAMMA,--I write you a few lines just to announce my safe
return to Paris. You have no doubt by this time got the box back
again. Henry was, as always, very kind to me, and I spent three
days very simply at his house. I had intended, when I left this,
to stay only two days in London, but those days being Saturday
and Sunday, I remembered that all the Galleries were shut, and
therefore, being most anxious to see the new Veronese, I stayed
over Monday. I was delighted with the pictures in the National
Gallery and also at Marlborough House, but the annual exhibition
at the British Institution is _deplorable_. I have decided, on
the advice of Buckner, Colnaghi, and others, to send my
"Niggers" ("A Negro Dance"--water-colour--from sketch made in
Algiers) to the Suffolk Street Exhibition (where I shall be well
hung through Buckner's intervention) _if_ I get done in time: it
will be a hard race, as the Exhibition opens a month sooner than
the R.A.
I reached home Tuesday evening at 10-1/2 o'clock, after a good
passage; I was, however, suffering from a shocking indigestion,
and, to crown all, was kept awake till four in the morning by a
ball immediately under my bed. Next morning I had to paint away
at Gallatti (my model) willy nilly (particularly nilly),
feeling seedy and frightfully cross. However, my "Gehazi" is now
as near as possible finished, and to-morrow I go in for the
"Niggers." I hope, dear Mamma, you will let me hear at once what
Lina or Suth. write; I am most anxious to hear more.
Good-bye, dear Mamma. Best love to all from your most
affectionate
FRED.
_Friday, 26th._
I am happy to say I have just done my "Niggers," and though too
late for the ordinary mode of conveyance on account of an
accident in the papers, I am saved by the exceeding kindness of
a secretary of the Sardinian Embassy, a great friend of mine; it
will be taken over on Monday night by a messenger under the
seals of the Embassy, and will just arrive in time. On Sunday I
hope to show it to Monfort, Fleury, and Scheffer. I will let you
know their verdict.
From America I have good and bad news. The bad is that my "Pan"
and "Venus" are _not being exhibited at all_ on account of their
nudity, and are stowed away in a cupboard where F. Kemble with
the most friendly and untiring perseverance contrived to
discover them. This is a great nuisance. I have sent for them
back at once; they know best whether or no it is advisable to
exhibit such pictures in America, but they certainly should have
let me know. I have written to Rossetti about it to-day,
expressing my regret and desires, and have added "my pictures
have been exposed to the wear and tear of several long journeys
_not only_ entirely for no purpose, but, being shut out from the
light, they are even suffering an injury; meanwhile I am
neglecting the opportunity of showing and disposing of them in
England, a possibility which I might willingly forego for the
sake of supporting an enterprise in which I am interested, but
not to adorn a hidden closet in the United States." Fanny Kemble
was charmed with the pictures, went often and pluckily to the
forbidden cupboard, and said she only wished she could afford to
buy them.
_Friday._
Since I last wrote I have had a note from Rossetti, the
Secretary of the American Exhibition, giving me a piece of
information about my "Romeo" which can't fail to gratify you. He
said that, had my picture not been bought by Mr. Harrison, a
public subscription would have been opened to procure it for the
Academy of Arts at Philadelphia. Rossetti answers me (as indeed
I did not doubt) that he had not the remotest notion of the fate
of "Pan" and "Venus." He has written on my request to beg they
may be sent back at once to Europe. By Henry Greville's urgent
advice I have given notice that I shall send the "Orpheus," as
they have applied for more pictures; things were selling so
satisfactorily that there was scarcely anything left to exhibit
in Boston. I am glad to be able to reassure you about the
"Niggers." Sartoris _did_ like them exceedingly even before they
were anything like as good as they are now. Cartwright, who is
not _gene_ to dislike, is enchanted with them, and says if they
are not sold at once people are fools, for he has not for some
time seen anything he likes so much. Puliza Ricardo and other
"publics" like it extremely. Robert Fleury considered it highly
original, and said that if he only saw one little head in it he
would say, "c'est d'un coloriste." R. Fleury, you know, blames
very roundly what he does not like. Montfort, my most candid
adviser, was delighted, and said of a particular bit "je vous
assure c'est tout a fait comme Decamps." This is unconditional
praise. Again I consulted him about its chances of success in
the gallery of water-colours. He said, "_Comme aquarelle_ je
vous promets qu'il n'y en a pas beaucoup qui font comme
cela;"--about water colour being _infra. dig._, showing myself
competent in _two_ materials can only raise me. Poor Scheffer
was unwell and could not come. You see, dear Mammy, you need not
be so uneasy. I fully appreciate your and Papa's anxiety about
my pictures; but it has too great a hold on you when it makes
you think that I am entirely reckless and foolish, and that
rather than give in I should tell a lie and say it was too late
to withdraw a picture when it might still be done. Many thanks
for the extract about Sutherland which, however, I had already
seen, Henry Grev. having sent it me a week ago. My "Niggers"
arrived in time by great luck. Buckner godfathers them.
In haste with very best love, your affectionate boy,
FRED.
19 QUEEN STREET, 1859.
I have got, through the kindness of Elmore (R.A.), a sort of
studio at the other end of the world; I believe I told you this
in my last note; I suppose my things will come over in a week or
less. I am in great doubt about being able to paint in that
studio, and about its having been any use to come over to London
without the possibility of a really good _locale_: however, here
I am. I shall brush up my acquaintances and see a good deal of
my friends. Don't reckon on my _selling_ anything--_I_ don't at
all. My picture is hung so that it is virtually _impossible_ to
see it. I went to look at my "Niggers" in Suffolk Street, and am
confirmed in the idea (that also of my friends) that it is my
best work. I have as yet nothing worth writing about, so
good-bye, dearest Mamma, best love to all.
2 ORME SQUARE, _Sunday, 1859_.
Having got on Monday last into my studio and been very busy ever
since, this is absolutely the first moment I have found to sit
down and write to you.
You will wish to know some particulars about my studio. Of
course after Paris and Rome it is a sad falling off--narrow and
dark, though I believe, for London, very fair; when I _live_
here I must have a much larger light or I shall go
blind--however, I must not look a gift horse in the mouth. I
have had to furnish--this costs me about nine or ten shillings a
week; I keep a servant (a stupid, pompous, verbose, dirty,
willing, honest scrub) to run my errands and clean my brushes,
&c. &c., at half-a-crown a day; models are five shillings a
sitting here--ruination!--men with good heads there are
none--women, tol-lol!--a lay figure, twenty-five shillings a
month; in short, historical painting here is not for nothing; I
am working at my "Samson" picture; God knows how I shall finish
it in so short a time! Dearest Mammy, I shall have but a very
short peep at you this year, I am very sorry to say--I lost a
full month waiting for this wretched studio. I don't see my way
through my work before the middle or even end of the second week
in August, and I cannot well give up going to Scotland though
only for a very few days, as I have accepted so long ago. I am
to go there on the 20th; after that I must rush back post-haste
to Stourhead to finish Lady Hoare; all this will make me very
late for Italy, as I am anxious to revisit the north of that
country and study the Correggios a little at Parma before going
south. I shall be obliged to scamper across the country. I
_must_ be in Rome or the neighbourhood in October; I am going to
finish my Cervara landscape on the spot.
I am in very fair health, London decidedly agrees with me, and I
don't suffer as much as I expected from the obligato spleen of
blue devildom. I need not say this is a source of immense
congratulation to me.
When the picture "Nanna" returned from the Royal Academy, where it was
exhibited in 1859, Leighton sent it to Bath, writing to his mother to
announce its arrival.
LONDON, 1859.
DEAREST MAMMY,--I scribble a word in haste to announce to you
that I have sent "Nanna" off to Bath for you to see, she wants
varnish very badly as you see, but is not dry enough for that
yet. You must mind and put her in the right light, the window
must be on the left of the spectator--the more to the _left_ of
the picture you stand yourself the less you will see the want of
varnish. If you stand to the _right_ of the painting you won't
see it at all. Please send "Nanna" back when you have shown to
whom you wish, as she is overdue at Paris.
_Saturday Morning, 1859._
I returned yesterday from the Highlands, and have at last time
to write you a little word. My stay in the North has been most
satisfactory, I have enjoyed myself thoroughly, and have felt
particularly well in the keen bracing air of the mountains. My
time has been spent exclusively in walks, rides, and drives, for
the weather was great part of the time too uncertain to allow of
sitting out to paint (even had there been time), whereas no
amount of showers prevented our going out, and indeed to those
showers I owe seeing some of the most superb effects of colour,
light and shade, that I ever beheld. We used sometimes to have
three or four duckings in one ride, drying again in the sun, or
not as the case might be, and never catching even the phantom of
a cold, so healthy and invigorating is the breath of those
healthy hills. I said I painted nothing and bring home an empty
portfolio (all but a flower I drew one _very_ wet morning), but
I have studied a great deal with my eyes and memory, and come
back a better landscape painter than I went. On my road home, at
Dunkeld, where I lingered a day (exquisite spot), I jotted down
in oils two reminiscences of effects observed at Kinrara with
which I am rather well pleased--one is a stormy Scandinavian bit
of cloud and hill, the other a hot sunny expanse of golden corn
and purple heather, which looks for all the world like a bit of
Italy. Mind, they are the merest little sketches, but accurate
in the _impression of the effect_.
I go on Monday morning to Stourhead, where I stay till Saturday,
and start Monday week for the Continent. Please send me a line
to Stourhead. How are you, darling? and Lina and Gus? and Papa?
Have you had any more drives?--Your loving boy,
FRED.
On returning to England Leighton took up his abode in his first studio
in England. Hitherto he had paid visits to London,--Rome, and
subsequently Paris, being his real home, for an artist's true home is
in his studio. In the autumn of 1859 he settled in 2 Orme Square, and
from that time to his death London became his headquarters.
After having settled into his studio in Orme Square in the winter of
1859, he wrote to Steinle and to Robert Browning the following
letters:--
_Translation._]
2 ORME SQUARE, BAYSWATER, LONDON,
_December 5, 1859_.
MY DEAR FRIEND AND MASTER,--What a long time it is since I heard
from you! my last letter, despatched from Rome, has had no
answer.
I enclose a photograph of a memorial tablet which I executed in
Rome last winter for my poor widowed sister. The monument is of
white marble with black mosaic decoration; the four dark circles
are bronze nails, which secure the marble tablet to the wall.
When I had finished work in Rome, I went south and spent five
weeks in Capri. You would hardly believe, dear Friend, how this
wonderful island delighted me. I made vigorous use of my visit
and executed a fairly large number of conscientious studies. I
also took the opportunity to visit Paestum for the first time. I
may say that the _Temple of Neptune_ gave me the most exalted
architectonic impression that I have ever received; I shall
never forget that morning. The two neighbouring temples,
however, are not worth looking at, except from a painter's point
of view.
