Lord Leighton

Cosmopolis, 1 March 1896, pages 710-720, 4,090 words

Wherever are Academies a hostile minority will argue that the influence exercised by these institutions has been directed to divert attention from the true and the abiding to the false and the ephemeral. It has been pointed out that academies tolerate art when it is popular; when it is not that they ignore it, cast it out, and crush it as far as it is in the power of academies to crush. For it would seem that in no true sense can art be either encouraged or repressed. Art comes we know not whence, it goes we know not whither; after slumbering for ages it leaps forth again like a volcano refreshed by long rest; it comes upon a nation like an epidemic, like a religion; comet-like, it flares suddenly into sight, and its visitations cannot be predicted. Yet its appearances are not wholly unrelated, and from them it would seem that Empire and Art are irrevocably antagonistic. The Chinese, the Persian, and the Roman Empires are barren surely when compared with the states of Greece and Italy, with Japan, with the little plain of Holland into which the Dutchman called the aid of the sea and so drove back the invader. Their heroism was followed by a period of marvellous artistic history. And what happened in Holland in the seventeenth century happened in Greece in the fourth century B.C. The heroism of the Greeks at Marathon and Thermopylae was followed by the building of the Parthenon by the art of Phideas. Nor did the artistic period of Italy come till her Empire had long passed away, till she was divided, and every petty state thrilled with aspiration, and a national spirit of adventure had begun again. The victories of Venice were followed by Tintoretto and Veronese, and how many

others! England's great literary period was contemporaneous with the discovery of America, the Reformation and the destruction of the Armada, and England's great artistic period followed close upon the victories of Marlborough. In France the same thing. The Revolution, Napoleon, then Ingres and Corot, and after them at least thirty great painters, and all born within a period of forty years. lt is possible to go one step further, and to bring the historical parallel down to our

own time: the pre-Raphaelite movement happened immediately after the Crimean War.

And unless we deny all significance to these facts, and it is surely difficult to do that, they almost compel the conclusion that art is not a sublime disease which comes upon nations in their decadence, the pearl in the oyster, but the beautiful garland woven of nature in the summer of nationhood. If this be so, academies, as the minority will have it, are verily as vain as the building of winter gardens to tempt swallows from their autumn departure.

These the arguments for abolition have never been answered, and none has been adduced for the preservation of academies except the general argument that academies are merely representative of the hieratic instinct indestructible in man. True it is that ceremonial has formed part of every social life; the savage tattoos himself, the civilised man calls himself a duke or an R.A.; and we must bow the head and admire such facts as these, awaiting the coming of a new Attila, who is required to destroy learning and lay Europe to rest in kindly darkness till the spirit of antiquity gathers strength to fill us with the breath of artistic life again. But these are wayside

reflections. As academies go, ours is of a nearly sufficient futility; it pursues popular shopkeeping in Piccadilly, and I think honestly. The Winter Exhibitions of old masters add in no small measure to the attractiveness and to the dignity of London life; the summer Exhibitions are a fashionable promenade for those who do not care about the National Gallery but are interested in the latest novelties. The mal-administration of the Chantrey Trust Fund is the only charge of corruption that can be brought against the Academy; and that Lord Leighton does not seem to have exercised his influence to check the purchase of dishonourable pictures is the most easily appreciable blot on his career as President. Year after year incredibly bad pictures have been bought, and the collection in South Kensington is as hideous as any collection made in Germany. The stupidity, natural and acquired, of certain Academicians has been pleaded in excuse for these purchases; but Lord Leighton was always there to advise, he was neither stupid nor ignorant, and perhaps might have checked the prostitution of Chantrey's money. That Lord Leighton was erudite, that his knowledge was very real and deep, any one of his pictures is an ample and conclusive proof, even "Flaming June," certainly one of the worst. Surely it is not possible to imagine anything more unlike what a picture should be than this curled figure, flaming indeed, like the sign of a druggist's shop, seemingly a very low relief modelled in orange soap. Surely it would be impossible to select any portion of this picture for commendation, it is hard even to condone; yet perforce, we must admit that there is something in the picture which proclaims that the man who conceived the pose, or who observed it when the model accidentally fell asleep, was far removed from the ordinary Academician. And in these days, when the world is the property and the playground of the vulgar, it is surely no light thing to preserve, even in failure, an air of superiority and distinction. To conceive an ideal clearly, and to follow it unswervingly for forty years, never distracted by the clamour of new aestheticisms, but always in quest of the ideal chosen in early youth, denotes a strength of soul which every artist in the land must acknowledge and admire. Nor was Leighton's ideal a lowly one; it was the ideal of Raphael, of Poussin and Ingres; and to have walked with a recognisable gait in a path lit with the light of such genius, is, believe me, both honourable and remarkable.

