Frederic Lord Leighton Part 2

[Ill.u.s.tration: GOLDEN HOURS (1864)]

CHAPTER III

YEAR BY YEAR--1864 TO 1869

In 1864 Leighton was made an a.s.sociate of the Royal Academy. To its summer exhibition he contributed three pictures, showing great and various power in their composition. _Dante at Verona_, _Orpheus and Eurydice_, and _Golden Hours_. The first of these, one of the most remarkable pictures of our modern English school, in which "Dante"

appears, is a large work, with figures something less than life-size. It ill.u.s.trates the verses in the "Paradiso":

"Thou shalt prove How salt the savour is of others' bread; How hard the pa.s.sage, to descend and climb By others' stairs. But that shall gall thee most Will be the worthless and vile company With whom thou must be thrown into the straits, For all ungrateful, impious all and mad Shall turn against thee."

"Dante, in fulfilment of this prophecy, is seen descending the palace stairs of the Can Grande, at Verona, during his exile. He is dressed in sober grey and drab clothes, and contrasts strongly in his ascetic and suffering aspect with the gay revellers about him. The people are preparing for a festival, and splendidly and fantastically robed, some bringing wreaths of flowers. Bowing with mock reverence, a jester gibes at Dante. An indolent sentinel is seated at the porch, and looks on unconcernedly, his spear lying across his breast. A young man, probably acquainted with the writing of Dante, sympathises with him. In the centre and just before the feet of Dante, is a beautiful child, brilliantly dressed and crowned with flowers, and dragging along the floor a garland of bay leaves and flowers, while looking earnestly and innocently in the poet's face. Next come a pair of lovers, the lady looking at Dante with attention, the man heedless. The last wears a vest embroidered with eyes like those in a peac.o.c.k's tail. A priest and a n.o.ble descend the stairs behind, jeering at Dante."[3]

It was the _Golden Hours_ which, though perhaps less memorable and imaginative than the others, won the greatest popular success of the three, a success beyond anything that the artist had so far painted. As this picture is here reproduced, description is needless, except so far as regards the colour of the background, which is literally golden. The dress of the lady who leans upon the spinet is white, embroidered with flowers. The _Orpheus and Eurydice_ showed that the old friendship, formed originally in Rome, between the painter and Robert Browning, was maintained. Some of the poet's lines served as a text for the picture; and as they are little known we repeat them here:

"But give them me--the mouth, the eyes, the brow-- Let them once more absorb me! One look now Will lap me round for ever, not to pa.s.s Out of its light, though darkness lie beyond.

Hold me but safe again within the bond Of one immortal look! All woe that was, Forgotten, and all terror that may be, Defied,--no past is mine, no future! look at me!"

[Ill.u.s.tration: HELEN OF TROY (1865) _By permission of Messrs. Henry Graves and Co._]

[Ill.u.s.tration: ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE (1864)]

To this year, also, belongs a portrait of _The late Miss Lavinia I'Anson_, a circular panel showing the sky for background. This was exhibited again in the winter Academy of 1897.

In 1865 the artist showed once again his eclectic sympathies, by the variety of the subject-pictures that he sent to the Academy, ranging from _David_ to _Helen of Troy_.

In his tenderly conceived _David_, the Psalmist is seen gazing at two doves in the sky above; he, sunk in a profound reverie, is seated upon a house-top overlooking some neighbouring hills. The whole is large in its handling and treatment, and in the simplicity of its drapery recalls several of the famous ill.u.s.trations the artist contributed to Dalziel's Bible Gallery. It was exhibited with the quotation, "Oh, that I had wings like a dove! for then would I fly away and be at rest." With the delightful _Helen of Troy_ we are recalled to the third book of the Iliad, when Iris bids Helen go and see the general truce made pending the duel between Paris and Menelaus, of which she is to be the prize. So Helen, having summoned her maids and "shadowed her graces with white veils," rose and pa.s.sed along the ramparts of Troy. In the picture the light falls on her shoulders and her hair, while her face and the whole of the front of her form are shadowed over, with somewhat mystical effect.

To the same year belongs _In St. Mark's_, a picture of a lady with a child in her arms leaving the church, a lovely and finished study of colour; _The Widow's Prayer_; and _Mother and Child_, a graceful reminder of a gentler world than Helen's.

