Ernest Rhys

“ As but one attitude could display the special formation to advantage, the idea of a Sibyl, sitting brooding beside her oracular tripod, was soon evolved, but not so soon was its form determined and fixed. Like Mr. Watts, Sir Frederic Leighton thinks out the whole picture before he puts brush to canvas, or chalk to paper; but, unlike Mr. Watts, once he is decided upon his scheme of colour, the arrangement of line, the disposition of the folds, down to the minutest details, he seldom, if ever, alters a single line. ”

“ For further description, we may be content to quote that given at the time in the appreciative art columns of the "Athenæum:"
"There is the grandeur of Greek tragedy in Mr. Leighton's Clytemnestra watching for the signal of her husband's return from Troy. The time is deep in the fateful night, while the city sleeps; moonlight floods the walls, the roofs, the gates, and the towers with a ghastly glare, which seems presageful, and casts shadows as dark as they are mysterious and terrible. The dense blue of the sky is dim, sad, and ominous. ”

“ There are many mansions in the city of Art, and if the one of Lord Leighton's building was not to the taste of all his contemporaries, the edifice can be left to await the final test of years. Fashions in taste change rapidly, and much of his finish that finds disfavour to-day may in time charm once again. A career overburdened by official honour was destined to provoke a certain amount of envious protest; but as a man, no voice has urged a word against his ideally perfect performance, not merely of his official duties, but of others which indeed were laid upon him by his position. ”

“ With the intermingling of the peoples, and the rejuvenescence of the physical life, came the spiritual outburst of Christianity. And the influence, again, of Christianity upon Italian Art was immense. In place of joy in the ideals of bodily perfection, "loathing of the body and its beauty, as of the vehicle of all temptation, a yearning for a life in which the flesh should be shaken off, a spirit of awe, of pity, and of love, became the moving forces that shaped its creations." ”

“ When the sun breaks through the lattice work of the musharabiyehs, and the light is thrown up on the storied tiles, and up the polished columns to the glinting mosaic, to die away in the golden cupola, the effect is indeed superb, and to sit on the divan, by the splash of the fountain, and look from the glories within to the green trees without, is to live not in London but in the veritable Arabian nights. ”

“ His artistic temper was throughout, one of endless energy, endless determination; with a dash of that finer dissatisfaction which is always seeking out new embodiments, under all difficulties, of Man's pursuit, in a difficult, and often an unbeautiful world, of Truth and Beauty. Above all, he was a consummate draughtsman, and as Francisco Pacheco, the father-in-law of Velasquez, wrote in his "Arte de la Pintura" (1649) : "Drawing is the life and soul of painting; drawing, especially outline, is the hardest; nay, the Art has, strictly speaking, no other difficulty. ”

“ One of the rarest of all accomplishments, at any rate in England, is a cultivated taste in architecture; but it so happened that amongst his many acquirements Lord Leighton possessed it in a remarkable degree. In fact he received, although a painter by profession, the gold medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects in virtue of the intimate knowledge of architecture he had displayed in some of his backgrounds—for instance, those of the frescoes at South Kensington. It is a great honour, and one by no means lightly bestowed. ”

“ I have said that the sense of line in composition, in figure and drapery, is one of the chief qualities of the artist; and the conviction that the method in which he places them upon canvas with such unerring success—for it may be said that the President rarely, if ever, produces an ugly form in a picture—would be both interesting and instructive, prompted me to learn in what manner his effects are produced. This I have done, having special regard to one of his Academy pictures, The Sibyl, which, being a single figure, simplifies greatly the explanation of the mode of procedure. ”

“ We are now at that century's end,—an end not without its reproach, as expressed by a decadence more self-conscious than dignified, more critical than creative; but in Lord Leighton's Art there was little diminution in his active energy, and of that finer health and spirit of life, which is behind all beauty! ”

“ The elder is showing the younger how to finger a lyre, of exquisite design and finish; and the expression on their faces is charmingly true, while the colours that they contribute [Pg 37] to the composition,—the pale blue of the child's dress, the pale flesh tints, the pale yellow hair, and the white and gold of the elder girl's loose robe, and the rich auburn of her hair,—are most harmonious. A bit of scarlet pomegranate blossom, lying on the marble ground, gives the last high note of colour to the picture. ”

“ In a prefatory note to the catalogue of these studies Mr. S. Pepys Cockerell says: "It is seldom that we are privileged to watch at ease the workings of another's mind, but these drawings, the intimate record of a long life-time, offer an unusually good opportunity. One might call them the confessions of an artist; and anyone who wants to know what Leighton was really like, has only to use his eyes. One thing, at any rate, no one can fail to see, viz., that he had the qualities which result in industry. Whatever success he achieved was only gained after desperate labour. ”

“ It was also the workshop of a great artist. But, above all, it was the centre of a great influence which profoundly modified English art.
Whatever judgment the future may pass upon his own productions, the fact must never be lost sight of that even without them Leighton was a great man. Intellectually, spiritually, and socially he was the most brilliant leader and stimulator of artists we have ever seen in England. His earnest example and lifelong persistence fanned the flame of enthusiasm among all branches of art workers. ”