I was once shown two portraits; I was told they were painted between the ages of seventeen and eighteen by a man who had since achieved greatness. So many are supposed to have achieved greatness that the task of guessing seemed reckless: Leighton's name did not at once suggest itself, but when I was told who painted them, I saw that they could be by no one else. They were refined and graceful, and haunted by the Italian melody which murmured in him as in a hollow shell. The quality of the painting was as bad then as it was in the end. In quality of paint he was vilely modern, and, notwithstanding all that has been said about his appreciation of the old masters, I take leave to doubt if on one essential point their beauty did not escape him; or may be he was aware of his natural and incurable inability to use oil paint, even as well as Ingres and Cabanel, and had the strength of mind not to strive to change what was unchangeable, seeking rather to develop his art in directions that were open to him. The continual change of method which is a marked characteristic in the work of modern artists was never attempted by Leighton, and the Iittle real progress that is achieved in these yearly alterations of technique would seem to show that he acted on the whole wisely. And the patience and fidelity with which he cultivated his art, forcing it to produce the best it could produce in the circumstances of his modern life, seems to me more worthy of attention than the secondary attainments which the press have selected to praise him for. It seems to me that we find the noblest qualities of his soul in the man's art, in that to which he dedicated his life, rather than in his superficial excellencies as an orator and a man of the world.

There is a word which I think accurately describes Lord Leighton's speeches at Academy banquets (but here it is necessary to whisper) – rigmarole. Reynolds' discourses are read to day by students in quest of their art. A painter in doubt about his back-ground finds there exactly the advice he needs. And very easily imagined is the interest they must have excited among the students sitting expectant, knowing that the great secret must fall every moment from his lips, quite as easily imagined as the ultimate drowsiness and irritation that Leighton's opulent disquisitions about the relation of art to nature and the awakening of the Renaissance must have sown among the devoted R.A.'s and A.'s clustered about him. The truth is that nature had linked to a man always conscious of a great ideal and always faithful to it, a very vulgar and claptrap showman, speaking all languages with the facility of a courier, and living in a shocking house in Kensington containing an Arab hall and a stuffed peacock. A man of somewhat excessive appearance, especially when he drove down the High Street in his victoria, looking like a Venus, an Aurora, a sort of damaged Guido Rene. His attitude in life was histrionic, somewhat vulgar, but to his credit it must be admitted that this side of his character he only once, so far as I can remember, allowed to definitely assert itself in his art: I am thinking now of the portrait he painted of himself for the celebrated Italian Gallery. In this portrait he appears in an almost shameful light, a sort of cross between a hairdresser and a toreador, and about this frightful vision the glamour which he believed essential to the President of the Academy. In this portrait he is his own satirist, for in it he painted the portrait of the babbler of nothings in various languages, the ornate host receiving guests in the Arab hall, and the purchaser of the stuffed peacock; he omitted every faintest trace of the man who designed the Hesperides. And, oh, bitter derision, it is only the things depicted in this portrait that the world has chosen to honour him for. I believe I am alone in my appreciation of the greater, the nobler Leighton, which we find reflected in the pictures; the man striving to reach a high ideal, and failing only on the threshold, even within sight of the altar.

Nature has a logic of her own, and her reasoning may not be read by the light of our reason, for given the accessories of Lord Leighton's life, a psychologist would construct from them one of the worst and vulgarest painters that ever lived. SociaI gifts and linguistic proclivities are usually associated with royalty, couriers, and cooks, who speak all languages with equal fluency and equal incorrectness. But Leighton like Rubens spoke several languages with that grammatical accuracy and fine choice of expression which is only possible to the distinguished mind. Rubens, it must be remembered, wrote his dispatches in Latin and lived in a palace as rich in art treasures as a museum. But Rubens was an exception which Nature has never repeated in artistic history. The sublimest dreams have been dreamed by the socially disagreeable and between bare walls. Delacroix, I am sure, painted the Entry into Constantinople in a bare studio, destitute of ornament; Manet's studio was such a one, and his private house was furnished in the most commonplace style. Degas' studio is like a lumber-room, and, except for the rare drawings and pictures on the walls, the rooms he lives in might belong to anyone, might have been furnished by any country solicitor. Of all the artists who have lived in Arab halls and have placed stuffed peacocks on inlaid cabinets, Lord Leighton is, beyond question, the most distinguished.

A weak man on all points except one – his own art. He may have made the Academy more fashionable than it would have been under another headship, the Prince of Wales and the Archbishop of Canterbury may have dined there more frequently during his than under any previous headship, but I fail to see that he raised the level of taste which prevailed under his predecessor. He did not secure the election of Albert Moore or :Mr. Whistler, and bad artists have been elected in his term of office as in any other. His presidentship was marked by much pomp and parade, and by very little else. He loved the Academy as a lady loves her milliner; her milliner is essential to her worldly life, as the Academy was essential to Leighton's. He took much from the Academy, and gave very little; his heart, like the lady's, was elsewhere.