In 1866 the critics had at last a work which seemed to them to follow the lines of the _Cimabue's Madonna_. This was the radiant and lovely picture of the _Syracusan Bride leading Wild Beasts in Procession to the Temple of Diana_. The composition of this remarkable painting deserves to be closely studied, for it is very characteristic of Sir Frederic Leighton's theories of art, and his conviction of the necessarily decorative effect of such works. A terrace of white marble, whose line is reflected and repeated by the line of white clouds in the sky painting above, affords the figures of the procession a delightful setting. The Syracusan bride leads a lioness, and these are followed by a train of maidens and wild beasts, the last reduced to a pictorial seemliness and decorative calm, very fortunate under the circ.u.mstances.

The procession is seen approaching the door of the temple, and a statue of Diana serves as a last note in the ideal harmonies of form and colour to which the whole is attuned. As compared with the _Cimabue's Madonna_, it is a more finished piece of work, and the handling throughout is more a.s.sured. It was as much an advance, technically, upon that, as the _Daphnephoria_, which crowned the artist's third decade, was upon this.

According to popular report, it was this picture of the _Syracusan Bride_ which decided his future election as a full member of the Academy; but as a matter of fact, it was in 1869 that this election took place. The picture, let us add, was suggested to the painter by a pa.s.sage in the second Idyll of Theocritus: "And for her then many other wild beasts were going in procession round about, and among them a lioness." _The Painter's Honeymoon_ and a _Portrait of Mrs. James Guthrie_ were also exhibited this year; and the wall-painting of _The Wise and Foolish Virgins_, at Lyndhurst, in the New Forest, was executed during the summer.

[Ill.u.s.tration: VENUS DISROBING FOR THE BATH (1867)]

[Ill.u.s.tration: ELECTRA AT THE TOMB OF AGAMEMNON (1869)]

In its next exhibition, that of 1867, the Academy held five pictures by the artist, including the delightful _Pastoral_, two small full-length figures standing in a landscape of a shepherd and a girl--whom he is teaching to play the pipes. This again might be considered a painter's translation from Theocritus, and the _Venus Disrobing for the Bath_, one of the most debated of all the artist's paintings of the nude. The paleness of the flesh-tint of this Venus aroused a criticism which has often been urged against his pictures--that such a hue was not in nature. In imparting an ideal effect to an ideal subject, Leighton always, however, followed his own conviction--that art has a law of its own, and a harmony of colour and form, derived and selected no doubt from natural loveliness, but not to be referred too closely to the natural, or to the average, in these things.

To the 1868 Academy Leighton contributed another biblical theme, _Jonathan's Token to David_. With this were four others, as widely varying in subject and conception as need be desired. One was a very charming portrait of a very pretty woman, _Mrs. Frederick P. c.o.c.kerell_.

Then follow three more in that cycle of cla.s.sic subjects, of which the painter never tired. The full t.i.tle of the first runs, _Ariadne abandoned by Theseus: Ariadne watches for his return: Artemis releases her by death_.

In it the figure of Ariadne, clothed in white drapery, is seen lying on a rocky promontory overlooking the sea. _Acme and Septimius_ is a circular picture, with two small full-length figures reclining on a marble bench.

This extract from Sir Theodore Martin's translation of Catullus was appended to its t.i.tle in the catalogue:

"Then bending gently back her head, With that sweet mouth so rosy red, Upon his eyes she dropped a kiss, Intoxicating him with bliss."

A love song on canvas, a pictorial transcript from Catullus, it was perhaps the most popular picture of the year. The last of the three was _Actaea, the Nymph of the Sh.o.r.e_. It represents a small full-length nude figure lying on white drapery by the sea-sh.o.r.e. Actaea is a lovely figure, full of that grace which Leighton so well knew how to impart to his idealized figures.

After this year, at any rate, there could be no longer any doubt but that the artist's power really lay in the creation of ideal forms; whether presented in monomime or combined in poetic and decorative groups, called up from the wonderful limbo of cla.s.sic myth and history.

With 1869 came _Electra at the Tomb of Agamemnon_, a memorable picture, full of characteristic effects of colour and composition, and a notable exercise in the grand style. This work, considered from any side, must be seen to be the outcome of a unique faculty, so unprecedented in English art as to run every risk of misconception that native predilections could impose upon those who stopped to criticise it. The figure of Electra clad in black drapery offered a problem of peculiar difficulty.

