LORD LEIGHTON
Bythe 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 ofmerely 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 ofMiddlemarch—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 themthe 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 ofWanderjahrewhich 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 copiedat 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 ordinarybourgeoisliking. 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 presentationof 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 anypopularity 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 in1886. 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—withmany 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 avox 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 theyounger 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.)