A failure, yes, an ignominious failure, if judged by the standard of Ingres and Poussin, but not a failure when compared with other modern painters of classical subjects in which beauty of line is the end in view. Cabanel fell far short of Ingres; his Venus in the Luxembourg, a perilous blossom born of sea foam and frothing of blood, a most perfect realisation of Mr. Swinburne's poem, lies exquisite and wild on the low curling waves, seductive from the strained toe to the laughing face half hidden in luxurious arms, and above her in circling flight are joyous Loves who, with clapping of hands, cries of worship, and music of conch shells blowing, arouse the world to the knowledge of the birth of the goddess. But when we have admired the bright and spacious design, and acknowledged the intellectual force inherent in every outline, we must fain admit a certain touch of realism in the conception – no, not in the conception, rather in the actual seeing, for we surely perceive the posing model in the goddess. True that the model was beautiful, and was seen by eyes that saw beautifully, but not in her nor through her did Cabanel perceive the eternal feminine. He saw all, and no more, than the eyes could see, and failed to pierce with vision the last veil which hides the essential truth, the eternal synthesis. Ingres saw with the beautiful, clear, and happy eyes of antiquity; he stands alone, or with Landor, in the modern world; and the abyss which divides Paradise from Purgatory separates Cabanel from Ingres. How much further behind Cabanel does Leighton stand? A long way, I fear, but an equal distance in front of Bouguereau and Lefebvre. He is as free from the vulgarity of the one as he is from the commonplace of the other. He employed a noble convention, and he employed it nobly. But however beautiful the convention, original perception is demanded in the application of it, otherwise the convention becomes dumb and void; and original perception seems to me what was lacking in the art of Leighton; he repeated the old formulas without caricaturing them, but he had no new thing to say. In the Venus I have described and in "The Florentine Poet" Cabanel invented designs, that is to say typical attitudes and gestures, which once seen are never forgotten. The Dante reading at one end of a stone bench to a group at the other end, with a man lying a little above on a low wall, has haunted a generation. And the girl who, frightened by the poet's descriptions, gathers her lover's hands in hers is essential to the scene, as is the listener who sits sphynx-like with hands clasped across both knees. Henceforth, that is how poets will always read; the scene has been described once and for ever. We shall look in vain amongst Leighton's work for a moment of such dramatic intensity.

His most vigorously conceived scene is a little known picture called "The Summer Moon." Five and twenty years have hardly tarnished my memory of this picture. I remember the two women sleeping in each other's arms in an oriel window; a star-speckled blue night fills the beautiful curves of the window, and the arms of the women hang listlessly heavy with sleep.

"De quoi rêvent-elles? De fleurs?

D'ombres, d'étoiles ou de pleurs?

De qui rêvent ces douces femmes,

De leurs amours ou de leurs âmes

Mais qu'importe! Comme en dormant,

Les bras tombent nonchalamment

Dans la grande fenêtre ovale,

Ou s'ouvre la nuit estivale."

The subject-matter of the Florentine poet is deeper, the scene passes in a more tragic range of emotions, but Leighton's sleeping women fix themselves equally in the imagination as the typical representation of women sleeping in a window. His "Juggler," a naked girl throwing brass balls into the air, painted about the same time as the "Summer Moon," also persists in my memory. The legs are clumsily drawn, the drawing is worse than clumsy, it is expressionless; but the upper part of the body, the head foreshortened, the throat, arms, breasts, and hands enclose more meaning in every outline than any other picture by him. Were it not for the legs it would indeed be beautiful. Of his later pictures the most striking in design is probably "The Garden of the Hesperides," In this picture he hit upon a new and expressive combination of lines, and with the result that these three women live in the mind's eye, not, perhaps, with any inner and intense life, but at least in all the life that a new and striking externality can express. Shades though they be, it cannot be denied that they do sit under their tree in memorable attitudes. They are excellent pictorial drama, and pictorial drama, I take leave here to remark, is a province of art, and must not be confused with the literary anecdote. Every design should be dramatic, all great portraits are dramatically designed – what more dramatic than Mr. Whistler's portrait of his mother or his portrait of Miss Alexander? But who can recall a single figure or gesture from the fifty or more figures which compose the "Briar Rose" series? As well try to recall the attitudes and gestures of the dolls in the Lowther Arcade. The larger part of Sir Edward Burne-Jones' work is literary anecdote: a sort of costume ball in which we meet our old friend Frith in Florentine habit.

