The Life, Letters and Work of Frederic Leighton Volume I Part 17

You will certainly be glad to hear that on the first day of the Exhibition my picture was bought by the Queen.

I am at this moment in the thick of packing; you must excuse, dear Friend, my ending so abruptly. I will write again from England.--Your grateful pupil,

FRED LEIGHTON.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Reproduction of Letter written by Sir Charles Eastlake, P.R.A., to Lord Leighton, announcing the fact that Queen Victoria had purchased his picture, "Cimabue's Madonna."

1855.]

So ended the first page of Leighton's life as an artist in the Rome of the fifties--a very different Rome to that of the present. The atmosphere was still steeped in those days with a flavour belonging to the Papal temporal dominion, and the visible life still picturesque with the costumes and grandeur of mediaeval customs.

FOOTNOTES:

[20] See page 83.

[21] Page 97.

[22] Page 26, "Introduction."

[23] "If the Almighty were to come before me, with absolute knowledge in his right hand, and perpetual striving after truth in his left, I would fling myself to his left, praying: Father, give! pure truth is thine alone."

[24] "The Well-Head" (see List of Ill.u.s.trations), drawn during Leighton's visit to Venice, and described in "Pebbles," more than justifies this opinion, for it may be questioned whether any other drawing he ever made of the kind is as perfectly beautiful.

[25] Miss Laing, afterwards Lady Nias.

[26] See Appendix. Presidential Address delivered by Sir F. Leighton, Bart., P.R.A., at the Art Congress, held at Liverpool, December 3, 1888.

[27] This modest att.i.tude Leighton took as listener reminds me of the last time he saw Browning. One afternoon in the autumn of 1888, we were sitting with Leighton and Browning in the Kensington studio. Browning showed us photographs of the Palazzo Rezzonico which he had lately given to his son. The subject turned to a discussion on Byron and Sh.e.l.ley. Often as I had heard Browning talk well, I never heard him converse so well as he did on that afternoon. It was no monologue. It was real conversation, and of the kind that inspires others to do also their best; but Leighton never uttered, till--when, after an hour or so, we rose to leave--he exclaimed, "Oh, don't! _do_ go on," and we had to sit down again. When at last the good thing came to an end, Leighton conducted us downstairs to his door, where we parted. Browning waved a farewell from across the road, where he stood for a moment in front of the little cottages, while Leighton stood in the porch-way of his house. The next day Browning started on his last journey to Italy--to die in the Palazzo Rezzonico.

[28] Another old friend of Leighton's, Mr. Hamilton Ade, writes: "My journal 1854-55-56 contains frequent notices of our excursions and long days spent on the Campagna, and on the hill-sides near the Bagni di Lucca, where we took out food for mind and will as well as for the body, and sketched while one of our party read aloud--and also of many Tableaux at Rome, devised by him (Leighton) to suit the colouring, character, and grace of certain n.o.ble ladies."

[29] It appears that Leighton had been misinformed as to "every girl"

having to pa.s.s such an examination.

[30] In Italien auf meiner Wanderschaft Hab' ich dies Bublein aufgerafft Hab's mit dem Pinsel so hingeschrieben Ist mir leider unvollendet geblieben.

[31] The Cafe Greco still exists, unaltered since the days when Leighton and Gamba lunched there every day on _macaroni al burro_. I visited it last May (1906), and heard from the present proprietor that it continues to be frequented by artists of all countries. He had heard of the book of sketches, and also that Rafaello had sold it before his death, but to whom the _Padrone_ could not say.

[32] Of Cervara there is a pencil drawing by Leighton in the Leighton House Collection, in his earliest style, dated 1856.

[33] f.a.n.n.y Kemble's answer to these words of Leighton's were:--"Thank you, my dear Sir Frederic, for the address you have been so good as to give me. You honour me by remembering any conversation you ever had with me. I remember one I had with you many years ago, but do not think you refer to that. You say no word, and you do well, upon the subject that must be uppermost in both our minds when we meet or hold any intercourse with each other--our thoughts must be of the same complexion and could hardly find any expression. Thank you again for your kindness.--I am affectionately, your obliged,

f.a.n.n.y KEMBLE."

[34] Ruskin wrote the following criticism of the picture when it was first exhibited: "This is a very important and very beautiful picture.