Meanwhile, the season being advanced, I was obliged, with real
regret, to give up my plan of going to Frankfurt, and to hurry
back to England. Here I am now permanently established. I
confess that I did not pitch my tent here without some anxiety;
I had not spent _a single winter_ in England since my earliest
childhood, and I had good reason to fear that to me, with my
love of sunshine, it would prove a little harsh. I also feared
the climate for my bodily health. However, "native air" appears
to be not altogether an empty phrase, but I find myself,
notwithstanding the fog, well and in good spirits. Man must
indeed carry the sun in his heart--if he is to have it. Of work
in particular, I have nothing much to say. Later, in the course
of the winter, I will report more at length.
Meanwhile, dear Master, write to me very soon. Tell me whether
you still think of your pupil, and especially tell me about your
certainly numerous works.--Your grateful pupil,
LEIGHTON.
_Translation._]
2 ORME SQUARE, BAYSWATER,
LONDON, _January 12, 1860_.
I spoke little in my last letter of my present work, partly
perhaps because of the feeling I have already described, but
partly also because I intend to send you a photograph directly
the picture is finished, which will not be till spring. It is a
commission, and the subject is religious. There is only a single
figure, and I would describe it to you now, but that I fear you
would imagine the picture much more beautiful than I can paint
it, and you would consequently suffer a disappointment later on
in my work which would be painful to me. For the rest, I am
striving as hard as I can to make it fine and simple. You will
perhaps be surprised, but, in spite of my fanatic preference for
colour, I promised myself to be a draughtsman before I became a
colourist.
And now adieu, my dear Friend. Directly I can show you anything
in "black and white" you shall hear from me again, and I shall
expect from you, as my old master, the most unsparing criticism;
that is the greatest proof of love you can give me.
FRED LEIGHTON.
2 ORME SQUARE, BAYSWATER,
_January 29, '60_.
DEAR BROWNING,--It is not till the other day that I at last
received from Cartwright your Rome address, or I should have
written to you some time ago; before it was too late to wish you
a merry Xmas and health, happiness, and all prosperity for
yourself and Mrs. Browning in the present year. I don't know
that I have anything worth telling you to write about, for all
the little incidents which have their importance for the space
of a day, all appear too trivial to write about after a lapse of
a week or two. Still I write to assure you I keep up my most
affectionate remembrance of you, and to beg that you won't
entirely forget me. I received your kind letter at the beginning
of the winter, and was truly concerned to hear that Mrs.
Browning had been so alarmingly unwell; I trust that the air of
Rome, which once before was so beneficial to her, will have
strengthened and recruited her again this time. Dear old Rome!
how I wish I could fly over and spend a week or so with you all
in my old haunts. I suppose I shall never be entirely weaned of
that yearning affection I entertain for Italy, and particularly
for Rome and the "Comarea." You must have it all to yourselves
this year. What a delight it must be to see neither Brown,
Jones, nor Robinson.
I suppose Cartwright, Pantaleone, and Odo Russell are the staple
of your convivial circle; and, by-the-bye, how much more freely
Mrs. Browning must breathe this winter without certain daily
visitations which I remember last year. I wonder whether you
will write to me and tell me what you are doing, socially and
artistically; everything about you will interest me.
As for myself, you would not believe it, in spite of my old
habits of continental life and sunshine, I take very kindly to
England; _it agrees_ with me capitally, really better than Rome.
I am fattening _vue d'oeil_. The light is certainly not
irreproachable, still I can work, and don't find that my ideas
get particularly rusty. On the contrary, for colour, certainly
my sense seems to be sharpened in this atmosphere.
I am soldiering too. I drill three times a week, and make as bad
a soldier as anybody else. The Sartoris, you know, are no longer
in London--a great loss to all their friends--but I go pretty
often to see them in the country, and have spent many a happy
day there in the course of the winter. By-the-bye, do you hear
or know anything of those two drawings I did of you and Mrs.
Browning? If so, will you give the one of you to Hookes that he
may send with some other things he has? And now, dear Browning,
"_vi levero l'incomodo_," and will bring this very tedious
epistle to a close. Remember me most kindly to Mrs. Browning, to
Cartwright and his wife, to Odo Russell, B----, Pantaleone with
better half, Storeys, and last, but not least, dear little
Hatty! Love to Cerinni; tell me about him. Good-bye.--Believe
me, very affectionately yours,
FRED LEIGHTON.
I am hand-and-glove with all my enemies the pre-Raphaelites.
Woolner sends his affectionate remembrances.
Leighton writes to his sister in Italy:--
2 ORME SQUARE, BAYSWATER,
_March 12_.
MY DEAR GUSSYKINS,--You may have heard from Mamma that I went to
Paris to hear Madame Viardot in "Orphee." What wonderful
singing! what style! what breadth! what pathos! You would have
been enchanted, I am sure. Do you know the music? It is
wonderfully fine and pathetic, the first chorus particularly is
quite harrowing for the accent of grief about it. Madame
Viardot's _acting_, too, is superb--so perfectly simple and
grand, it is really antique. And when you consider all she has
to overcome--a bad, harsh voice, an ugly face, an ungainly
person; and yet she contrives to look almost handsome. She
enters heart and soul into her work; she said it was the only
thing she ever did that (after fifty performances) had not given
her a moment's _ennui_. I am afraid there is no chance of her
singing it in England this year, if at all; I don't believe the
Covent Garden audience would sit through it.[14]
I also saw Gounod's new opera, "Philemon et Baucis," and was
disappointed. Nothing but the care and distinction of the
workmanship redeems it from being a bore; the subject is ill
adapted for the stage, and is dragged through three acts with
portentous efforts. Striking melodies there are few, charming
accompaniments many; all the pretty music (or nearly) is in the
orchestra--_c'est la sauce qui fait avaler le poisson_. The
introductions to the first and second acts, but particularly the
latter (a little _motif_ on the oboe), are charming; there is
also a capital chorus. All this, however, is an impression after
one hearing; I might alter my mind on hearing it oftener, but I
think not.
In the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1860 Leighton sent one picture
only, "Sunrise--Capri."
_Translation._]
2 ORME SQUARE, _September 15, 1860_.
MY VERY DEAR FRIEND,--I was almost afraid that you would think
that I had entirely forgotten you, but this would be a very
undeserved interpretation of my long silence. No, my dear
Master, you still live in my constant memory, in my most
grateful recollection.
When I last wrote, I promised to send you a photograph of my
large picture. This work has taken up my time far beyond my
expectations, and I always put off writing in order not to send
you an empty letter. At last it is thus far, and I enclose both
the large photograph and some little ones, in the hope that you,
dear Master, will be interested also in the unimportant works of
your old pupil.
Have I already told you the subject of my religious picture? I
think not. At the turning-point of a very critical illness, the
lady who commissioned my picture dreamt that she, as a
disembodied spirit, soared up heavenwards in the night.[15]
Suddenly she was aware of a point of light in the far vault of
heaven. This light grew, developed, and soon she saw coming
forth from the night the shining form of the Saviour. Full of
confidence she approached the holy apparition. Jesus, however,
raised His hands and, gently repulsing her, enjoined her to
return to earth, and during her life to make herself worthier to
enter the company of the blessed. She awoke, recovered, and
ordered the picture.
You will be able to imagine, my dear Friend, how little
contented I am with my work; however, I am accustomed to show
you my weaknesses, and I therefore send you also this
unsatisfactory work. As regards the photograph, it is in certain
respects successful, although it makes the whole picture _four
times too dark_.
I send also a portrait of my sister; a head of an English
soldier, who lost an arm at Balaclava, and recently died of
consumption; and finally a photograph after a drawing on wood,
which I drew for a book, but which has been _incredibly_
disfigured by the engraver. Fortunately I had the drawing
(although bad) photographed before I sent it to be engraved.
But enough of me and my affairs.
And you, dear Master, what are you working at? Are your
cartoons all finished? Shall you soon begin your frescoes? What
other beautiful things have you composed?
Do not punish my long silence, but send me a couple of lines to
tell me what interests me so deeply. So soon as I have finished
anything new (and I have many pictures in prospect) I will send
you another specimen of my handiwork.
Meantime I beg you will remember me most cordially to your wife
and daughters, and to my other friends in Frankfurt. And
yourself do not altogether forget, your loving pupil,
FRED LEIGHTON.
It was in 1860 Leighton joined the Artist Rifle Corps. It was also
then he first made the acquaintance of Sir William B. Richmond (now
Chairman of the Leighton House Committee).
_December 12, 1860._
DEAREST MAMMY,--I have deferred until now answering your kind
letter that I might be able to announce to you a little
circumstance which took place yesterday, and which, though not
of any real importance, may give you and Papa pleasure. I was
yesterday raised to the rank of Captain; I command the 3rd
Company--Lewis was at the same time made Captain of the 2nd--his
election of course came before mine; he has done three times
more for the Corps than I have or could have done--he lives very
near and goes _every day_--as a man of business, and a very
clever one, he has entirely organised the bookkeeping
department, and in fact has been altogether the vital principle
of the Corps. I was chosen next for having shown some zeal in
this service and some little capability for teaching. The vacant
lieutenancies go to Nicholson (the musician) and Talfourd. One
of the ensigncies has been given to Perugini, contingent on its
being lawful for him to hold such commission; another to old
Palmer. So much for our volunteering. I wish we had a commander.
The next question in your letter I thought I had answered in my
last--however, though Ruskin stayed about three hours and was
altogether very pleasant, he did not say anything that I could
quote about my paintings. He was _immensely_ struck by my
drawing of a lemon-tree, and was generally complimentary, or
rather, _respectful_, that is more his _genre_. I don't think,
however, that he cared for Sandbach's picture--which leads me to
the third point in your letter. Neither of the S.'s have seen
their picture; last time they were in London, having made no
definite appointment, I missed them. He wrote to say that when
he came up to town again, he would fix a day to call on me.
Gibson, the old traitor, never turned up at all. By-the-bye, I
see you ask whether I shoot much--no, not often; I am an
ordinary, average shot--my unsteady hand prevents my shooting
well. My general health is pretty fair. Many thanks, dearest
Mammy, for your kind wishes and congratulations on that
melancholy occasion, my birthday--it is a day I always
hate--fancy my being _thirty_!!! About marrying, dear Mamma, you
must not forget it requires two to play at that game. I would
not insult a girl I did not love by asking her to tie her
existence to mine, and I have not yet found one that I felt the
slightest wish to marry; it is no doubt ludicrous to place this
ideal so high, but it is not my fault--theoretically I should
like to be married very well.
In another letter to his mother Leighton writes on the subject of
marriage: "If I don't marry, the reason has been that I have never
seen a girl to whom I felt the least desire to be united for life. I
should certainly never marry for the sake of doing so." The same
subject is again alluded to in a letter written in 1863, from
Leighton's mother to her younger daughter who was in Italy. The letter
begins by referring to a servant who was dismissed by Leighton.
"He has such an effect on him by his profound stupidity and
intense conceit he can't keep him, for if he did, the irritation
would render him wicked if he indulged it, and ill if he
repressed the same--at least that's Fred's feeling just now. He
means to take an Italian servant if he can find one.
