page_title: Frederic Leighton
section_title: Biography
hierarchical_section_title: Frederic Leighton / Biography
caption_attribution_description: English: Catalogue Entry: A member of the Royal Academy by 1864 and elected its president in 1878, Frederic, Lord Leighton reached the apex of the British art world at a young age. Knighted in 1878, ennobled in 1886, and elevated to a life peerage as Baron of Stretton (ironically, the day before he died), he rose through the ranks of society in a manner that was unprecedented for a modern British artist. Leighton’s great success coincided with the Aesthetic movement of the 1870s and 1880s, in which a cult of beauty reigned in literature, the fine arts, and especially the decorative arts. Models were sought from multiple sources, primarily Greco-Roman antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Italian Renaissance, and Asian art, particularly Japanese. Leighton was well prepared to emulate the great Italian masters of the past by his friendships with the Italophiles Robert Browning and John Ruskin, and by his frequent travels abroad. The enigmatic painting After Vespers was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1872 and again in the posthumous Leighton exhibition of 1897. It brings us into the presence of a lovely young woman who gazes out languidly with an expression of deep melancholy. Framed in the background by a niche in the wall of a church, decorated with ornamental mosaics on a gold background, she seems to be leaving a chapel enclosed by a balustrade with an egg-shaped ornament on the newel post. The mosaics appear to be free adaptations of those in St. Mark’s in Venice. The young lady’s right hand holds a coral rosary, while her left hand lifts her skirt off the dusty floor. In her hair are white flowers, probably a species of rockroses, given the small roots that are visible. According to the symbolic code of flowers that was embraced and elaborated by the Victorians, a certain species of this genus signified imminent death, which may contain a clue to the meaning of the lady’s mournful gaze, or perhaps she simply suffers from the pain of unrequited love. Our speculations can find no satisfactory proof. In the Aesthetic movement in England, the female portrait was often static and mysterious with respect to its exact meaning; in this painting, Leighton draws on that new type of female image, which was introduced by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in the 1860s. The execution of After Vespers displays Leighton at his best as a painter: it has been noted that he varies his brushstrokes to an extraordinary degree, with the spectrum ranging from the soft-focus flesh to the precisely delineated mosaics in the background and a lush impasto in the dress implying a dense, velvety pile in the green fabric. The sensual pleasure of Leighton’s brushwork, coupled with the lack of a true narrative in a painting such as this, has made some critics reassess him as a precociously modern artist. Gallery Label: After Vespers epitomizes the delicacy and refinement that Leighton’s Victorian clients appreciated. The setting, with faithfully reproduced mosaics, is St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice. The painting’s subject, however, is less the magnificent sanctuary than an enigmatic young woman. Her gold earrings and beads mark her elevated social status, and she gently lifts her skirt to keep it off the dusty floor. Her melancholy expression hints, perhaps, at unrequited love.
context_page_description: Frederic Leighton, 1st Baron Leighton, PRA, known as Sir Frederic Leighton between 1878 and 1896, was a British painter, draughtsman and sculptor. His works depicted historical, biblical, and classical subject matter in an academic style. His paintings were enormously popular, and expensive, during his lifetime, but fell out of critical favour for many decades in the early 20th century.
  Leighton was the bearer of the shortest-lived peerage in history; after only one day his hereditary peerage became extinct upon his death.
context_section_description: Leighton was born in Scarborough to Augusta Susan and Dr. Frederic Septimus Leighton. He had two sisters including Alexandra who was Robert Browning's biographer. He was educated at University College School, London. He then received his artistic training on the European continent, first from Eduard von Steinle and then from Giovanni Costa. At age 17, in the summer of 1847, he met the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer in Frankfurt and drew his portrait, in graphite and gouache on paper — the only known full-length study of Schopenhauer done from life. When he was 24 he was in Florence; he studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti, and painted the procession of the Cimabue Madonna through the Borgo Allegri. From 1855 to 1859 he lived in Paris, where he met Ingres, Delacroix, Corot and Millet.
  In 1860, he moved to London, where he associated with the Pre-Raphaelites. He designed Elizabeth Barrett Browning's tomb for Robert Browning in the English Cemetery, Florence in 1861. In 1864 he became an associate of the Royal Academy and in 1878 he became its President (1878–96).  His 1877 sculpture, Athlete Wrestling with a Python, was considered at its time to inaugurate a renaissance in contemporary British sculpture, referred to as the New Sculpture. American art critic Earl Shinn claimed at the time that "Except Leighton, there is scarce any one capable of putting up a correct frescoed figure in the archway of the Kensington Museum." His paintings represented Britain at the great 1900 Paris Exhibition.
  Leighton was knighted at Windsor in 1878, and was created a baronet, of Holland Park Road in the Parish of St Mary Abbots, Kensington, in the County of Middlesex, eight years later. He was the first painter to be given a peerage, in the 1896 New Year Honours. The patent creating him Baron Leighton, of Stretton in the County of Shropshire, was issued on 24 January 1896; Leighton died the next day of angina pectoris.
  Leighton remained a bachelor; rumours of him having an illegitimate child with one of his models, in addition to the supposition that Leighton may have been a homosexual, continue to be debated. He certainly enjoyed an intense and romantically tinged relationship with the poet Henry William Greville whom he met in Florence in 1856. The older man showered Leighton in letters, but the romantic affection seems not to have been reciprocated. Enquiry is furthermore hindered by the fact that Leighton left no diaries and his letters are telling in their lack of reference to his personal circumstances. No definite primary evidence has yet come to light that effectively dispels the secrecy that Leighton built up around himself, although it is clear that he did court a circle of younger men around his artistic studio.
  On his death his barony was extinguished after existing for only a day; this is a record in the Peerage. His house in Holland Park, London has been turned into a museum, the Leighton House Museum. It contains many of his drawings and paintings, as well as some of his former art collection including works by Old Masters and his contemporaries such as a painting dedicated to Leighton by Sir John Everett Millais. The house also features many of Leighton's inspirations, including his collection of Iznik tiles. Its centrepiece is the magnificent Arab Hall. The Hall is featured in issue ten of Cornucopia.
  A blue plaque commemorates Leighton at Leighton House Museum.
caption: After Vespers (1871; Princeton University Art Museum)
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