It has both sincerity and grace, and is painted on the purest principles of Venetian art--that is to say, on the calm acceptance of the whole of nature, small and great, as, in its place, deserving of faithful rendering. The great secret of the Venetians was their simplicity. They were great colourists, not because they had peculiar secrets about oil and colour, but because when they saw a thing red they painted it red, and ... when they saw it distinctly they painted it distinctly. In all Paul Veronese's pictures the lace borders of the tablecloths or fringes of the dresses are painted with just as much care as the faces of the princ.i.p.al figures; and the reader may rest a.s.sured that in all great Art it is so. Everything in it is done as well as it can be done. Thus, in the picture before us, in the background is the Church of San Miniato, strictly accurate in every detail; on top of the wall are oleanders and pinks, as carefully painted as the church; the architecture of the shrine on the wall is studied from thirteenth-century Gothic, and painted with as much care as the pinks; the dresses of the figures, very beautifully designed, are painted with as much care as the faces; that is to say, all things throughout with as much care as the painter could bestow. It necessarily follows that what is most difficult (_i.e._ the faces) should be comparatively the worst done. But if they are done as well as the painter could do them, it is all we have to ask, and modern artists are under a wonderful mistake in thinking that when they have painted faces ill, they make their pictures more valuable by painting the dresses worse.

"The painting before us has been objected to because it seems broken up in bits. Precisely the same objection would hold, and in very nearly the same degree, against the best works of the Venetians. All faithful colourists' work, in figure-painting, has a look of sharp separation between part and part.... Although, however, in common with all other work of its cla.s.s, it is marked by these sharp divisions, there is no confusion in its arrangement. The princ.i.p.al figure is n.o.bly princ.i.p.al, not by extraordinary light, but by its own pure whiteness; and both the master and the young Giotto attract full regard by distinction of form and face. The features of the boy are carefully studied, and are indeed what, from the existing portraits of him, we know those of Giotto must have been in his youth. The head of the young girl who wears the garland of blue flowers is also very sweetly conceived."

D.G. Rossetti wrote to his friend, William Allingham, May 11, 1855: "There is a big picture of Cimabue, one of his works in procession, by a new man, living abroad, named Leighton--a huge thing, which the Queen has bought; which every one talks of. The R.A.'s have been gasping for years for some one to back against Hunt and Millais, and here they have him, a fact that makes some people do the picture injustice in return.

It was very interesting to me at first sight; but on looking more at it, I think there is great richness of arrangement, a quality which, when really existing, as it does in the best old masters, and perhaps. .h.i.therto in no living man--at any rate English--ranks among the great qualities."

[35] Sir John Leslie.

[36] Mrs. Richmond Ritchie gives a very charming account of her first introduction in the Rome of those days to Leighton's friend, the great _cantatrice_, Mrs. Sartoris, in the preface to the edition of "A Week in a French Country House," published in 1902. Thackeray, Mrs.

Ritchie's father, and Charles Kemble, Mrs. Sartoris' father, had been old friends. Mrs. Ritchie says: "The writer's first definite picture of her old friend (Mrs. Sartoris) remains as a sort of frontispiece to many aspects and remembrances. We were all standing in a big Roman drawing-room with a great window to the west, and the colours of the room were not unlike sunset colours. There was a long piano with a bowl of flowers on it in the centre of the room; there were soft carpets to tread upon; a beautiful little boy in a white dress, with yellow locks all a-shine from the light of the window, was perched upon a low chair looking up at his mother, who with her arm round him stood by the chair, so that their two heads were on a level. She was dressed (I can see her still) in a sort of grey satin robe, and her beautiful proud head was turned towards the child. She seemed pleased to see my father, who had brought us to be introduced to her, and she made us welcome, then, and all that winter, to her home. In that distant, vivid hour (there may be others as vivid now for a new generation) Rome was still a mediaeval city--monks in every shade of black and grey and brown were in the streets outside with their sandalled feet flapping on the pavement; cardinals pa.s.sed in their great pantomime coaches, rolling on with accompaniment of shabby c.o.c.ked-hats and liveries to clear a way; Americans were rare and much made of; English were paramount; at night oil-lamps swung in the darkness. Many of the ruins of the present were still in their graves peacefully hidden away for another generation to unearth; the new buildings, the streets, the gas lamps, the tramways were not. The Sartorises had fireplaces with huge logs burning; Mrs.

Browning sat by her smouldering wood fire; but we in our lodging still had to light brazen pans of charcoal to warm ourselves if we shivered.