Looking at "The Hesperides," it is impossible to refrain from imagining what so beautiful an arrangement would have become in the hands of a Venetian, how at every touch of the brush values and colour would have entered into it. That liver, that strawberry, and that orange drapery would be replaced by dark subdued tones in which crimson would be heard faintly murmuring. That bright blue sky would become dark grey, and the tree would be wrapped in sombre green shadow; the garden would fill with a hot and heavy daylight laden with the odour of over-ripe figs, and shadows from the drowsing leaves would sweep over the ends of the garments, burying them in mystery. But of the science of values Leighton could learn no more than Rossini could learn of counterpoint. The test of a colourist is that he shall be able to produce the effect of a rich interior with a brown and a white slightly tinted with bitumen, like Rembrandt, or of a highly coloured evening with a grey and a green, like Corot. The most beautifully coloured pictures are often painted in this manner; but the vehicle of such colour is chiaroscuro, which presupposes the science of values, and without values it is impossible to paint with reduced palette. A sanded floor is not more barren of interest than the surfaces of the pictures Leighton painted in monochrome, and the much praised illustrations of Romola, notwithstanding many sterling merits, are surely rigid and unemotional as a lunar landscape. They lack the depth, the tenderness, and the mystery of Millais' black and white, because they are without atmosphere, or even that suggestion of atmosphere which some artists give in drawings which are little more than outline sketches. It was the knowledge of his limitations in respect of values which drove Leighton into the excessive colour contrasts which critics have frowned over, unable to imagine why a painter of such wide learning and so steeped in the classical tradition should indulge year after year in such deplorable extravagances of taste. Likewise in sculpture did he seek escapement from the limitations of his own nature. But our limitations pursue us into every retreat. Bronze muscles, too, have their atmosphere when genius is the modeller, and Leighton's sculpture has all the faults without the fluency of accomplishment of his pictures.

Such talents as he had were exhibited best in single figures or in groups of two or three; for he does not seem to have ever realised the truth, first enunciated by Degas, that a crowd is not made of fifty figures but of five. Then again (I am now thinking of the Daphnephoria) he seems to have overlooked the fact that processions are more interesting in bas-reliefs than in pictures. There are Mantegna's processions, they are beautiful, and there is a procession by Rubens in the National Gallery which I cannot recall very distinctly: but the old masters seem to have been sparing in processions. However this may be it is certain that there are too many figures in Leighton's, the attention is dissipated; the central figures in the Daphnephoria are as unimpressively conceived as may be; among them there is not a distinguishing gesture, they are as ordinary as "supers," and as a composition the effect of line is as uneventful as that which meets the eye in any stage procession, the entrance of the pilgrims into Tannhauser

for example. The other figures advance in step, their mouths open, not like choristers singing different notes, but like fledglings waiting with open beaks to receive their doses of worms. Leighton is said to have delighted in music, but a very slight knowledge of singing should have told him that the mouth is opened according to the note and the octave. Or a cursory notice of a choir singing should have taught him that all the mouths are not equally open. But he observed superficially, and the mistake is characteristic of him. There is a picture in the National Gallery, had he really seen it he could not have painted all the mouths equally open in the Daphnephoria. A lovely thing it is in blue-grey of a choir singing: each singer is clearly singing a different note. A motet – no, they have lutes in their hands; then a madrigal by Nannini, Felice Anerio, or Clemens non papa; some delicious contrapuntal fancy. This picture was wrought out of pious observation, and after centuries it still exhales all the lively interest and joy of life which the painter experienced in the aspect of the singers and the music itself.

Leighton's other large compositions call for less remark than the Daphnephoria. About "Cimabue's Madonna carried in the streets of Florence" it is difficult to say more than that it proves his possession from the outset of that love of the noble and beautiful which penetrated the whole of his career, finding abundant expression even in his last picture, "Flaming June." Of the decorations at South Kensington it is only necessary to say that they are at South Kensington, where it is said few ever go, and from whence it is to be hoped they will never be moved. No one seeks to defend them, why should I? Of course, if time and space were of absolutely no consequence, there would be the fancy female heads which he produced in such numbers to consider. Let suchlike futilities be waived, and let us think of Lord Leighton as a man always in pursuit of a noble ideal, and who though he may have fallen deplorably short of it, never degraded or derided it for the sake of money or popular applause. Let us remember that he painted for himself, and for himself alone; and this to the honour of his labour, that however taste may change, the time will not come when his pictures will fail to awaken respect and admiration in the mind of the intelligent spectator. I have not minced words in this article, I have said the worst that could be said, and yet I believe that there floats on these pages, as on his own canvases, the clear reflection of an artist's soul. GEORGE MOORE.