By the death of Lord Leighton, the Royal Academy loses a great
President and England a many-sided artist, who was certainly not far
removed from being a great painter. It was more, perhaps, by the
combination of so many various qualities of character and talent
than by the firm possession of one especial vein of genius, that
‘our dear President, our admirable Leighton’--to use the words most
fittingly applied to him by Sir John Millais--had come, of recent
years at least, to be distinguished and known. The painter’s and
designer’s art, evidenced in his youth, about forty years ago, by the
‘Procession of Cimabue,’ had not only never fallen into disuse, but
had never come to occupy, in his mind, a secondary or comparatively
unregarded place. But, along with the well-maintained devotion to the
craft to which he had first vowed his affections a full generation
ago, there had sprung up, partly of necessity and partly by reason of
Lord Leighton’s exceptional temperament, many interests, exclusive
of merely official duties, which occupied time and thought--so much
so that if he had not added to the tastes of an artist the habits and
qualifications of a great man of affairs, it would have been impossible
for him to have successfully crowded into his life all the pursuits
that engrossed it. It is easy for the ‘admirable Crichton,’ in these
modern times, to degenerate into the Mr. Brook of _Middlemarch_--the
not unamiable dilettante who was pretty certain to have once ‘taken up’
everything, and was pretty certain also to have dropped it. But Lord
Leighton, great as was the diversity of his interests, was absolutely
systematic and thoroughgoing; and, outside his especial art (in which
his place, whatever may have been his deficiencies, was peculiar and
unquestioned), he not only practised but excelled.
Leighton was linguist, student, antiquary, man of fashion,
administrator, even philanthropist. His oratory was an accomplishment;
albeit, in its addiction to ingenious ornament, his style was not quite
of our period. His tact in dealing with men and with affairs was almost
faultless. His opinions were decided, and he never concealed them; yet,
in uttering them, he hardly ever gave offence--never, indeed, to the
reasonable. When all these things are remembered, and when there is
added to them the recollection of a presence elegant and stately, and
of a manner which, though it could well keep intruders at a distance,
had singular and winning charm for the many whom it was intended to
please, it will be fully realised what a difficult and heavy honour
awaits Lord Leighton’s successor in his great function--that of
President of the Royal Academy, and official representative of English
Art. The Academy contains several painters of genius; several amiable
and distinguished men of the world; but as those who can look back the
furthest declare that no past President of whom they had any knowledge
ever equalled Lord Leighton, it may well be doubted whether a future
President is likely to equal him.
So much by way of rough indication of the character of the man, and of
the public man. A further explanation of his individuality must, of
course, be discovered in his Art; and even a cursory survey of it--and
of the creations which were the events of his life--will disclose
something of his strength, and something, too, of his weakness. The
son of a physician whose life was extended to a most ripe old age, and
grandson of Sir James Leighton, also a doctor--long resident at the
Court of St. Petersburg--Frederic Leighton was born at Scarborough,
on the 3rd December 1830. A Yorkshireman in fact--like William Etty,
and another remarkable artist of a later generation, Thomas Collier--no
one could have been less of a Yorkshireman in character than was
the late President. To what is understood or conjectured to have
been a Jewish strain in his blood are possibly to be attributed his
profoundly artistic inclinations, which were manifested very early,
and which, as the public knows, dominated the whole of his career. It
is recorded that young Leighton received drawing lessons in Rome as
long ago as the year 1842; and not two years afterwards he entered as
a student at the Academy of Berlin. With Rome, perhaps, began that
long series of _Wanderjahre_ which made him so cosmopolitan an artist
and so many-sided a man. He had some general education at Frankfort;
then, after a removal to Florence, where the American sculptor, Hiram
Powers, was consulted with a view to an opinion on his ability, and
prophesied that the boy ‘could become as eminent as he pleased,’
young Leighton’s father withdrew his long-standing objections to the
adoption of painting as a profession; and the new decision was followed
by a sojourn in Brussels and a longer stay in Paris. In Paris the
youth attended a life-school, and copied at the Louvre. Next we hear
of him at Vienna, where he was a pupil of Steinle, himself a pupil
of Overbeck. Of Overbeck’s religious unction, Leighton had never a
perceptible share. Something he no doubt owed to the leaders of the
German Renaissance of Painting; but amongst these, more, it may be,
to Cornelius than Overbeck. After his sojourn in Vienna, he was back
again in Rome--these early and most prolonged wanderings are worthy
of chronicle, because they had so much to do with the formation of
the characteristics of the artist--and it was from Rome that he sent
to the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1855 a picture which made no bid
for immediately popular effect, which was nothing, moreover, of a
‘pot-boiler,’ and which made no concession to ordinary _bourgeois_
liking. It was the canvas in which is depicted, with something of
reticence and grace, and with a very learned draughtsmanship, the
procession which passed through the streets of Florence, on its way to
Santa Maria Novella, when Cimabue’s picture of the Madonna was carried
in the midst, and honour and peculiar recognition--in which a whole
city joined--were bestowed upon its painter. Elegant as the picture
was, it did not lack favour; a certain relative warmth, a certain
romantic spirit, the presentation of the ideal, it may be, in more
homely form, pleased a generation familiar with Dyce, Maclise, and
Cope; and the picture, as it happened, had an immediate success.