"Fred has received an invitation to Sandringham (the Prince of
Wales). If he has not found a suitable servant we are to lend
him ours--Ellen's husband, a very superior person. I must not
forget to tell you that we saw ----'s new baby, a very dear
little thing. Freddy was enchanted with it. He noticed him more
than ----, who is a delightful little chap, and after caressing
it several times with exceeding tenderness, he suddenly grew red
in the face, and said, 'I must nurse him,' which he did for a
long time, to the wonder and admiration of Miss ---- and the
nurse. For my part, it gave me actual pain to see that proof of
his strong love for children, believing that he will never have
any of his own. He declares he has never seen a girl he could
marry. Of course this shows he is unreasonably fastidious;
more's the pity!"
[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF MRS. SUTHERLAND ORR. 1861]
2 ORME SQUARE, _April 10, 1861_.
DEAREST MAMMY,--I have deferred writing until now that I might
be able to tell you the result of my little "private view," now
over. I am happy to say I have a great success. The "Vision"
pleased many people much, but was altogether, as I expected, the
least popular; the subject, though very interesting, was less
attractive to the many, and besides I have progressed in
painting since the date of that picture. My little girl at the
fountain, christened for me by one of my visitors, "Lieder ohne
Worte," has perhaps had the greatest number of votes.[16] The
"Francesca,"[17] on the other hand, has had, I think, the
advantage in the _quality_ of its admirers. Watts, for instance,
and Mrs. Sartoris think it by far my best daub.
By-the-bye, you will be particularly pleased to hear that Lina's
portrait has had an immense success, and indeed, on second
thoughts, perhaps it was more admired than anything else. The
"Capri" and the "Aslett" were also much liked. Mind, dear Mamma,
this letter is "strictly confidential," because although, of
course, you want to know what people say of my pictures, anybody
else seeing this letter would (or might) suppose I was devoured
with vanity.
I have just made an unexpected acquaintance in the Gladstones,
who sent me, I don't know why, a card for two parties. It was
very polite of them, and of course I went. This is a very
egotistical letter, dear Mamma, but I know that is what you
want.
I am very sufficiently well, not strong, but never ill. I
marched to Wimbledon with the Volunteers last Monday, and got
wet several times but did not catch cold.[18]
LONDON. 1861.
DEAR PAPA,--If the _Public_ receives my pictures as favourably
as the _Private_ has done, I shall have no cause to complain; as
far, at least, as the maintenance and increase of my reputation
is concerned. I should, however, have liked the "market" to be a
little more "brisk."
Tom Taylor and Rossetti (Wm.), the only critics that came (as
far as I know) besides Stephens, were, as far as I can judge,
both of them much pleased with what they saw. I know at least
that both spoke well of my pictures behind my back.
As for Ruskin, he was in one of his queer moods when he came to
breakfast with me--he spent his time looking at my portfolio and
praised my drawings most lavishly--_he did not even look at the
pictures_. However, nothing could be more cordial than he is to
me.
I bolted out into the passage after you when you left the other
day to tell you that one of the gentlemen you saw come in was
Sir Edwin Landseer, but you had disappeared.
PARIS. _Monday_.
DEAREST MOTHER,--I must wind up with bad news, which I hope you
will bear well: my pictures are badly hung, ill lighted, and
almost entirely ignored by the press.[19] Of course this is _au
fond_, a bitter disappointment to a man of my temperament,
especially after all the praise my work got before the
Exhibition. However, I shall wear a brave face, and who knows
but that some good may arise to me out of this? My little
energies will be sharpened up and my tenacity roused. I trust in
some future day, as long as hope lives. God bless you, Mammy;
best love to dear Gussy. From your affectionate son,
FRED.
_May 1, 1861._
DEAREST MAMMY,--Life being a pump handle, first up then down,
you won't be too much surprised to hear that after the real
success my pictures had on "private view" they are with one
exception (the landscape) badly hung, "The Vision" over a door,
the others above the line, which will make it impossible to see
the finish or delicacy of execution which is an important
feature in them. I have not seen them myself, but am told this
by those who have. Don't take on, dear Mammy, nor let Papa worry
himself about it. Things come right in the end, and I know that
many people will be much annoyed at this treatment of me.
_Millais_, like a good fellow that he is, spoke up for me like a
man, though he himself feels so differently on art from what I
do. My good friend Aide is furious. After all perhaps, though
badly hung, the pictures may still be seen well enough to be
judged, that is all I really want, then perhaps some of the
papers will speak up for me. I am glad I let so many people see
them at the studio, those at least know what the pictures are
like. Of one thing be sure: if my works have real value, public
opinion will in the _long run_ force the Academy to hang me--but
enough of this subject.
The Prince of Wales saw a photo-portrait of me in Valletort's
book the other day and begged him to ask me for one. I have had
some new ones done, and mean at the same time to send H.R.H. a
photograph of each of my larger pictures, "The Vision," the
"Francesca," and "The Listener," which, by-the-bye, I have
christened on the suggestion of a lady friend of mine (a sister
of Cockerell's) "Lieder ohne Worte."
Landseer said nothing that was worth repeating, though he gave
me one or two useful practical hints. He is eminently a
practical man, and I suspect in his heart sneers at style. He
was, however, I believe, pleased with my things.
9 PARK PLACE, ST. JAMES'S,
_Sunday, May 5, 1861_.
DEAR MRS. LEIGHTON,--I know that the news of the bad hanging of
your son's pictures has reached you (unpleasant tidings
generally travel fast) and I hasten to tell you, what I hope may
a little mitigate the annoyance you must have felt about it,
that they are spoken of in terms of great eulogium by both the
_Times_ and _Athenaeum_. I was afraid that their unfortunate
placing might have prevented the possibility of any justice
being done them by the public critics, but after all the _Times_
and _Athenaeum_ are the most influential and leading of all our
public journals. Mrs. Orr's portrait is consistently praised by
all the papers, even by those which review the others less
favourably. Fortunately, the pictures were well seen in the
studio by numbers of people of all classes before they went to
the Academy, and excited very general admiration in those who
felt no particular interest either in art or in your son; while
his friends, and those who _know_, were delighted not only with
the works themselves, but at the visible indications in them of
increased power in all ways. They have been thought by all whose
opinion is of value a great advance upon what he has hitherto
done. All this will, I hope, be pleasant to you; what will be so
most of all will be to know that he took the exceeding trial and
vexation of the abominable hanging of his pictures with the most
perfect temper, and an admirable desire to be just about those
who were doing him this ill turn. You will care for this, as I
do, more than for any worldly success his talent could have
brought him. I think he is looking well, although he complains a
little of feeling tired. I daresay it is nothing but the
weariness that must make itself a little felt after a great and
all-engrossing exertion. His volunteering occupation is quite
invaluable to him, giving him the exercise he never would
otherwise get. I think he seems to like his life in London,
where he has many friends, so many that if you were here you
would no longer feel as jealous about me as you once owned to
feeling--do you remember? I do not apologise for writing all
this to you, for although excess of zeal may be a sin in the
eyes of others, and even indeed of those whom one would die to
serve, a mother will hardly count it as such when her child is
in question. With best remembrances to Mr. Leighton and your
daughters, I am, ever faithfully yours,
ADELAIDE SARTORIS.
To his father Leighton wrote:--
1861.
As to the article in _Macmillan_, I don't in the least deny its
value as far as it goes and _quo ad_ the public; it is in that
sense very gratifying to be spoken of in such flattering terms
in a periodical of some standing, but I can't individually feel
much elated at the praise of a critic who in other parts of his
article shows he is not _au fond_ a judge; as for what he says
in _interpretation_ (I am not now alluding to the _praise_), it
is so verbatim what I said myself to those who visited my
studio, that I suspect he must have been of that number. I
remember, it is true, telling you _before_ I began to paint
"Lieder ohne Worte" that I intended to make it _realistic_, but
from the first moment I began I felt the mistake, and made it
professedly and pointedly the reverse. I don't think, however,
that we understand the word realistic alike; the Fisherman and
Syren which you quote was as little naturalistic as anything
could be, and, while you urge me to take up some subject
possessing that quality, I would point out that the Michael
Angelo and the Peacock Girl both fulfil that condition--to _my_
mind _to a fault_. I have sent in (or am about to) a formula
which I received to fill up, stating what I would contribute to
the Great Exhibition of 1862 (International). I have offered the
Cimabue, four "Nannas," the "Lieder ohne Worte," "Francesca,"
and the "Syren." I have obtained permission for all.
_Translation._]
2 ORME SQUARE, BAYSWATER,
_30th April 1861_.
MY DEAR FRIEND AND MASTER,--When I last wrote you I promised in
the spring to send you photographs of my pictures for the
exhibition. I have just received some prints and hasten to
enclose them.
One of them (the girl by the fountain) gives, as is so often the
case, an entirely false impression of the picture, in that the
drapery of the principal figure should be much darker, and that
of the retreating figure much lighter. I have called this
picture "Lieder ohne Worte." It represents a girl, who is
resting by a fountain, and listening to the ripple of the water
and the song of a bird. This subject is, of course, quite
incomplete without colour, as I have endeavoured, both by colour
and by flowing delicate forms, to translate to the eye of the
spectator something of the pleasure which the child receives
through her ears. This idea lies at the base of the whole thing,
and is conveyed to the best of my ability in every detail, so
that in the dead photograph one loses exactly half, also the
dulling of the eyes, which are dark blue in the picture, gives a
look of weakness in the photograph that is not quite pleasant.
The second subject is, as you will know well, the old, ever-new
motive of Paolo and Francesca. I endeavoured to put in as much
glow and passion as possible without causing the least offence;
this picture also would, perhaps, have pleased you in colour.
How I should like to show it to you, my dear master! However,
you will no doubt send me your candid opinion of the photographs
in a few lines, and not spare criticism.
I am exceedingly curious to know how _your_ work is getting on.
What are you working at just now? When is the fresco to be
begun? What easel pictures have you undertaken? I want to know
all that. I also hope with all my heart, my dear master, that
your health keeps good, that your wife and children are all
well. Please remember me most kindly to your family and all in
Frankfurt who remember me. And yourself, my dear friend, keep in
remembrance.--Your grateful pupil,
FRED LEIGHTON.
_Translation._]
2 ORME SQUARE, BAYSWATER, LONDON,
_June 30, 1861_.
MY DEAR FRIEND,--Forgive my not having thanked you sooner for
your kind note. The same thing has happened to me as to you:
work has left me but little leisure for writing. Now, however,
my hearty thanks for the open sincerity with which you have
spoken of my latest work, I am only sorry that you have not gone
into it even more closely. I shall endeavour in my present works
to diminish the excessive mannerism of the lines, which will be
all the easier for me as I am now painting principally from
nature; in my last picture the subject permitted that but
little. In any case I hope, dear master, that you will always
speak to me with the same candour; it is the best proof to me
that I still possess your friendship.
I am extremely eager to see how far your works have got on.
Amongst them, however, my dear friend, keep in remembrance your
grateful pupil,
FRED LEIGHTON.
_P.S._--I notice with regret that already I do not write a
German letter with my former fluency.
In a letter to his sister, Mrs. Matthews, January 24, 1860, Leighton
wrote: "I am horrified to hear the account you give of Mrs. Browning.
I knew she was a confirmed invalid, but had no idea that one of her
lungs was already gone! What will poor Browning do if she dies? He
adores her, you know."
