Holland Park Hellenism
Richard Shone
Lord LeightOnTIzonee and Richard Ormond (Yale University Press £19.50).
"Sir Frederick is a mixture of the Olympian Jove and a head waiter, a superb decorator and superb piece of decoration . . ." Such was Vernon Lee's tart comment on Lord Leighton, President of the Royal Academy for sixteen years, the only Baron of British art, the painter at whose funeral in 1896 at St Paul's women were injured in the crush of the crowd outside. The same year saw the deaths of Millais and William Morris; all three were immensely important, very different figures in the complicated evolution of Victorian art. Leighton has perhaps been the most neglected and most reviled. Though gifted, he had neither the youthful brilliance of Millais nor the intellect and accomplishments of Morris. Few of his paintings are of vital interest to us now, though after reading the Ormonds' monograph we can look at his production in a more sympathetic light. They are excellent at presenting Leighton's aspirations and how he arrived at his aesthetic credo, that embarrassing mixture of Paris Salon and Holland Park Hellenism. They rightly emphasise the freshness of his landscapes with their Corot-like concern for tonality and architecture, but are perhaps too indulgent toward some of his more melodramatic setpieces. The image of some well-upholstered dame sitting on a rock in heaven may well have been inspired by Schwind but it hardly mitigates the commonplace pose of an expensive-looking whore on the switchback to Paradise. They occasionally confuse the intended drama of the subject with the pictorial drama that follows which as often as not is blandness itself.
But they are -serious scholars and brave to tackle an artist with few of the surprises one finds in the work of Watts or Burne-Jones, and a man who seems to have lead the life of a spotless eunuch. They try here and there to part the curtains round the bed; but there is nothing. In fact it's rather a relief to find a Victorian artist who did not run off with another one's wife. We get as near to Leighton as he will allow; after that, conjecture may be a pleasure but it remains conjecture. What we are given and in telling detail, however, is something of the social life of artistic London in the later nineteenth century — the musical parties, the Sunday at homes, the affairs of the Royal Academy and the expansive patronage of bankers and industrialists. The Orrnonds have scavenged the most unpromising sources, grubbed away among the pots and pans of period reminiscence in search of their subject and his world. Lady Paget, Lady Battersea, Mrs Jopling, Annie Thackeray, all are invoked to enliven their narrative. Massive research has been welded into a compact account though occasionally they are coy or at a loss for a phrase as, for example, over the energetic American lesbian Harriet Hosmer, whom they describe as "prone to emotional relationships with other women"; and to someone's death as "an event which must have underlined the remorseless passage of time." But I can only admire how much of interest they find to say
over some of Leighton's more blatantly horrid works.
Leighton's well-to-do expatriate youth Was accompanied by an education which held perfection in all things as its goal. Teutonic rigour left its mark — all his life he was la earnest, unskimping, a voracious self-educator with the fluent command of many languages (including three Tuscan dialects) an able musician and learned in the history and arts 4., several civilisations, particularly those al Persia and Greece. He was too excessively educated to be a great painter. Allied to these gifts of the mind were his curly good looks, na, often playful and charming character ant' social graces "of the highest order." From the beginning he was a star, surrounded 115; "Sensitive and cultivated ladies" and most °I the eminent men of his time, a President of the Academy, an ornament of cosmopolitan seri!: ty. He inevitably attracted criticism such as t Maurier's comment on him as "one of U.' world's little darlings, who won't make theln; selves agreeable to anything under a duchess' As a student in Frankfurt he came under the influence of the German Nazarene painters, with Steinle as his master, and his first wnrk„s were predominantly Gothic in inspiration wit..., detailed scenes from Italian history an literature. The development towards a more classical conception of painting came in the mid-1860s with ancient Greece as his quarry' lighter and more sumptuous palette, a withdrawal from explicit anecdote towards poetic suggestion. In some of his individual nude figures one can see connections with the aestheticism of Albert Moore, and Leighton admitted that the "sooth" ing influence of abstract beauty (is] more than, ever wanted in these harassed modern daYs', But where Moore investigated purely forma' harmony and arrangement, Leighton's feelings about the loftiness of his purpose produced an, effete idealism of well-polished ladies WitH nothing much, to do around the temPleSometimes a model struck a spark of warmth ja, him, as with the sensual Nanna or the beautifw young men of Rome but such occasions are rare. More usually we are presented with the self-conscious posing of a strapping Victorian girl, flesh like blancmange, popping breasts and the shoulders of a scrum-half. His lack of a really fertile imagination is especially apparent in his drawings. All his life Leighton had been generous to hi! fellow painters, angling for commissions an°, paying their debts. He was infinitely tolerant19,: younger men like Sargent, Beardsley ant; Ricketts and bought their work. As President °' the Royal Academy, he constantly worked t° improve its amenities and exhibitions bnet:i . ironically enough it was his own debas classicism — as promulgated by his less idealistic followers — that brought the Ace,: demy into such disrepute with Sick ert generation and after. Being the President ° such an institution, he received more posthn; mous abuse than perhaps he deserved. His lase years (he was sixty-six when he died) wet. made considerably Painful by increasiri.g. attacks of angina pectoris. The year before tiP
death, on the eve of the selecting day for the annual Summer Exhibition, his doctors warned him that any excitement would be his undoing. But he went through the ordeal and survived. A tribute, one presumes, to the dullness of the Pictures rather than to Leighton's consititudon,
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