At my request an old friend, who for our good fortune has kept a diary, opens one of his pretty vellum-bound note-books, and evokes an hour of those old Italian times from the summer following that Roman winter. He tells of a peaceful Sunday at Lucca, a place of which I have often heard Mrs. Sartoris speak with pleasure; Leighton and Hatty Hosmer and Hamilton Aide himself are there; they are all sitting peacefully together on some high terrace with a distant view of the spreading plains, while Mrs. Sartoris reads to them out of one of her favourite Dr. Channing's sermons. Another page tells of a party at Ostia. 'Very pleasant we made ourselves in a pine wood,' says the diarist; 'I walked by A.S.'s _chaise-a-porteur_ up the hills later in the evening. She talked of her past life and all its trials, and of her early youth.'

Mrs. Ritchie in her preface also tells of this 'past life.'

"The Rue de Clichy of which he (Thackeray) speaks was the street in which Miss Foster lived, under whose care both f.a.n.n.y and Adelaide Kemble were placed, when they successively went to Paris. Then each in turn came out and made her mark, and each in turn married and left the stage for that world in which real tragedies and real comedies are still happening, and where men and women play their own parts instinctively and sing their own songs. Adelaide's short artistic career lasted from 1835 to 1842, long enough to impress all the subsequent years of her life. With all the welcoming success which was hers, there must have been many a moment of disillusion, discouragement, and suffering for a girl so original, so aristocratic in instinct, so quick of perception, so individual, '_De la boheme exquise_,' as some great lady once described her. The following page out of one of her early diaries gives a vivid picture of one side of her artistic life: '...Received an intimation that the company who are to act with me had arrived at Trieste, and would be here at eleven to rehea.r.s.e the music. At twelve came Signor Carcano (the director of the music), and a dirty-looking little object, who turned out to be the prompter. After they had sat some time wondering what detained the rest, a little fusty woman, with a grey-coloured white petticoat dangling three inches below her gown, holding a thin shivering dog by a dirty pocket-handkerchief, and followed by a tall slip of a man, with his hair all down his back, and decorated with whiskers, beard, and mustachios, made her appearance. I advanced to welcome my Adalgisa, but without making any attempt at a return of my salutation, she glanced all round the room and merely said, "Come fa caldo qui! Non c'e nessuno ancora? Andiamo a prendere un caffe," and taking the arm of the hairy man retreated forthwith. Then came Signor Gallo, leader of the band, then the tenor, who could have gained the prize for unwashedness against 'em all--and after half-an-hour more waiting, Adalgisa and the hairy one returned, and after about half-an-hour more arrived my ba.s.s, and, G.o.d bless him, he came clean!

"'We then went to work. Adalgisa could think of nothing but her dog, who kept up a continuous plaintive howl all the time we sang, which she a.s.sured me was because it liked the band accompaniment better than the piano, as it never made signs of disapprobation when she took it to rehearsals with the orchestra. She also informed me that it had five puppies, all of which it had nursed itself, as if Italian dogs were in the habit of hiring out wet nurses....'" And again--

"I can remember her describing to us one of these performances, and her enjoyment of the long folds of drapery as she flew across the stage as Norma and how she added with a sudden flash, half humour, half enthusiasm: 'I have everything a woman could wish for, my friends and my home, my husband and my children, and yet sometimes a wild longing comes over me to be back, if only for one hour, on the stage again, and living once more as I did in those early adventurous times.' She was standing in a beautiful room in Park Place when she said this. There were high carved cabinets, and worked silken tapestries on the walls, and a great golden carved gla.s.s over her head--she herself in some velvet brocaded dress stood looking not unlike a picture by Tintoret."

CHAPTER III

PENCIL DRAWINGS OF PLANTS AND FLOWERS

1850-1860

No attempt at an appreciation of Leighton's art would be complete were it not to include, and even accentuate, the distinct value of the exquisite drawings of flowers and leaves which he made in pencil and silver point between the years 1852 and 1860.[37] As regards certain all-important qualities these studies are unrivalled. I was well acquainted with the drawings Leighton made for his pictures during the last twenty-five years of his life, and I had oftentimes heard Watts express an unbounded admiration for these; but when, looking through the portfolios of early drawings after Leighton's death, I came upon these exquisite fragments in pencil, it seemed that I had found for the first time the real key to the inner chamber of his genius. As reproductions of the beauty in line, form, and structure--the architecture, so to speak, of vegetation--nothing ever came closer to Nature revealed by a human touch through a treatment on a flat surface.