LONDON, _July 1861_.
DEAREST MAMMY,--Thanks for your kind letter, which I have been
unable to answer till now. I had heard of poor Browning's
bereavement; we were all very much shocked at it, knowing, as we
do, how entirely irreparable his loss is. I wrote a few lines to
him that he might know how sincerely I grieved with him; I don't
at all know what were the circumstances of her death, we have no
particulars.
Leighton undertook to design the monument over Mrs. Browning's grave
in the English Cemetery at Florence. The work appealed to him in
every sense, and remains as a permanent memorial of those friendships
which made the years spent in Italy so full, so rich, so entrancing.
With reference to the monument Browning writes:--
CHEZ M. LARAISON,
STE. MARIE, PRES PORNIC, LOIRE INFERIEURE,
_August 30, 1863_.
MY DEAR LEIGHTON,--Don't fret; you will do everything like
yourself in the end, I know; wait till the end of October, as
you propose. I cannot return before the beginning of it, though
I would do so were it necessary, but it is not, for I have only
this morning received the notification of which I told you, that
"the marble is in the sculptor's studio." We shall therefore be
in full time.
The portrait you saw was the autotype which I lent to Mr.
Richmond, and concerning which I wrote to him before leaving
London, directing that it should be sent to you. He engaged to
let you have it whenever you desired. I therefore enclose (oh,
fresh attack on your envelopes and postage stamps!) a note which
I presume he will attend to, and which you will of course burn
should he have sent the portraits meanwhile. I have also two
others nearly like that portrait, taken the same day with it,
which I was unable to find, but which shall be found on my
return.
Dear Leighton, I can only repeat, with entire truth, that you
will satisfy me wholly. I don't think, however, you can make me
more than I am now--Yours gratefully and lovingly,
ROBERT BROWNING.
Continuation of letter to his mother:--
I am glad to hear Papa reported favourably of my work, and that
you like the photographs of my pictures now in the Exhibition. I
am very glad also that Gussy liked the _receding figure_ in the
"Lieder ohne Worte," as it was a favourite also with me, the
_tallness_ of said figure was inseparable from the sentiment of
it in my mind. I have a photograph of that picture still
remaining; I will give it to Gus when she comes through, I can
get myself another some future day. I am getting on tol-lol with
my pictures, but am rather anxious just now about the extreme
difficulty of getting a peacock. I want to _buy_ one to have the
skin prepared, and if I don't get one soon they will all lose
their tails; and there I shall be--in a fix! A friend of mine
has written to Norfolk, and hopes to get me one. The season,
even in the extremely moderate form in which I take it, is a
fatiguing affair. I get up late and never feel fresh and
vigorous. I have serious thoughts of entirely giving it up next
year. I will go now and then to stay at people's houses, but not
to their parties--_le jeu ne vaut pas la chandelle_. _A propos_
of country houses, I am going to spend a few days with Lady
Cowper at Wrest Park towards the end of this month; there are to
be theatricals and great hilarity. And now about Bath, I hope,
dearest Mammy, you won't be hurt if I propose to come at the end
of the _first_ week in September instead of the _last_ week in
August. The fact is I have a great "giro" I want to make, and if
I could take Bath in the regular progress it would be both a
great convenience and a saving of expense. I mean to stay three
weeks in Bath and have thoughts of painting a _pot-boiler_ of
little Walker if he is still handsome. I wish Papa would look
after him, and let me know what he is doing and how he is
looking. These are my plans: I want, whilst the summer is still
hot and green, to visit South Hampshire, New Forest, Isle of
Wight, South Devon, North Devon, and so work my way round to
Bath, whence to Stourhead for a few days; then to Mason in
Staffordshire, and then back to London. My pictures will be done
long before the Exhibition next opening, so I can manage all
this. I shall visit the following people: Sartoris, Aides,
perhaps Morants, I hope _Tennyson_, Lady E. Bulteel, and look in
at Mount Edgcombe--the rest of the journey will be purely
artistic.
CLOVELLY, _Sunday_.
DEAREST MAMMY,--I could not find time to answer your note (for
which best thanks) before I left Ventnor. I am now in one of the
most picturesque spots on the north coast of Devon--the
_rendezvous_ of painters and tourists, the _pays de cocagne_ of
Hook and one of the chief lions of my trip.
The places I have visited so far are Salisbury, Exeter, and
Bideford; with the latter I was much disappointed, and think it
far below its reputation; not so Salisbury, which is a most
interesting town, full of quaintness and character beyond my
expectations; it has, however, a look of decay and depopulation
about it which makes me feel awfully low-spirited. The
Cathedral, perhaps, _altogether_ rather disappointed me--though
of course much about it is very beautiful; then, too, its
general (internal) aspect is entirely marred by a brutal coat of
whitewash laid on in the last century, covering up the marble
columns and killing out all life and colour. Unfortunately, it
would cost very many thousands to restore the church and its
ancient glories.
To-morrow I start for Ilfracombe--the next day for Lynton.
Again, later:--
Many thanks for your letter just received and for all the kind
wishes therein contained, which I most warmly return for you
all--a double portion to dear Taily in honour of her birthday.
I will come on the 8th if I possibly can, and bring some little
sketches to show you.
I shall exhibit this year IF I get done in time, but I can't
hurry--it is entirely immaterial whether I exhibit or not--I
would rather, of course.
We have begun drilling, but it will be many weeks before we get
to rifle-shooting--this is the sort of thing we are doing now.
Our uniform is plainness itself, all grey, and the cheapest in
London.
I weather the cold so-so--I have a gas-stove beside my
fireplace, but am still tolerably cold when it comes very sharp.
My dinner with Millais was put off till Monday next--I think
Millais _charming_ and _so_ handsome.
I am exceedingly sorry, dear Mamma, you have reckoned on me for
cotillon figures--with the exception of the one I led at Bath
once, _I have not seen one for years_, and have not the faintest
notion what is done--I will, however, _back_ anybody else with
great zeal.
I was indeed truly sorry to hear of Lord Holland's death--I had
expected it for some time; nothing could exceed their kindness
to me, and the House is an irreparable loss to me.
I hope to have a very merry Christmas Day. I am running down to
Westbury (the Sartoris); there is to be a tree; I come up again
of course Monday morning.
I am never _ill_. I take my human frailty out in never being
very well--never equal to much fatigue.
LONDON, 1861.
My dinner at Millais' yesterday was very pleasant. I like him
extremely, and his wife appears an agreeable person. I met there
John Leech, the man who does all those admirable caricatures in
_Punch_--he is a very pleasant and gentleman-like person.
I don't feel sure whether I told you that I am about shortly to
send my "Paris and Juliet" with the "Samson" to America on spec.
Mrs. Kemble will do all she can to godmother them; I got a very
kind letter from her from Boston the other day--she has asked me
to send her a little sketch of Westbury with the pictures--of
course I shall.
The following letters from Mrs. Fanny Kemble reveal the interest which
this friend took in Leighton and his pictures, also the genius of the
writer in penning delightful epistles:--
REVERE HOUSE, BOSTON,
_Friday, December 9, 1861_.
DEAR MR. LEIGHTON,--It was very kind and amiable of you to write
to me of Westbury and my sister; you cannot imagine the
forlornness one feels when, to the loss of the sight of those
one loves, is added that bitter silence which leaves one almost
ignorant, as death does, of all the conditions in which our
friends remain. God knows, written words are a poor substitute
for the sound of a voice and the look of living eyes; still,
when they are all that can reach us of those towards whom our
hearts yearn, it is miserable not to be able to obtain them. The
friends with whom I constantly correspond see and know little or
nothing of her, and so no one of them can in any degree supply
me with the news that I most desire from across the sea--how it
is faring with my sister; so I am very grateful to you for your
intelligence, which was just what I would give anything for
(though not in itself, perhaps, very satisfactory) out here,
where I think you have none of you an idea how _banished_ I
feel. Now, my dear Mr. Leighton, to your business, about which
I began my inquiries almost immediately after my return to this
country, but only received the last of these communications last
night, and you perceive the other was incomplete without it. You
must command me entirely in any and every thing that I can do to
forward your aims, and I will promise to be _severe_ in my
obedience to any instructions you may like to give me. New York
is undoubtedly a better market for pictures, and therefore a
better place to exhibit them than this, but I do not know
anybody whom I trust there. Mr. Ordway, however, seems inclined
to take charge of your pictures if they are exhibited there.
Good-bye. Do not fail to employ me in this matter to the fullest
extent that I can be of the least use to you; it will be a great
pleasure to me to help you in any way that I possibly
can.--Yours very truly,
FANNY KEMBLE.
I wish you would send me out some sketch of Westbury with your
pictures, if they come. I wish for one very much. I wish you
could see the world here just now--a sky as pure and brilliant
as it is possible to conceive, and every bough, branch, blade of
grass and withered leaf coated with clear crystal and _blazing_
with prismatic colours. There are, every now and then,
_sentiments_ in this sky that I have seen in none other. There
are certain points of view in which Boston, rising beyond broad
sheets of water that repeat them still more tenderly, seems to
me worthy of a great painter. But do not come out and try unless
you are quite sure of going back, or you will break your heart.
REVERE HOUSE, BOSTON,
_Friday, February 7_.
I feel terrified, when you speak of my determining what is to be
done with your pictures when they arrive in Boston, for
assuredly I am utterly incompetent to any such decision, and can
only refer myself to the judgment of my friend Mr. Cabot, who
will certainly advise for the best in the matter, but who,
nevertheless, is not infallible. I should think it rather late
in the season for exhibiting them here, but again would not take
upon myself to say. I do not know what the percentage on sale
here is, but presume it is not higher than in London. But here
people exhibit their pictures at a shilling a head, _i.e._ put
them in a room hung round with black calico, light up a flare of
gas above them, and take a quarter of a dollar from every sinner
who sees them. Two of Churche's pictures (he is a great American
artist, though you may never have heard of him) have been, or
rather are, at this moment so exhibiting--his "Falls of
Niagara," and a very beautiful landscape called the "Heart of
the Andes." Both these pictures were exhibited in London, I know
not with what success; they have both considerable merit, but
the latter I admire extremely. Page had a "Venus" here the other
day, exhibited by gas-light in a black room; but indeed, dear
Mr. Leighton, it sometimes seems to me as if you never could
imagine or would consent to the gross charlatanry which is
practised--how necessarily I do not know--here about all such
matters. Certainly your gold medal should be trumpeted--and your
profession of art and your confession of faith, and anything
most private and particular that you would not wish known, had
better be published in several versions in all the newspapers of
the United States. Your pictures must be placarded over all the
walls in all the sizes of type conceivable, and all the colours
of the rainbow. If you will write me your personal history, and
rampant puffs of your own performances, I will copy them and
send them to those sources of public instruction, the
enlightened public press. Moreover, I will go and sit before
them daily and utter exclamations of admiration on every note in
my voice, and if anything else remains to be done I will do it;
but you must not make me in any way responsible for the result,
because it is not in the least likely that you will write
yourself up to the mark of puffing as practised here. Basta--I
will take the very best advice and do the very best I can about
the pictures, and rejoice in my heart to see them myself, that I
can assuredly promise you. By-the-bye, I gave your address only
a few days ago, to be sent to a person now in Europe negotiating
with French and English artists for pictures to exhibit. I
wonder if he will find you and enlighten your mind about art in
America. Thank you for the account of Westbury and its Christmas
festivities, and thank you, thank you for the sketch of the home
you are so very kind as to promise me; it will be a blessed
treasure to see, for you cannot conceive the dreary
heart-sickness that utterly overcomes me here sometimes. To-day
I was singing the quartette in "Faust" that we used to sing, and
was obliged to stop for crying. I wished extremely to have a
photograph of the house, and, if I could only have afforded it,
should have asked you to sell me every sketch you took about the
place. The skies here are beautiful, wonderful in their
transparent purity. They seem to me of a different _texture_
from any other I ever saw, more diaphanous, and there is a
colour in them when they are quite free from clouds that
surpasses in delicacy all other skies I have seen. It is like
the complexion of the young girls here, a miracle of evanescent
brilliant softness. My winter is wearing along pretty tolerably.