Paris was Leighton’s next halting-place, and now, an artist rising
above the horizon, he was no longer likely to seek direct instruction
from any one of the painters who were there at work; but he was
associated with, and was to some extent influenced by, men like Ary
Scheffer (whose ‘Augustine and Monica’ was long appreciated in England)
and Robert Fleury. He contributed almost without intermission, for
the next eight or nine years, to the Royal Academy, and it was in
1864, when he was represented by an ‘Orpheus and Eurydice,’ that he
was elected to the Associateship--becoming in 1869 a full member. The
year of his election to the Associateship was likewise the year of the
exhibition of his charming and seductive invention, ‘Golden Hours.’ To
the painter of mediæval or Renaissance history, and of themes avowedly
classic, there was vouchsafed the expression of the romantic and the
unquestionably poetic, and it is, no doubt, to the certain element of
poetry that is in Lord Leighton’s work--far more, at all events, than
to its austerer qualities of design, which never had any popularity
at all, and which, even amongst painters, have gone terribly out of
fashion--that is to be attributed part of the great favour which his
art has enjoyed. In 1869 was shown ‘Electra at the Tomb of Agamemnon,’
and in 1876 the second great processional, ‘The Daphnephoria.’ Two
years later the ‘Arts of War’--not the least dignified and decorative
of modern frescoes--was finished for South Kensington, where was
already its companion, ‘The Industrial Arts of Peace,’ completed in
1873; another mural painting, that of ‘The Wise and Foolish Virgins,’
having, at an earlier date, been placed in the chancel of a fortunate
parish church in Hampshire. The year of the completion of ‘The Arts
of War’ was that of Lord Leighton’s election to the Presidency of the
Academy, which he obtained, it will be remembered, in direct succession
to Sir Francis Grant, with whose courtly qualities, and with whose
large and manly sympathies, he combined a width of artistic outlook, a
refinement of artistic expression, which had scarcely perhaps belonged
to any President of the Academy since the days of its first leader, Sir
Joshua Reynolds.
President, and knighted in consequence of that distinction in 1878,
Leighton was given a baronetcy in 1886. In the interval he had not
only proved beyond dispute his fitness for the responsibilities of
the official position, which he filled, but--to mention only some
of the most memorable of many works--had completed his own portrait
for the Uffizi, had wrought the really grave and impressive canvas
of Elisha raising the son of the Shunamite widow, and had, in his
peculiar fashion, effected an alliance between luxury in colour and
sculpturesque arrangement of ‘line’ in the great ‘Cymon and Iphigenia.’
In actual Sculpture, too--sharing the ambition of the men of the
Renaissance for a triumph in various mediums--he had produced ‘The
Sluggard.’ It was extraordinarily clever, but perhaps its qualities
were less truly sculptural than was some of his design executed in
the older and more familiar material. Yet, if this particular work
did not possess to the full all the great qualities that might have
been expected in it, the order of Lord Leighton’s talent was one,
nevertheless, which empowered him to succeed thoroughly in Sculpture,
sooner or later; for, in Sculpture, while there was room for the
generally unimpeded play of his own skill in design, there might have
been a relief found from the exercise of his art in a path in which
success to him was more uncertain and capricious--the path of colour.
It is too early, of course, to attempt to settle definitely the place
of Leighton in English Art; but it is certain that his influence,
whether as President or painter, tended to the extension of its vistas.
An upholder of the Classic--never, with all his range, much in love
with Realism--he was yet nothing whatever of a partisan, and--it may
be mentioned as a characteristic detail of him in his daily ways--he
was accustomed from time to time to purchase clever little drawings
(sometimes the very last one would have thought he would care for)
by artists who esteemed him as a President, but who regarded him
very lightly as a practitioner of their own craft. Lord Leighton was
perfectly aware that several circumstances limited--especially of late
years--the appreciation of his work. He was not altogether insensible
of its real defects--at all events, of peculiarities which were defects
upon occasion. He knew that his ‘brush-work’ was not absolutely
‘modern.’ He must have allowed that, now and again, when it was by
no means one of his aims to seek it, the texture of his flesh was
porcelain-like, and thus mainly conventional. He was, confessedly, not
greatly occupied with ‘values’ of colour, with the relation of part to
part. He was at one--perhaps more than they knew it--with many of our
newest artists in demanding a decorative quality; only the decorative
quality of his choice was not always--was, indeed very seldom--that of
theirs. A successful pattern of colour they could understand the virtue
of. The Japanese, or Mr. Whistler, had taught it them. But a successful
pattern of line, they were less capable of appreciating. They, for
example, or some of them, execrated Bouguereau, and resented in some
degree the hospitality prominently offered to that distinguished
Frenchman on the walls of the Academy. Lord Leighton, on the other
hand, was, very possibly, not fully alive to Bouguereau’s vices or
failings--to his mere smoothness, softness, not infrequent vapidness
of human expression. But he valued justly Bouguereau’s possession
of the best Academic graces, of faultless composition and subtle
draughtsmanship. For these things--these best Academic graces--he
himself strove. These, too, he generally, though not always, attained.
In regard to this particular matter, there were times when Leighton
knew himself to be a _vox clamantis in deserto_. But he had his
mission. It is an immense tribute to him to recognise that any
one caring, as he undoubtedly cared, to be acceptable amongst his
fellows--amongst the younger men, even, who were some day to succeed
him--should yet have been so true to his particular message. But Lord
Leighton had an admirable courage as well as a great patience and an
untiring diligence. And there were times, fortunately, when it was
brought home to him beyond cavil, that some educated appreciation
existed of his own especial artistic qualities, as well as of those
human virtues which made him, in many ways, so estimable a man, and so
fitting a leader of men.
(_Standard_, 27th January 1896.)