Frederic Leighton: The Complete Story
Frederic Leighton sold his first exhibited painting to Queen Victoria, became the only British artist ever raised to the peerage, and held the title for one day before dying. His most famous canvas spent decades lost, then turned up in Puerto Rico.
President of the Royal Academy, builder of the most exotic house in London, and a painter Victorian England adored then forgot. Here is the whole arc.
Frederic Leighton at a glance:
1830: born in Scarborough to a medical family that educates him across Europe, fluent in four languages.
1855: his first Academy picture, Cimabue's Madonna, is bought by Queen Victoria on opening day.
1877: shocks London with a bronze, An Athlete Wrestling with a Python, and accidentally founds the New Sculpture.
1878: elected president of the Royal Academy, a post he holds with diplomatic polish for 18 years.
1896: made Baron Leighton one day, dies the next: the shortest peerage in British history.
The debut Queen Victoria bought
Leighton was born in Scarborough on December 3, 1830, to a wealthy medical family that educated him across Europe, in Frankfurt, Rome, and Florence.
In 1855 his first submission to the Royal Academy, Cimabue's Celebrated Madonna Carried in Procession, was bought straight off the wall by Queen Victoria for 600 guineas. He was 24, and he never really cooled down from that start.
President, painter, sculptor
Elected president of the Royal Academy in 1878 and knighted the same year, Leighton ran British official art for 18 years.
His Athlete Wrestling with a Python of 1877 helped launch what critics called the New Sculpture, and his studio-house in Holland Park, with its tiled Arab Hall built around Damascus ceramics, became a work of art in itself.
It is open today as Leighton House.
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Flaming June, lost and found
Flaming June, the sleeping woman in translucent orange painted in 1895, was his last great success.
By the 1930s Victorian art was so unfashionable that the canvas vanished from view, and in the early 1960s it resurfaced in London and failed to find a British buyer at a modest price.
Luis Ferre bought it in 1963 for about 2,000 pounds and took it to the Museo de Arte de Ponce in Puerto Rico, which is why the most reproduced Victorian painting lives in the Caribbean.
The myth of the empty decorator
Leighton is often filed as Victorian surface, beautiful and hollow.
The drawings say otherwise: hundreds of preparatory studies survive for single pictures, built on anatomy learned in Frankfurt and composition learned from the Italians. His problem was never skill but timing.
He perfected an ideal of classical beauty at the exact moment painting turned toward modern life, and the reassessment only began a century after his death.
One day a Lord
On January 24, 1896, Leighton became Baron Leighton of Stretton, the first and still the only British artist given a peerage. He died of heart failure the next day, January 25, at 65, making his the shortest peerage in British history. He is buried in St Paul's Cathedral.
The Arab Hall
His Holland Park house grew an Arab Hall in the 1870s: gold dome, fountain, and walls of 16th-century Iznik and Damascus tiles shipped back from the Levant.
William De Morgan fired new tiles to fill the gaps; Walter Crane ran the gold frieze above them.
It was a reception machine, musicians on the balcony and the Academy's president below. Upstairs, one narrow bachelor bedroom, the only modest room in the building.
The sculptor's surprise
The Athlete of 1877 was anatomical, tense and modern enough that critics invented a name for what followed: the New Sculpture.
The Sluggard came next, a model's yawning stretch between poses, frozen because Leighton liked the accident better than the pose.
Two bronzes were enough to redirect British sculpture. He filed it under side projects.
Music, and the private man
His other art was hospitality to music: Joachim and Clara Schumann played his studio, and the annual music evenings were the hardest invitations in artistic London.
Of his inner life he left almost nothing: no marriage, few confiding letters, a reserve contemporaries found impenetrable.
Biographers argue over the silence. The house, all public splendor and one narrow bed, may be the only confession he made.
The Frederic Leighton questions that keep coming up
Where is Flaming June? At the Museo de Arte de Ponce in Puerto Rico, bought by Luis Ferre in 1963 for about 2,000 pounds after Britain passed on it.
Why is Leighton famous? For Flaming June, for 18 years as president of the Royal Academy, and for being the only British artist ever made a peer.
What is Leighton House? His studio-house in Holland Park, London, with the tiled Arab Hall at its heart. It is now a museum of his work and collections.
Was Leighton really a Lord for one day? Yes. The peerage was created on January 24, 1896, and he died on January 25, the shortest tenure in the history of the House of Lords.
Who was his favorite model? Dorothy Dene, an actress he coached, promoted and provided for; she is the face of Flaming June. The bond fed decades of speculation and no evidence.
How much does a Leighton cost? Major canvases start in the seven figures when they surface at all. In the 1960s Victorian pictures went for pocket change, which is how Flaming June nearly vanished.
More secrets to unlock
No British artist started or finished higher
Queen Victoria bought his first exhibited painting in 1855, and the state ennobled him on the second-to-last day of his life. No British artist ever started or finished higher.