My Christmas was passed entirely alone, but I am quite used to
that. I am beginning to be much occupied about the plans and
drawings for a house, which I am thinking of building on some
land I own in Massachusetts. It is a great undertaking, and
really at fifty years old seems hardly worth while, and yet,
till I am ready for my coffin, I must have some place in which
to rest my head. Perhaps some fine day--who knows?--you will
come to see me there. That would be a very pretty plot, and I
think I need not say how welcome you would be, dear Mr.
Leighton, to yours very truly,
FANNY KEMBLE.
LENOX, _Tuesday_.
A thousand thanks, my dear Mr. Leighton, for the minute account
of Westbury--as I cannot know anything about my sister, it is
something to know how her house is settled and decorated, and
how the place where she lives looks. The red velvet drawing-room
sounds gorgeous, and it must be very becoming to the pictures.
Of your pictures that have "wandered west" you may be sure I
should have written you, if I had had the good news to give you
that either of them was sold, but I am sorry to say this is not
the case. The New York Exhibition is now closed, and the
pictures have been sent back to Boston, where they are at
present hanging in the Athenaeum under the care of Mr. Ordway,
who wishes, but does not much hope, to be able to sell them. It
seems that one or two people asked the price of the pictures in
New York, but considered it, when they received the
information, "rather a tall price." I am a little consoled at
the ill success of this venture of yours, by Henry Greville's
writing me that your hands are full of orders, for which you are
to be well paid. Your small acquaintance, Fanny, who left me
this morning after a visit of a month, propounded to me the
expediency of desiring the purchaser of the reconciliation of
old Capulet and Montague to buy as its pendant the "Paris and
Juliet"; and though she has no personal acquaintance with the
lover of art in question, she said, when she got to Philadelphia
she should set about intriguing to that effect; and she had my
full permission to try and to succeed. I wish I could tell you
anything pleasant in return for your description of the rooms at
Westbury, but I have nothing very cheerful to impart. I have
been quite unwell, and am still very far from flourishing; my
spirits are much depressed, and the life I lead, of incessant
worry and discomfort with servants and all one's domestic
arrangements, is something quite too tedious to relate--and that
indeed it would be impossible to _realise_, as the Yankees say,
unless you witnessed it. I saw Hetty Hosmer three days after her
arrival in Boston. Her father is a hopeless invalid, and she
will certainly not leave him while he lives; but I suspect that
he is likely to die before this year ends, and then she will
return to live in Italy. The State of Missouri has voted two
thousand pounds for a statue of Colonel Benton, one of its
"great men," to be erected by her, which, of course, is a whole
plume of feathers in her cap.
Good-bye, dear Mr. Leighton; believe me always yours most truly,
FANNY KEMBLE.
You must not fail to write to me any directions that you wish
observed about your pictures, while they remain here. I am only
too glad to try to serve you.
LENOX, BERKSHIRE, MASSACHUSETTS,
_Monday, March 12_.
Pictures of very high pretensions are exhibited, like the scenes
in a theatre, by gas-light, and advertised in coloured _posters_
all over the streets like theatrical exhibitions. However, it is
no use vexing your soul with what neither of us can help. I
cannot and will not accept the responsibility of disposing of
your pictures; but I will get the best advice I can about them
and follow it, and spare no personal pains to have them
advantageously dealt with; only, I hope it will not be very long
before they arrive, because my own stay in Boston is now drawing
to a close, and after the end of the present month I shall be at
Lenox, a remote village in a lonely hill district one hundred
miles from Boston, or rather I should say seven hours distant
from the nearest railroad station, which is six miles away again
from Lenox. When once I come here--for I write at this moment
from this snowy wilderness--it will be to remain for the next
nine or ten months, so you see I must make all arrangements
about your pictures before taking my leave of civilised
communities. I came up to this place from Boston yesterday to
look at a house that I think of hiring for a year, and shall
return to the city next week. I have left your pictures (should
they arrive during my absence) to the charge of a friend of mine
who is one of the directors of the Athenaeum, and will see that
they are properly received. Thank you a thousand times for the
promised likeness of Westbury, which will be a treasure to me.
What a contrast is my recollection of that charming place, to
the abomination of desolation of the dreary savage winter
landscape of low black hills, bristling with wintry woods and
wide, bare, snow-covered valleys, that stretch before me here at
this moment. I am well, but much worn out with my last course of
public readings, which I had just ended in Boston. My daughters
are well, and write to me tolerably frequently; the eldest seems
happy and contented in her marriage; your small acquaintance,
Fanny, writes to me from Savannah of sitting with the doors and
windows wide open, and wiping the perspiration from her face in
the meantime; and here everything is buried in snow. I shall
wait till I return to Boston to finish this, as I shall hope to
send you then news of the arrival of your pictures.
_Wednesday, March 14._
Your pictures are arrived, my dear Mr. Leighton; they reached
Boston last week while I was absent at Lenox. I only returned
yesterday evening, and found a letter from Mr. Cabot announcing
that they were at the Athenaeum; thither I went this morning, and
spent a most delightful half-hour in looking at them. I like
the "Samson" very much indeed; I think it is beautiful, and am
charmed with the treatment of the subject, though you have
chosen a different moment for illustration from the one I had
imagined. This evening I have been having a long conversation
with Mr. Ordway about the future destinations of the pictures. I
am little sanguine, I regret to say, about their being bought
here, for the only rich picture purchaser that I know here has a
predilection for French works of art, small _tableaux de genre_,
and Troyon's landscapes. However, it must be tried. Mr. Ordway
says he will exhibit your pictures in the Athenaeum, which
(should they be sold while there) will save you your commission,
because, being an artist himself, he will not charge you any. If
after due experiment they do not seem likely to sell here, we
will send them to New York, and then to Philadelphia; in short,
the best that can be done for them shall, as far as my agency is
concerned, you may be sure.
BOSTON, _Thursday, March 15_.
I have this moment received your letter of the 25th February,
for which I thank you very much. It does not require any further
answer with regard to your pictures, of the safe arrival of
which I wrote you word last night. I did not tell you,
by-the-bye, that they are both slightly _streaked_ across from
side to side with what Mr. Ordway thinks must have been small
infiltrations of sea-water; he says the pictures are not injured
by them, nor do they indeed appear to be so in the least, and
that he can wipe off the stains with no damage whatever to them.
Thank you for all you tell me of my sister; it is not much,
indeed, nor very cheerful, but it is more than reaches me
through any other channel, and far better than the miserable
conjectures of absolute ignorance. Dear Mr. Leighton, thank you
a thousand times for the _portrait_ of Westbury--it is exactly
what I wished for--but, oh, why could there not be the lovely
upland beyond, and the sheep slowly rolling up and down the
slopes, and the tinkle of the bell, and you and she and they and
all of us. Oh dear, if you could conceive what it is to me to be
_here_, you would know a thousand times better than I can tell
you how precious such a memento of _there_ is to me. Thank you,
too, for the good inspiration of telling me about the change of
place of the pictures at Westbury; it is wonderful how much one
small particular has power to bring the whole of what surrounds
it, back to the mind, and what vividness it gives to the picture
that, in spite of the distinctness with which it was stamped
upon the memory, becomes so soon, and yet so unconsciously,
obliterated in the minor parts that give it charm and vitality.
I spent a long hour to-day again looking at your pictures and
wishing most heartily that I could afford to buy them both.
Good-bye, dear Mr. Leighton; I shall leave this open till
to-morrow, in case I should hear anything more about them before
I go. I enclose the receipts for what I have paid. I suppose it
is all right, but it seems a most monstrous price for mere
conveyance, and indeed reminds us that our humorous forefathers
called _stealing_ _conveying_.
LENOX, BERKSHIRE, MASSACHUSETTS,
_Friday, April 27_.
Your pictures are at present in the New York Exhibition. Mr.
Ordway tells me that it is extremely rare for pictures to sell
without the intervention of dealers. In this country they cry
down and undervalue all pictures that are not expressly
committed to them, and the ignorance of the rich shopkeepers who
purchase works of Art, is so excessive that they do not feel
safe in making any acquisition without the advice and permission
of some charlatan of a dealer, to whom these wiseacres come
saying (verbatim, so Mr. Ordway informed me), "I want some
pictures; can't you recommend any to me?" and then, of course,
the picture-dealer recommends what brings him the highest
percentage; and the man who buys pictures exactly like
looking-glasses, window-curtains, or any other _furniture_ for a
new house, departs satisfied that he possesses a work of Art.
The things that are bought and sold here in the shape of
pictures, and the things that are said about them, _vous
feraient pouffer de rire_, if you did not live in this country.
If you did, they would be like many other proofs of the
semi-civilisation of the people, that would be rather doleful
than otherwise to you. Thank you for all you tell about my
sister and her children. I feel very much both for my sister and
Anne in their separation. I have just parted with my maid Marie,
who has lived with me fifteen years, and who leaves me now
because her health is so much broken down that her physician
tells her, she must go to some other climate or she will die.
So she is gone, and here I remain absolutely alone, looking, not
for the "wrath to come," but what may be supposed no bad
instalment of it--the advent of four new servants with whom I am
to begin housekeeping in my small cottage next week. Just before
leaving Boston I saw Hetty Hosmer. She has come home to her poor
old paralytic father, who, I suppose, is not likely to live very
long. Whenever the event of his death happens, Hetty will gather
up her substance, and depart hence for the rest of her natural
or artistic life. She is very little changed in appearance, and
only a little in manner. She seemed very glad to see me, and so
was I to see her, for she represented to my memory a whole world
of things and places and people that I am fond of. I have not
seen Lord Lyon, and do not expect to do so, as I understand he
does not mean to stir from Washington all the summer, and
thither I shall assuredly not go, though I would go a good way
to see him. I'm told he lives in dread of being married by some
fair American, and it is not always a thing that a man can
escape; but he is too good for that, and I trust will not
succumb to these intrepid little flirts. Good-bye, dear Mr.
