| Frederick Leighton (3 December 1830 – 25 January 1896) was a hugely successful and popular Victorian painter and sculptor of the highest order. He was the first English painter to be given a peerage. Like many Victorian artists, the themes on his paintings were often of classical mythology, or simply portrayed beauty for its own sake.
His first major painting was Cimabue's Celebrated Madonna, begun in late 1853 in his studio in Rome. This painting was sent to the Royal Academy in 1855 and was bought on the opening day of the exhibition by Queen Victoria for 600 guineas (£630). She wrote "Albert was enchanted with it, so much that he made me buy it". Leighton was only 25 and his reputation was made.
The rich colouring and especially his brilliant handling of fabrics and drapery show art skills and experience few could match. Leighton noted "The combination of the expressed motion and rest sources is fascinating in drapery - a wayward flow and ripple like living water together with absolute repose". Look at the costumes in Captive Andromache for an example.
Like many Victorian paintings, the lavish yet formal style was so out of favor by the 1960s that his most famous work, Flaming June, couldn't fetch £50 at auction.
Leighton did not want to paint pretty pictures. He once said "By the by, if you think my picture pretty, please don't say so; it's the only form of abuse which I resent".
Another of his models was the child Connie Gilchrist, who appears in The Music Lesson, At A Reading Desk and Winding The Skein. She also modeled for Lewis Carroll and Whistler, and became a novelty skipping-rope dancer in music hall and later married Lord Orkney.
Leighton died in 1896, at the age of 66, without finishing his final work, the painting of Perseus On Pegasus. The rough work on the sky and rocks below do not detract from the studies of the man and horse.
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December 3 is the birthday of famous English painter Frederic Leighton. Even though I knew many of
Leighton's masterpieces, I must admit I did not know his name until
recently. That's the thing about art - we know the masterpieces but we
might not know the authors. Show "Mona Lisa" painting to a redneck and
he'll tell you he knows it, but ask him who Leonardo Da Vinci is and
he'll tell you it's the kid who played the main role in "Titanic"
movie.