Another painting shown this year was _Daedalus and Icarus_, a strikingly conceived picture. The two figures are singularly n.o.ble conceptions of the idealized nude; the drapery at the back of Icarus is typical of the painter in every fold, while the landscape seen far below the stone platform on which the figures stand, shows a bay of the blue aegean sea in full sidelight, with a lovely glimpse of the white walls of a distant town.

The same exhibition of 1869 saw, also, the vigorously painted diploma picture, _St. Jerome_, which marked his election as R.A. In it the saint, nude to the waist, kneels with uplifted arms at the foot of a crucifix, his lion seen in the background. _Helios and Rhodos_, another painting exhibited at the same time, shows Helios descending from his chariot, which is in a cloud above, to embrace the nymph Rhodos, who has risen from the sea.

[Ill.u.s.tration: DaeDALUS AND ICARUS (1869)]

[Ill.u.s.tration: ST. JEROME (1869)]

CHAPTER IV

YEAR BY YEAR--1870 TO 1878

Sundry journeys into the East during this period of Leighton's career, gave him new subject-matter, new tints to his palette, and added something of an oriental fantasy to the cla.s.sic sentiment of his art.

The sketches of Damascus and other time-honoured eastern cities, mosques, gardens, and courtyards, which figured largely among Sir Frederic's studies, were made for the most part in the autumn of 1873.

Previously, as early as 1867, the East had cast its spell upon him. In 1868, he went into Egypt, and made a voyage up the Nile with M. de Lesseps, then at the flood of good-fortune. The Khedive himself provided the steamer for this adventure. "It was during this voyage," we are told, "that Sir Frederic came across a small child with the strangest and most limited idea of full dress that probably ever occurred to mortal--a tiny coin strung on to one of her strong coa.r.s.e hairs." Of the studies made during the journey, one is a woman's head, draped so as to have a singularly archaic and Sphinx-like effect. Another is the fine profile of a young peasant; and yet another, the head of an old man, simple-minded and philosophical.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GARDEN AT GENERALIFE, GRANADA]

[Ill.u.s.tration: MIMBAR OF THE GREAT MOSQUE AT DAMASCUS (Since destroyed by fire)]

In 1869 the _Helios and Rhodos_, already mentioned, served as the first sign to the public of the new R.A.'s interest in things oriental. To the 1870 exhibition, his only contribution was the picture, _A Nile Woman_, which is now owned by the Princess of Wales. It is a small full-length figure of a girl, balancing an empty pitcher upon her head, at the time of moonrise. Antic.i.p.ating the Eastern subjects which future years produced, we may note a picture of _Old Damascus_, showing the Jews' quarter in that fabled city, in all its motley picturesqueness, and the delightful _Moorish Garden,--A Dream of Granada_, which were exhibited in 1874. A powerful picture, shown in 1875, of the _Egyptian Slinger_,[4] is ill.u.s.trated later in this volume, but no reproduction can quite suggest the striking colouring of the original, and the masterly treatment of its light and shade, in the presentment of this lonely figure posed high on its platform against the clear evening sky.

The delightful _Little Fatima_, and the _Grand Mosque, Damascus_, enlarged from the sketch previously alluded to, were also exhibited in 1875.

But perhaps the most picturesque memorial of the East due to the artist's wanderings of these years, is an architectural, and not a pictorial one. The fame of the Arab Hall in Lord Leighton's house has reached even further than that of _Little Fatima_, or his painting of the _Grand Mosque at Damascus_. Built originally to provide a setting for some exquisite blue tiles, brought by the owner from Damascus itself, it remains the most perfect representation of an oriental interior to be found in London; but this again belongs to a later period, and we must return to the date whence this chronicle was interrupted. Before doing so, however, it may be noted that in 1870 began the famous Winter Exhibitions of Old Masters and Deceased British Artists, of which Leighton was one of the most active supporters.

In the May exhibition of the Royal Academy, 1871, was hung a notable canvas, _Greek Girls picking up Pebbles by the Sea_, described at the time as "a delightful composition, comprising figures of almost exhaustless grace, and wealth of beauty in design and colour."

Another painting, also shown there, _Cleoboulos instructing his daughter Cleobouline_, is a charming example of its kind. The philosopher, with a scroll on his lap, sits on a cushioned bench with his young daughter by his side, his earnest action in delightful contrast with her girlish grace.