Leighton; I have a settled nostalgia, which is the saddest thing
in the world. Your sketch of Westbury is always before me, and
your letters are the most kindly return you could possibly make,
for any service that you could require of me. I wish with all my
heart I might have the great pleasure of writing you, now that
one of your pictures was sold.
Addio.
LENOX, _Friday, June 7_.
Thank you, dear Frederic Leighton, for your letter and the
photographs, by means of which, and your description, I have a
sort of vision (not quite what the Yankees call a "realising
sense") of your pictures. The girl at the fountain is
charming,[20] the other beautiful and terrible, as it should
be.[21] I can well imagine the beautiful effect the sentiment of
the picture must receive from that regretful return, as it were,
of the daylight that has set upon the poor people for ever. In
the English newspapers that are sent to me I looked eagerly
among the notices of the Exhibition for your name, and read the
meagre little bit allotted to each picture. I was especially
delighted with the critic who thinks your "Paolo and Francesca"
too _earthly_ in the intensity of their passions. The gentleman
apparently forgets that it was not in Heaven that Dante met
these poor things. With regard to your other pictures, dear Mr.
Leighton, I think you are right to withdraw them from America. I
wish with all my heart that I could have presented myself with
one of those pictures; however, that is one of the vainest of
all human desires. My income is already docked of two hundred
pounds this year by the disastrous state of public affairs; but,
of course, if one is in the midst of a falling house, one can
hardly hope to avoid bruises and broken bones. The attitude of
England is highly unsatisfactory to the North, who now choose to
consider the whole action of the Government a crusade against
slavery--which it is not, and was not, and will not be except in
the New England state where the Abolitionist party has always
been strongest, and where the character of the people is more of
the nature to make fighters for abstract principles. The
Southerners hate the Yankees, and _vice versa_, for this very
reason; and if the crisis comes really to anything like
fighting, the New England, especially the Massachusetts men,
will probably fight very maliciously as against slaveholders,
and the slaveholders against them as Abolitionists, which _they_
now are, pretty much to a man. A huge volunteer force is levying
and being prepared for action; but in spite of the very
unanimous feeling of the North and North-West, and the warlike
attitude of the South, I shall not believe in anything deserving
the name of war till I see it. The South is without resources
that can avail for a six months' struggle. The North has a huge,
unarmed, undisciplined force of men at its command; but the
Southerners do not want to fight, and neither do the
Northerners; _but_ if any combination of circumstances (and of
course matters cannot stand still, especially with the border
states all _au pied en l'air_) should occasion any collision
accompanied with considerable effusions of blood, I believe the
North would pour itself upon the Southern States and annihilate
the secessionist party. It is extremely difficult to foresee the
probable course of events, but I believe eventually the Southern
States will be obliged to return to their allegiance, and
_then_ I believe the North will, once for all, legislate for the
future limiting of the curse of slavery to those states where it
_now_ exists, and where, of course, under such circumstances, it
would very soon cease to exist, as if it cannot extend itself it
must die. In one sense slavery is undoubtedly the cause of the
present disastrous crisis--and in the profoundest sense, for the
character of the Southerners is the immediate result of these
infernal "institutions"; and but for Southern slavery Southern
"Chivalry," that arrogant, insolent, ignorant, ferocious and
lawless race of men, would never have existed.
Oh, how thankful I shall be to be at home once more! Farewell,
dear Mr. Leighton; pray, if there is anything special to be done
about your pictures, write to me and let me have the pleasure of
doing something for you. Oh, I am so enraged that I could not
get them sold; and yet though you may not think it, I should
have thought it a pity for them to have to live the rest of
their lives here. Thank you again for the photographs; I look at
them constantly. All _such things_ are like being lifted into
another atmosphere from that which surrounds and stifles one
here. Believe me always your obliged and sincere friend,
FANNY KEMBLE.
Emil Devrient's was the best Hamlet I ever saw. It would not
have been if my father's had not been too smooth and harmonious.
I hope I shall see Fechter's.
LENOX, _Thursday, October 11_.
How good an inspiration it was that made you send that beautiful
photograph to me! It came to me really like a special
providence, on the day when I had parted from my children for an
indefinite time, and with more than usual sadness and anxiety;
for my eldest child's health has failed completely since her
confinement, and she came to me for a visit of ten days only,
looking like the doomed, wan image of some woman whose enemies
were wasting her by witchcraft. My small comfortless home was
intolerably lonely to me, and towards sunset I went out to find
some fortitude under the open sky. I wandered into a copse of
beech trees that clothe the steep sides of a miniature ravine
with a brook at the bottom, and here gathered a handful of the
beautiful blue fringed gentian (do you know that exquisite
flower that grows wild in the woods here?). The little glen with
its clusters of mysterious blue blossoms was all but dark, but,
emerging from it, I stood where I saw a wide valley flooded with
the evening light, and hills beyond rising in waves of amber and
smoke colour and dark purple; it was so beautiful that it cannot
be imagined. The autumn has turned all the trees into gold and
jewels, like the enchanted growth of fairy-land, and the whole
world, as I saw it from the entrance of that shadowy dell,
looked as if it was made of precious metals and precious stones.
I was very sad, and stood thinking of our Saviour and the widow
of Nain, and how pitiful He was to sorrowful human creatures,
and with some sparks of comfort in my heart I returned home,
where I found your letter waiting for me. I have told you all
this of my previous state of mind and feeling, because--without
knowing that--you could not conceive how like an express message
of consolation your work appeared to me. May it be blessed to
many hearts for admonition and for consolation as it was to
mine, dear Mr. Leighton. It is no wonder that it seemed to me
beautiful, and I do not think I shall ever sufficiently
disconnect it with this first impression, to be able to judge of
its merit as a work of art; it was, as I said before, a special
Providence to me. I long to have it framed and hung where I can
see it constantly. I have within the last few days moved into a
house which I have hired for the next two years. It is all but
in the village of Lenox, and yet so situated that it commands
from the windows of every room a most beautiful prospect. The
whole landscape is a harmonious confusion of small valleys and
hills, rolling and falling within and around and beyond each
other, like folds of rich and majestic drapery. Oh, what lights
and shadows roam and rest over these hill-sides and in the
hollows between them! The country is very thickly wooded, and
the woods are literally of every colour in the rainbow, all
mixed together under a sky, the peculiar characteristic of which
is not so much softness or brightness, as a transparent purity
that seems as if there was _no_ atmosphere betwixt oneself and
the various objects one sees. I expect this would make it
difficult to paint these beautiful aspects of nature here; but,
oh, how I _do_ wish you could see it, for, in the matter of
American autumnal colouring, seeing alone is believing. The
house itself is very tolerably comfortable, but hideous to
behold both within and without; and I have begun my residence in
it under rather depressing circumstances, _i.e._ without _being
able_ to obtain the necessary servants for the decent comfort of
my daily existence. Ever since the beginning of May I have been
endeavouring, in vain, to procure and keep together a decent
household. Not for one _single week_ have I had my proper
complement of people in the house, and I have done every species
of house-work myself, from cleaning the cellar and kitchen to
washing the tea-cups; it is a state of things as incredible as
the colour of the autumn woods, and as peculiar, thank God, to
America. I am now making my last experiment by trying coloured
servants. Their manners and deportment are generally much better
than those of either the Irish or American, and they seem
capable of personal attachment to their employers, which neither
of the other races are. The incessant worry, discomfort, and
positive fatigue that I have undergone during the whole summer
has completely shaken my nerves, so that I have been in a sort
of hysterical condition of constant weeping for some time past.
I trust, however, it will not be so wretched now, for I am at
any rate close to the village inn, and if I am left without
servants, can go there and get some food; it is a state of
existence _qu'on ne s'imagine pas_. You will not wonder, after
all this, to hear that I declined a ticket to the Prince's ball
at New York, to which the whole population of the United States
are struggling to get admittance; but at the best of times "I am
not gamesome," and feel as if I had swept my own rooms quite too
recently to be fit company for my Queen's son. Thank you, dear
Mr. Leighton, for all you tell me about my sister and the
children; she never writes, you know, and so I am thirsty all
the time for some tidings of her. It is very sad to be so far
away and hear so seldom from those one loves. Good-bye, God
bless you; and thank you once more for the "Vision." I am sorry
I cannot tell you of the sale of either of your pictures; they
are in the Boston Athenaeum, very safe, and highly ornamental to
it, but not, I regret to say, sold. If you wish me to do
anything more about them, you must write me your directions,
which I will fulfil with every attention and accuracy of which I
am capable.
LENOX, _Sunday, November 11_.
I trust before long you will receive your children safe and
sound. I wish the two hundred pounds I have lost this year had
been invested in one of those pictures instead of in St. Louis.
Thank you for your account of Adelaide and her children; it is
not much, but it is all that much better than nothing. The state
of the country is very sad, and any probable termination of the
war quite out of calculable distance. England, no doubt, will
maintain her absolute neutrality in spite of secession, cotton,
and anti-slavery sympathies; it is her only part. Good-bye, dear
Mr. Leighton.
I beg you will not scruple to write me now if there is anything
more that I can do, either in the matter of the pictures or any
other by which I can be of use to you here.
NEW YORK,
_Sunday, March 10_.
I am sure you have not forgotten the charming farmhouse at West
Mion, to which you and your sketch-book were the means of
introducing us, ---- farm: well, his brother is one of the
richest shopkeepers in New York--and, upon the strength of my
visit to the paternal acres in Hampshire, his wife, a funny
little specimen of vivacious vulgarity, called upon me, and I,
of course, upon her. I was shown into a drawing-room at least
thirty feet long, with two massive white marble chimney-pieces,
green silk brocade curtains and furniture to match, magnificent
carpets, mirrors, gildings, hideous _works_ in marble on
scagliola pillars--in short, the most marvellous palace of
shopkeepers' _beaux ideaux_ that you can conceive; through this
to a beautifully fitted-up library; through this to a picture
gallery, noble _seigneur_, _pensez y bien_! Oh, my dear Frederic
Leighton, it was enough to make one fall down and foam at the
mouth, to see such a hideous collection of daubs and to think of
the money hanging on those walls; and then I thought of your
pictures, and why the wretched man couldn't have procured them
for some of his foolish money; and then I begged your pardon
internally for the desecration of imagining your pictures in
such company; and then I gazed amusedly about me, and at length
gave tongue: "Mr. ----," said I, "this is a vastly different
residence from the old homestead in Hampshire." The worthy man
could not see in my heart which way the balance of preference
inclined, and answered with benignant self-satisfaction: "Ah,
well, you see, ma'am, they've been going on there for the last I
don't know how many hundred years, just about in the same social
position; they haven't a notion of the rapidity of our progress
here." I hate to advise you to have your pictures back, for
there really does seem to me to be a _greedy desire for
pictures_ (I cannot qualify in any other way the taste which
covets and buys such things) here; but I suppose pictures, at
any rate, must be what these people want, and will not buy dear
and good ones, when cheap and nasty do as well. I think, while I
am here in New York, I shall take the liberty of making some
further inquiry as to whether the great print and picture seller
here does not think they could be seen to selling advantage in
his shop; in short, it throws me into a melancholy rage to think
what pictures are bought while yours are not. The state of this
country is curious--strange and deplorable beyond precedent in
history, it seems to me; and it is absolutely _impossible_ to
foresee to what issue things are tending. The opinions one hears
are all coloured by the particular bias of the speaker, and the
confusion is so great in the general excitement of sectional
partisanship that even one of the members--and a very
influential one--of the peace convention sent to Washington for
the purpose of proposing terms of conciliation--which should
not, however, compromise the Northern principles--said that
nothing had been done, that all was "sound and fury, and
signifying nothing"--or if anything at present, the confirmed
secession of the Southern, the disruption from the North of the
Northern slave States, and, not impossibly, civil war. Of
course, the more time elapses in palavering before the first
fatal blow is struck, the less probability there is of its being
struck at all; but, on the other hand, the longer the present
state of things continues, the more accustomed people become to
the idea of the dismemberment of the Union, and therefore,
though the clangour of an appeal to arms diminishes, so I think
does the prospect of anything like "making up" the family
quarrel--indeed, if it were patched, and soldered to the very
best, I do not believe that it will ever "hold water again"; but
it is impossible to foresee from day to day what may be the turn
of events.
