Flaming June is famous for its blaze of orange and for how close it came to being lost. Frederic Leighton painted the sleeping woman in 1895, the year before he died. Then the picture vanished for decades, and when it came back, almost nobody wanted it.
Today it belongs to the Museo de Arte de Ponce in Puerto Rico, and it has drawn crowds at the Prado, the Frick Collection and the Royal Academy. Its fans call it the Mona Lisa of the Southern Hemisphere.
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The odd part is how it was found. In 1962, builders working on a house on Clapham Common, in south London, came across the canvas behind panelling over a fireplace, according to local historians. They had no use for the picture. They thought the frame might be worth something, so they carried it to an art and framing shop on Battersea Rise.
The painting sold for £60. The frame was judged to be worth more. In 1895, the owner of a London magazine had paid just over £1,000 for the same canvas. Sixty-seven years later, it was an afterthought with a good frame.
So how does a picture that cheap end up in the world's great museums? I don't think the color explains it. The answer starts with a pose that Leighton did not invent.
Where did Flaming June's pose come from?
From a statue in Florence. The curled body, the head resting in the crook of an arm and the bent knee come from Night, the figure that Michelangelo carved around 1530 for the Medici Chapels, in the New Sacristy of San Lorenzo. The art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon describes Leighton's pose as loosely modelled on it, and the Royal Academy says the same.
The figure did not start as a painting. The motif first appears in 1894 in another Leighton picture, Summer Slumber, as a small carved relief on a marble plinth. He liked the shape enough to rebuild it as a living woman, and at least ten drawn studies for the final canvas survive, five of them in his house in Kensington, now the Leighton House museum.
Leighton told it differently. He said the pose began with a tired model in his studio, who dropped into that position when the work was over. I suspect both accounts are true: the model gave him the moment, and Michelangelo gave him the shape. Leighton never said who that model was.
What You'll Discover
Who really posed for her.
What Leighton painted out.
Where it hid for thirty years.
Who finally rescued it.