The Life, Letters and Work of Frederic Leighton Volume II Part 8

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 ent.i.tled 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 n.o.bler 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 a.s.suaged 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 auth.o.r.ess 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 antic.i.p.ated 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 t.i.tle 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 mult.i.tude 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. c.o.c.kerell'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 t.i.tles "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.

CHAPTER II

ILl.u.s.tRATIONS FOR _CORNHILL MAGAZINE_--FRESCO FOR LYNDHURST CHURCH--a.s.sOCIATE OF THE ROYAL ACADEMY--MRS. LEIGHTON'S DEATH

1863-1865