On December 22, 1852, Leighton writes to his mother from Rome: "I long to find myself again face to face with Nature, to follow it, to watch it, and to copy it, closely, faithfully, ingenuously--as Ruskin suggests, 'choosing nothing and rejecting nothing,'" and it is in this spirit that he set to work when he filled sketch-books with exquisite studies of the flowers and plants he loved best. These records of the joy with which Nature filled his artistic temperament are to some more truly sympathetic than his elaborate work, for the reason that, while enjoying their beauty, we come in contact with the pure spirit of Leighton's genius unalloyed by any sense of intellectual effort. In his diary, "Pebbles," on August 21, 1852, Leighton writes: "Of the Tyrolese themselves, three qualities seem to me to characterise them, qualities which go well hand in hand with, and, I think it is not fanciful to say, are in great measure a key to, their well-known frankness and open-hearted honesty. I mean Piety, which shines out amongst them in many true things, a love for the art, which with them is, in fact, an outward manifestation of piety, and which is sufficiently displayed by the numberless scriptural subjects, painted or in relief, which adorn the cottages of the poorest peasants ... and last, not least, a love for flowers (in other words, for Nature), which is written in the lovely cl.u.s.ters of flowers which stand in many-hued array on the window-sills of every dwelling. The works of all the really great artists display that love for flowers. Raphael did not consider it "niggling," as some of our broad-handling moderns would call it, to group humble daisies round the feet of his divine representation of the Mother of Christ. I notice that _two plants_, especially, produce a beautiful effect, both of form and colour, against the cool grey walls; the spreading, dropping, graceful _carnation_, with its bluish leaves and crimson flowers, and the slender, anthered, thousand-blossomed _oleander_." No exact name has ever been given to the special creed of the artist's religion; to that condition of the soul which Socrates in Plato's _Phaedrus_ declares has come to the birth as having seen most of truth together with that of the Philosopher, the Musician, and the Lover. The artist penetrates further than others can, into the mysteries of Nature's marvels as revealed through the eye, and he therefore comes in closer union through the sense of sight with the spirit of the artist of the infinite, and can gauge better the immeasurable distance which exists between Divine and human creation, and this is felt more distinctly, more reverently, when the artist simply copies Nature than when his own daemon is taking a part in the inspiring of his inventions.

Leighton writes to his mother when he first reaches Rome in 1852: "I wish that I had a mind, simple and unconscious, even as a child"; and we find the evidence in these studies by Leighton of plants and flowers that his wish, for the time when he was drawing them, was granted; no intellectual choice nor a.s.sumption of scholarly theories have taken part in their achievement; they are spontaneous echoes of Divine creations when he was "face to face with Nature," and there is no reflection of any teaching but hers. Nature and her child have been alone together. The results are unalloyed expressions of the joy he felt in pure impersonal revelations of beauty. They are distinguished because elemental, recording the birth of the ingenuous response of a human spirit to a superhuman perfection of workmanship. When in such union of spirit with Nature, the artist-soul enters his most sacred shrine. An ecstatic joy is kindled by wonder, admiration, adoration, from which joy is inspired a peremptory impulse to endeavour to reproduce in his human handicraft the marvels of creation. Such experiences result from instinctive inevitable conditions, and, coming from the illumination of genius, belong to a higher level than that on which the intellect works;[38] no temptations of the personal daemon simmer behind and distort the pure vision of Nature, provoking suggestions which are human of the human--the desire to excel, the ambition to be first, the love to display individuality. That inner life, the very core and most vital meaning of Leighton's being, the life that held revelry with all Nature's beauty, had been enraptured through the pure innocent loveliness in the flowers. Take, for instance, the page where he has _explained_ the cyclamen he found at Tivoli in October 1856, and take a cyclamen, the real flower, and dissect it. What precious work we find: the ribbed calyx spreading out from the satin sheen of the stalk to clasp the bulbous swelling at the root of the petals--brilliant like finest blown gla.s.s, each calyx fringed round with emerald green flutings--inside straw colour dashed with brown speckles, all this triumph of minute finish just to start the sail-like petals of the flower itself. What reverence and enthusiasm was excited in Leighton as he pored over such things is vouched for by this page (and others similar of different flowers), exquisite portraits of every view of the cyclamen; faint notes in writing recording the colours which his pencil failed to do.

[Ill.u.s.tration: STUDIES OF CYCLAMEN. Tivoli, October 1856 Leighton House Collection]

[Ill.u.s.tration: WREATH OF BAY LEAVES.

Drawn at the Bagni di Lucca, 1854. Leighton House Collection]

Referring to his journey through the Tyrol, in 1852, Leighton writes: "I had been dwelling with unwearied admiration on the exquisite grace and beauty of the details, as it were, of Nature; every little flower of the field had become to me a new source of delight; the very blades of gra.s.s appeared to me in a new light."