“ We state as a physiological fact, that a head so small, with a brow so receding, could not have belonged to any man who has made himself conspicuous in the world's history. Again, descending to mere matter of costume, there cannot be a doubt that the purple mantle flung on the psalmist's shoulders is wholly wanting in study of detail, and constitutes a blot on the landscape. Barring these oversights, the picture possesses merits."
At this period we hear the first critical murmurs against the artist's very deliberately chosen method of flesh-painting. ”

“ It is obvious that an artist with so strongly marked a personality must needs have been fettered by the very limits he himself had set. At one time, when a painter of eminence openly expressed [Pg 118] his preference for Lord Leighton's unfinished work, and begged him to keep a certain picture as "a beautiful sketch," he replied: "No, I shall finish it, and probably, as you suggest, spoil it. To complete satisfactorily is what we painters live for. I am not a great painter, but I am always striving to finish my work up to my first conception." ”

“ Everything in it is done as well as it can be done. Thus in the picture before us, in the background is the Church of San Miniato, strictly accurate in every detail; on the top of the wall are oleanders and pinks, as carefully painted as the church; the architecture of the shrine on the wall is well studied from thirteenth-century Gothic, and painted with as much care as the pinks; the dresses of the figures, very beautifully designed, are painted with as much care as the faces: that is to say, all things throughout with as much care as the painter could bestow. ”

“ With the delightful Helen of Troy we are recalled to the third book of the Iliad, when Iris bids Helen go and see the general truce made pending the duel between Paris and Menelaus, of which she is to be the prize. So Helen, having summoned her maids and "shadowed her graces with white veils," rose and passed along the ramparts of Troy. In the picture the light falls on her shoulders and her hair, while her face and the whole of the front of her form are shadowed over, with somewhat mystical effect. ”

“ To-day, when one has heard sculptors claim that Lord Leighton's finest work was in their own craft, one has also heard many illustrators not merely extol these drawings—notably the Bible subjects—as his masterpieces, but jealously refuse to consider him entitled to serious regard as an artist in any other medium. This attitude, so curiously unlike the usual welcome from experts which awaits an artist who ventures into fresh mediums for expressing himself, should be put on record as a unique tribute ”

“ Lord Leighton is said to have referred to the many days spent upon the production of this study—dwelling specially on the difficulty he experienced in finding again and again each separate leaf in the perspective of the confused branches, as morning after morning he returned at sunrise to continue the work. The drawing of each leaf reveals the close observation which ultimately recorded its particular individuality. You feel that as a shepherd knows his sheep to call each by its name, so the artist must have become familiar with every separate leaf and twig before he had completed his task. ”

“ Such a fortunate environment, joined to the extraordinarily high ideal formed by the Greeks of citizenship, had much to do with the fostering of Greek Art, in all "its nobility and its serenity, its exquisite balance, its searching after truth, and its thirst for the ideal." ”

“ Orchardson has been so good as to say I have never done anything finer than the sky. You know the story. I have shown the goddess in adoration before the setting sun, whose last rays are permeating her whole being. With upraised arms she is entreating her beloved one not to forsake her. ”

“ A blue sky, for instance, would possibly have a soft, ruddy tone spread over the canvas—the sky, which is a very definite and important part of the President's compositions, being as completely drawn in monochrome as any other portion of the design; or for rich blue mountains a strong orange wash or tint might be used as a bed. The structure of the picture being thus absolutely complete, and the effect distinctly determined by a sketch which it is the painter's aim to equal in the big work, he has nothing to think of but colour, and with that he now proceeds deliberately, but rapidly. ”

“ Looking back now to that date, what one discerns chiefly is the emergence of the Pre-Raphaelites from the more conventional multitude that were taking up the artistic traditions of the first half of the century. Millais, Rossetti, Holman Hunt, and their associates, count to us, to-day, as the representatives of an earlier generation; in 1855 they still stood for all that was daring, unprecedented, and adventurous in their art.
This newcomer, with his Cimabue's Madonna in a new style, puzzled the critics considerably. ”

“ A STUDY IN OILS
"The language of Art," he said then, "is not the appointed vehicle of ethic truths;... On the other hand, there is a field in which she has no rival. We have within us the faculty for a range of emotion, of exquisite subtlety and of irresistible force, to which Art, and Art alone amongst human forms of expression, has a key; these [Pg 75] then, and no others, are the chords which it is her appointed duty to strike; and form, colour, and the contrasts of light and shade are the agents through which it is given to her to set them in motion. ”

“ Drawn erect and with set features, which are so pale that the moonlight could not make them paler, the queen stares fixedly and yet eagerly into the distance, as if she had the will to look over the very edge of the world for the light to come. ”

“ Except perhaps in the case of politicians, who live in some degree by the public recognition of their personal qualities, it is difficult to render tribute gracefully and well to a contemporary. But we cannot close these pages, now, without pausing to recall how fortunate it has been that English Art, for seventeen years, had as its titular head an artist whose affluent artistic faculty was but the open sign of a crowded life, loyal throughout to the great causes, high ideals, and, let us add, the early friendships, chosen long ago in the mid century. ”