If I live till a year from this summer I will be in England in
July, and if I live till the November after that I will be in
Rome, and you and Edward and Adelaide have my full permission to
come too.
Good-bye, dear Mr. Leighton. Your letters are a great comfort as
well as pleasure to me; I am extremely obliged to you for them.
I showed my daughter the photograph of your "Vision," and she
was enchanted with it. She has not a cultivated or educated
taste in matters of art--this country affords no means for such
a thing--but she is a person of very fine natural perceptions
and great imagination and sensibility, and she was so charmed
with it that I hope you will not think it foolish or impertinent
in me to tell you of it.
The last political news I have is that the border or Northern
slave States will probably not join the cotton states, in which
case the latter will, of hard necessity, very soon be compelled
to abandon their absurd and infinitely perilous position; but
one does not see the end of it all, for if they _do_ come back
into the Union, it will be under a burning sense of humiliation
which will hardly facilitate their future intercourse with the
North, for humiliation and humility are difficult things, and
the cotton Lucifer under coercion will not be a pleasant devil
to deal with.
LENOX, _Saturday, September 7_.
You owe me nothing, and you will owe me nothing, dear Mr.
Leighton, for expediting your pictures to England. When I wrote
to Mr. Ordway about them desiring him to send them back to you,
and to let me know the amount of any expenses he incurred in
doing so, his reply was that the mere cost of packing and
putting them on board ship would not be worth charging you with,
and that the possession of your pictures in his gallery was well
worth the small outlay of merely despatching them to you. I
hope they will reach you safely. I am sorry, _sorry_ they have
not remained here; but latterly, as you will easily believe,
people's minds have been little inclined to the peaceful arts or
any influences of beauty and grace; moreover, the pockets of the
wealthiest amateurs are affected, as those of their poorer
neighbours are, by the public disasters. My own loss this year
is two hundred pounds of my income. What it may be next year, or
how far my capital itself is safe, is more than anybody can
tell. We are to be taxed moreover beyond all precedent in this
country hitherto, and as it is already nearly the dearest place
in the world to live in, what with onerous imports and the
failure of interest from one's investments it will be simply
ruinous. Thank you for all you tell me of my sister and her
children. I am beginning to _see them again_, as the time when I
may really hope to do so draws nearer. I am sorry for what you
and all my friends tell me about Harry's strong dramatic
propensities. Of course, if he is fit for nothing else, or
fitter for that than anything else, he had better become an
actor, and his being so in England need not prevent his being a
worthy fellow and respectable and respected member of society. I
am, however, much reconciled to what at first disappointed me
extremely--my not being able to bring him out to this country;
for if he should eventually take to the stage, here that is
simply in most instances equivalent to taking to the gutter. My
daughters are both with me just now, and Fanny desires me to
remember her very kindly to you. The incidents of the war which
reach the other side of the water no doubt strike you as amazing
enough; but anything more grotesque than the daily details in
the midst of which we live, you cannot conceive. A young
gentleman, a friend of ours who has just returned from his share
in the campaign in a three months' volunteer regiment (he has
entered the regular army, as a very large proportion of the
volunteers did as soon as their three months' amateur service
expired), described to us a volunteer corps which happened to be
encamped in the neighbourhood of his company. He said they were
one of the finest bodies of men he ever saw. Lumberers, that is,
wood-fellers from the forests of Maine and New Hampshire,
perfectly brave and reckless and daring--perfectly undisciplined
too, to the tune of replying to their officers when ordered to
turn out on guard, "No, I'll be damned if I do," with the most
cheerful good humour. Thereupon the discomfited "superior"
simply turns to some one else and says, "Oh, well--you're so and
so--go." Good-bye; I shall rejoice to see you again, and be once
more at home among people who know how to behave
themselves.--Believe me, always yours most sincerely,
FANNY KEMBLE.
After the Prince Consort's death in 1861 Leighton wrote the following
letter to his younger sister, who was in Italy:
I have just returned from a fortnight in Bath, where I have at
last finished the Johnnies,[22] I believe, and hope you will
like them; they are at all events much improved. I am glad for
the poor lad that the _corvee_ of settling is over; he was dying
to get back to his work. If zeal and enthusiasm can make an
artist, he ought to become one.
I don't attempt to give you home news, as you are amply supplied
with that article by Mamma. Everybody here is in great sorrow
for the poor Queen. She bears up under her overwhelming grief
with admirable fortitude, and expresses her anxious desire to do
_her duty as he_ would have wished it, but she speaks of all
earthly happiness as at an end. The tender sympathy manifested
by the whole nation is touching, but deserved.
Whether there will be war or not, the beginning of the year will
show; it is, I think, more than probable; there is no
probability of the Americans giving up Mason and Slidell. If we
do fight, it will be agreeable to feel that we are supported by
the sympathy and approval of _all Europe_; that we are entirely
in the right is _universally_ recognised, even by those who have
no love for us. Sooner or later, a war with America was, I fear,
unavoidable. There is a limit to what even we can overlook. All
this need not prevent your coming to England that I can see; it
won't stop the Exhibition, nor make any perceptible difference
in anybody's doings, except perhaps the picture buyers.--Your
very affect. brother,
FRED.
_Sunday, 1862._
Arrived here safe and sound on Thursday night, and began my work
on Friday. I am making studies[23] for the "Eastern King" which
I shall begin to paint shortly after New Year. I found the frame
for the large "Johnny" on my return. It improves the picture
very much, and looks very handsome. I also found a letter from
Henry Greville waiting for me. He says the Queen bears up
admirably, because, she says, _he_ would have wished it, but
that she always talks of her earthly career as at an end. The
equerries, &c., will remain attached to the court.
In 1862 Leighton sent eight pictures to the Royal Academy, and six
were accepted. Before the sending in he writes to his father:--
1862.
DEAR PAPA,--I am afraid I don't take exercise _very_ regularly,
still, I walk a _little_ nearly every day.
With regard to the volunteering, the zeal for the matter is
necessarily not what it was when every third man really expected
to be called to defend the country. Nevertheless, the movement
is not dead, but has found a level on which I fancy it will
remain; the _shooting_ will keep it together a good deal. We
(the artists) shall join the great business at Brighton on
Easter Monday.
Had I thought you would have taken my remark about the M. Angelo
and the Johnnies so much to heart, I should have thought twice
before I made it. Against what I said you must set the paragraph
in the _Athenaeum_ two or three weeks back--my doubt is not
whether they will be admired--I think they will be _that_--my
only question is whether they will be _cared_ for. Mrs. Austin
admires and likes the M.A. beyond anything, and if she could
afford it would, I believe, buy it at once.
You will perhaps be surprised to hear that the pictures from
which I expect most are the three which you have not seen--the
"Eastern King" and the two others I mentioned in my last. One of
them is Pocock's smaller order, a girl with a _swan_ (not with
_peacocks_ as the _Athen._ says)--the other is a kitcat of a
girl listening to a shell. Both these are very luminous, and are
in that respect the best things I have done.
And later:--
LONDON, 1862.
DEAR PAPA,--I think I may confirm the report made to you of the
success of my pictures, particularly the "Odalisque" and
"Echoes" (by-the-bye, I have just received a letter from
somebody who wants to know if they are sold). What the papers
say, you have seen. You will be glad to hear that I have
received congratulations on all sides, which gives me the idea
of being tolerably secure; at all events, I got no such last
year, nor indeed at all since the "Cimabue." That two of my
pictures should not have been accepted does not indeed surprise
me, and least of all would it do so if they were rejected on the
score of _number_, but I have reason to suspect that they were
_not_ liked; in fact I _know_ it. I have put my name down as a
candidate for associateship.
I don't think I have anything of interest to communicate; nobody
has as yet asked the price of the "Eastern King" or the "Michael
Angelo." There is no mistake now about what people in this
country like to buying point; whether I shall conform to their
taste is another question.
Pocock liked the "Michael Ang." much, but did not seem to wish
to have it. The same remark applies to the Johnnies.
Millais has been, and liked the yellow woman[24] extremely. I
think he liked them all _of their kind_, but the yellow woman
was his favourite by far. Stephens has also seen my pictures. He
seemed altogether much pleased, but most especially with the
design for the "Eastern King," which is also Fred Cockerell's
favourite.
To his mother he wrote:--
1862.
I have deferred answering your letter till now, that I might be
able to inform you definitely of my fate as regards the Royal
Academy. I have just been there; I must tell you at once the
least pleasant part of my news--they have rejected the large
"Johnny" and "Lord Cowper." On the other hand, the other
pictures are well hung; two (the "Odalisque" and the yellow
woman), _very_ well, being on _the line_ in the _East Room_. The
"Michael Angelo," the "E. King," and the shell girl are just
above the line and well seen--the small "Johnny" just below the
line. I think the pictures all look well, though not so luminous
as in the studio. I am confirmed in my opinion that the Academy
Exhibition is a false test of colour; what looks sufficiently
_silvery there_ is _chalky_ out of it. The "Odalisque" looks
best from general aspects. Lady Cowper wrote me a very nice note
about the rejection of her son's portrait, and said she was
delighted to get it so soon. I am sorry about the large
"Johnny," because my chance of selling it is much diminished.
That Leighton received great encouragement from personal friends there
can be no doubt. The following is one of very many letters he received
which expressed warm appreciation.
64 RUTLAND GATE.
MY DEAR MR. LEIGHTON,--I do not know how to express my thanks to
you. I have this moment come home and found your beautiful
drawing, and can hardly hold my pen, I am in such a state of
delight at possessing such a reminiscence of my favourite
picture. You really _do_ not know what pleasure you have given
me, and I think it _too kind_ of you to have parted with this to
give to me. One thing you may be quite sure of, that the
"Eastern King" will receive the greatest homage to the end of
days from his devoted admirer and your sincere friend,
MARY SARTORIS.[25]
_Past Midnight, Tuesday._
Among Leighton's friends was Charles Dickens. The following notes,
written in 1863, have turned up in a packet of miscellaneous
correspondence:--
OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND,"
NO. 26 WELLINGTON STREET, STRAND, LONDON, W.C.,
_Thursday, April 9, 1863_.