Not only his artistic temperament, but also circ.u.mstances, had guided Leighton's instincts into the worship of beauty--beauty such as can be conceived alone by the artistic temperament--as the divinest element in creation and one to be reverenced beyond all others; and when "face to face" with Nature, having no desire but to record that reverence and worship "ingenuously," he made these incomparable drawings. They were done solely for the sake of the joy he felt in doing them, and Leighton certainly never expected any recognition of their beauty by a future generation. Stray leaves from a sketch-book have been collected and preserved in the Leighton House Collection, having been extracted from a ma.s.s of old dusty papers. On these pages are exquisite pencilled outlines of cyclamen, of a crocus, of oleander flowers, of a bramble branch, of sprays of bay and of plants of the agaves. They are dated the year after Leighton's great success, 1856, the year of his failure. In 1854, when he spent the summer at the Bagni di Lucca, he drew studies of bay-leaves twined into a wreath and festoons of the vine (see List of Ill.u.s.trations and design on cover). Three days after Leighton's death, in a letter to _The Times_ from one who knew him, a reference was made to this visit to Lucca.[39] This old acquaintance, who was then seeing him daily for three months, writes, "He was the most brilliant man I ever met." It was this brilliant ent.i.ty, this attractive personality, who spent hours over drawing the flower of a pumpkin and of a "_faded pumpkin_." Professor Aitchison records how he found Leighton at work over this drawing.[40] The celebrated "Lemon Tree," to which Professor Aitchison refers, and of which Ruskin also writes,[41] though the most renowned of Leighton's drawings of plants, and doubtless a _tour de force_,--a wonderful achievement,--has not, I think, the same perfection of charm which many of the earlier, less complete studies possess.[42] The sketch of a portion of a deciduous tree[43] is perhaps a greater triumph in draughtsmanship than even the "Lemon Tree," because the foliage has a frailer and less definite aspect, and is yet reproduced with an absolute certainty of outline.

The "Lemon Tree," drawn at Capri in 1859, was done for a purpose.

Leighton had a feeling that the pre-Raphaelites ought not to have it all their own way on the score of elaborate finish and perfection in the drawing of detail. My first introduction to the "Lemon Tree" was on an occasion when Leighton and I had had an argument respecting the principles of the pre-Raphaelite school. He fetched the drawing from a corner in his studio, and, while showing it to me, said words to the effect that it was not only the pre-Raphaelites who reverenced the detail in Nature, and who thought it worth the time and labour it took to record the beauty in the wonderful minutiae of her structure. If sufficient pains were taken, any one, he maintained, who could draw at all ought to be able to draw the complete detail of every object set before him. But, for the very reason that the "Lemon Tree" was done with a further purpose than the mere joy the beauty of Nature excited in Leighton's aesthetic senses, there is not, I think, quite the same convincing charm in this drawing as in some other more fragmentary studies.

In considering this early work by Leighton, it should be borne in mind, that in those years when it was executed, photography had not yet given the standard of a finish and perfection in actual delineation which outrivals every record made by human hand and eye.

Photography has, in these later years, given the proportion and detail in beautiful architecture, the form of trees, plants, and flowers, their exquisite delicacy of structure, their grace and intricacy of line: all this has been secured and pictured for us by the camera; and, up to a certain point, very precious and truthful are these memoranda of the aspects of nature and art. Many of us remember the days when enthusiastic disciples of the wonderful new art of photography prophesied that no other would soon be needed, and that the draughtsman's craft would before long cease to exist. And further, they maintained it only required the discovery of a means to photograph colour for the painter's art also to be demolished.

Artists, however, knew better. What was valuable in the records of photography, and what was of most intrinsic worth in the records created through means of the human hand and eye, were absolutely incomparable quant.i.ties. The treatment of nature in a photographic picture, however admirable and complete, must always be lacking in the evidence of any preference, reverence, or enthusiasm--in the sacred fire, in fact, which inspires the draughtsman's pencil and the painter's brush. Photography is indiscriminate; human art is selective, and is precious as it evinces and secures a choiceness in selection. However truthfully a photograph may record beauty of line and form in nature, it inevitably also records in its want of discrimination any facts which may exist in the view photographed; these counter-balance the effect of such beauty, and mar the subtle impression of charm which scenes in nature produce on a mind sensitive to beauty.

[Ill.u.s.tration: STUDY OF LEMON TREE. Capri, 1859 By permission of Mr. S. Pepys c.o.c.kerell]