MY DEAR LEIGHTON,--I owe you many thanks for your kind reminder.
It would have given me real pleasure to have profited by it had
such profit been possible, but a hasty summons to attend upon a
sick friend at a distance so threw me out on Friday and Saturday
in obliging me to prepare for a rush across the Channel, that I
saw no pictures and had no holiday. I was blown back here only
last night, and believe that I shall deliver your message to
Mrs. Collins to-day; that is to say, I am going home this
afternoon and expect to find her there.
When the summer weather comes on, I shall try to persuade you to
come and see us on the top of Falstaff's Hill. A hop country is
not to be despised by an artist's eyes.--Faithfully yours
always,
CHARLES DICKENS.
GAD'S HILL PLACE,
HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT,
_Saturday, July 18, 1863_.
MY DEAR LEIGHTON,--Shall I confess it? I never went out to
breakfast in my life, except once to Rogers'. But what I might
have done under this temptation is a question forestalled by my
having engaged to go down to Bulwer Lytton's in Hertfordshire on
Monday, to stay a few days.--Cordially yours,
CHARLES DICKENS.
It was in 1863 that Leighton paid the notable visit to his friend of
the Roman days, George Mason, to whom the world's Art owes so much.
Assuredly, without Leighton's encouragement and help, those lovely
idylls which stand with the most precious treasures of the English
school of painting would never have been created. Mason had returned
to England in 1856; he married and settled in his own manor-house,
Wetley Abbey. Children were born and expenses increased, and little or
nothing was there with which to meet them. After Rome England seemed a
hopeless place to work in, and Mason's surroundings were quite dumb to
his artistic sense. Leighton, when he heard of his depression and
poverty, sought him out in his rural retreat, beamed mental sunshine
on his spirits, made him walk with him, pointing out the pictorial
beauties of Mason's own native country, and ended by taking him a tour
through the Black Country. Mason's poetic sense was again awakened; an
artistic purpose was again inspired; and, feeling the despair of
hopeless poverty removed (Leighton was ever ready with substantial
aid), he painted the pictures for which the world has so much reason
to be grateful. When in 1872--nine years after this visit--George
Mason died, Leighton arranged for a sale of his pictures and property,
from the proceeds of which his wife and children obtained an income of
L600 a year. Leighton wrote to Mrs. Matthews at the time of Mason's
death: "Poor Mason's death has been a great shock to me, though indeed
I should have been prepared for it at any time. His loss is quite
irreparable for English Art, for he stood entirely alone in his
especial charm, and he was one of the most lovable of men besides."
FOOTNOTES:
[8] The critics, judging from the following extracts, were amiably
inclined towards him that year:--"Among the pictures familiar to London
loungers of 1858, is Mr. F. Leighton's scene from 'Romeo and Juliet,' a
work lost and, it may be submitted, undervalued, owing to the
disadvantageous place given it in Trafalgar Square. The depth and
richness of its colour, the picturesque manner in which the story is
told, the contrast in some of the heads, that, for instance, of Friar
Lawrence, hopeful in the consciousness of knowledge of Juliet's secret,
with that of the entrancing maiden of Verona, or again with that of the
weeping nurse, whose grief is a trifle too _accentue_. The truthful
conception and careful labour of this picture have now a chance of
being appreciated, and but that Pre-Raphaelitism is resolute not to
give in, might fairly have entitled it to the prize bestowed
elsewhere."--_Athenaeum_, 1858.
"We will take the second-named gentleman first, and come at once to his
'Fisherman and Syren.' The picture is not of any commanding size, nor
does it relate any very exciting legend. The story is of the mystic
Undine tinge, and with a shadowy semblance in it to that strange
legend, current among the peasants of Southern Russia, of the 'White
Lady' with the long hair, who, with loving and languishing gestures,
decoys the unwary into her fantastic skiff, then, pressing her baleful
lips to theirs, folds them to her fell embrace, and drags them
shrieking beneath the engulfing waves. The 'Fisherman and Syren' of Mr.
Leighton has something of this unreal, legendary fatality pervading it
throughout. There is irresistible seductiveness on the one side,
pusillanimous fondness on the other. That it is all over with the
fisherman, and that the syren will have her wicked will of him to his
destruction, is palpable. But it is not alone for the admirable manner
in which the story is told that we commend this picture; the drawing is
eruditely correct, most graceful, and most symmetrical. The syren is a
model of form in its most charming undulations. The fisherman is a type
of manly elegance. That Mr. Leighton understands, to its remotest
substructure, the vital principle of the line of beauty, is pleasurably
manifest. But there is evidence here even more pleasing that the
painter, in the gift of a glowing imagination, and a refined ideality,
in his mastery of the nobler parts of pictorial manipulation, is worthy
to be reckoned among the glorious brotherhood of disciples of the
Italian masters--of the grand old men whose pictures, faded and
time-worn as they are, in the National Gallery hard by, laugh to scorn
the futile fripperies that depend for half their sheen on gilt frames
and copal varnish. This young artist is one of Langis' and Nasasi's
men. He has plainly drunk long and eagerly at the painter's Castaly.
The fount of beauty and of grace that assuaged the thirst of those who
painted the 'Monna Lisa' and the 'Belle Jardiniere'; who modelled the
'Horned Moses' and the 'Slave'; who designed Peter's great Basilica,
and the Ghiberti Gates at Florence."--_Daily Telegraph_, 3rd May 1858.
[9] The Prince of Wales, who lent the picture to the exhibition of
Leighton's works at Burlington House, 1897.
[10] Mr. Augustus Craven's wife, _nee_ Pauline la Ferronnay, was the
authoress of the famous book, _Le Recit d'une soeur_, in which several
of the most charming scenes took place at Naples.
[11] Mr. George Aitchison wrote: "In 1859, while at Capri, he drew the
celebrated Lemon Tree, working from daylight to dusk for a week or two,
and giving large details in the margin of the snails on the tree."
[12] The drawing had been lent to Ruskin at the time he was lecturing
at Oxford.
[13] Leighton knew Mr. Chorley through Mrs. Sartoris. He accompanied
the great _cantatrice_ when she made a tour abroad. "Mrs. Kemble's
children and their nurse are with them, and Mary Anne Thackeray, a
life-long friend, and Mr. Chorley, and the great Liszt, who
subsequently joined them in Germany."--Preface by Mrs. R. Ritchie to "A
Week in a French Country House," by Mrs. Adelaide Sartoris.
[14] Leighton was perfectly right. "Orphee" was produced at Covent
Garden, and the great artist, Madame Viardot, sang in it superbly. The
opera was given after one or two acts of a well-known work, and I can
vouch for the fact, having been one of the audience, that the house was
very nearly empty at the close of "Orphee," Lord Dudley and a very few
true lovers of music only remaining in the stalls to the end.
[15] The lady was Mrs. Sandbach, a _Hollandaise_, who was Maid of
Honour to the Queen of Holland. In after years, on an occasion when she
and I paid a visit together to Leighton's studio in Holland Park Road,
she recounted the incident above related by Leighton, which happened in
the palace at the Hague when she was in waiting. She also added that
from her description Leighton painted what she had seen in her dream to
perfection; but that he subsequently added two _amorini_, which in her
opinion did much to mar the otherwise true feeling of the picture.
[16] See sketches in the Leighton House Collection. The picture itself
is, I believe, in America.
[17] _Ibid._
[18] A visitor to Leighton's "private view" wrote him the following
suggestions:--
13 CHESTER TERRACE, N.W., _Easter Monday_.
DEAR MR. LEIGHTON,--Pardon intrusion. I thought much of your
beautiful pictures after my yesterday's visit, and I anticipated
a struggle with the difficulty you mentioned of worthily naming
them.
Don't think me impertinent for volunteering the result. It
seemed impossible without verbal description to explain the
sacred subject to the profane imagination, while a prose
translation of its sentiment must be heavy and subversive of
romance.
I think, were I fortunate enough to own the picture, I would
call it "Not Yet," and I would put some little lines in the
catalogue, which, for aught any one knows, might have come from
some volume of rhyme, and which should explain that it is a
story of a dream, and that the rejection is not final: something
in this spirit, only better:--
"Not yet--not yet--
Still there is trial for thee, still the lot
To bear (the Father wills it) strife and care,
With this sweet consciousness in balance set
Against the world, to soothe thy suffering there.
Thy Lord rejects thee not."
Such tender words awoke me, hopeful, shriven,
To life on earth again from dream of heaven.
For the beauty at the fountain I once thought the best title
might be some couplet like the following:--
"So tranced and still half-dreamed she, and half-heard
The splash of fountain and the song of bird."
But my wife, from my description of the picture, suggested a
name better suited to the "suggestiveness" of the work:--
"Lieder ohne Worte": don't you think it rather pretty?
In the multitude of counsellors some one says there's wisdom,
and this liberty we take with you may beget some thought that
had not struck you.
I have Mr. Cockerell's commands to express to you the
gratification his visit afforded him and his sense of your
kindness and attentions.--I am, faithfully yours,
RALPH A. BENSON.
Another friend wrote of "Lieder ohne Worte," adding a poem suggested by
the "Francesca":--
TRINITY HOUSE, E.C., _8th April 1861_.
MY DEAR LEIGHTON,--If you did not paint better than I write you
would not be the man of abounding promise that you are.
What I meant to say was that Law and Restraint are healthy life
and the infraction of them ghostly death and dissolution, and
that meaning is in your picture, whether you know it or not.
Your "daemon" may have put it there, but then you can trust
_your_ daemon.
Still, best love to the little girl at the fountain, who knows
that though Speech may be silver, Silence is Golden.--Ever
yours, with many thanks,
ROBIN ALLEN.
FRED. LEIGHTON, Esq.
LEIGHTON'S "FRANCESCA DI RIMINI."
"That day they read no more." Virtue grows faint,
One hand lies powerless, the wife's sweet face
Is half-convulsed by loss of self-restraint.
Outstretched to resist, remaining to embrace,
The extended arm will clasp her guilty lover,
And all the bright, pure world beyond for her be over.
Their very forms grow blurred and change their colour
Into dim snaky wreaths of purple pallor,
Fading away with Honour's fading Law
Into the pale sad ghosts that Dante saw;
Which we too see, crowned with departing glory,
When Leighton's genius deepens Dante's Story.
R.A.
_6th April 1861._
[19] D.G. Rossetti, in a letter to William Allingham, May 10, 1861,
writes: "Leighton might, as you say, have made a burst had not his
pictures been ill-placed mostly--indeed one of them (the only very good
one, _Lieder ohne Worte_) is the only instance of very striking
unfairness in the place."
[20] "_Lieder ohne Worte._"
[21] "Paolo and Francesca."
[22] These two pictures were painted from John Hanson Walker. Leighton
sent both to the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1862 with the titles
"Duet" and "Rustic Music." The first only was accepted.
[23] See water-colour and chalk drawings: Leighton House Collection.
[24] "Sea Echoes."
[25] The Hon. Mrs. Alfred Sartoris, sister-in-law of Leighton's friend,
Mr. Edward Sartoris.