9 May – 26 August 2011
Drawings by Lord Leighton from Leighton House, London
John Ruskin is best known for his championship of J.M.W. Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites, but he was also an admirer and friend of several other contemporary artists. One of them was Frederic Leighton (1830-1896), President of the Royal Academy from 1878 and the first painter to be awarded a peerage. From their initial meeting, Ruskin liked the younger man and his work, which he commended in his Academy Notes in the 1850s and in Oxford lectures thirty years later. Leighton reciprocated by lending two drawings for use in the art school established by Ruskin at Oxford.
Born in Scarborough, Leighton chose artistic training abroad, in Hamburg and Florence, where he met the poets Robert and Elizabeth Browning, who introduced him to Ruskin in 1855. In that year the young artist made an immediate impression with his huge painting of Cimabue’s Madonna carried in Procession through the streets of Florence, not only picture of the year at the Royal Academy but purchased by Queen Victoria. Ruskin’s Academy Notes heavily favoured the Pre-Raphaelite painters, but Cimabue’s Madonna was identified as “a very important and very beautiful picture” in a long appraisal comparing it with the work of the Venetian Old Masters.
Frederic, Lord Leighton: Study for Cimabue's Modonna carried in Procession through the streets of Florence
The two men could hardly be said to have been on close terms, but it became for Ruskin a typically enduring friendship despite – or perhaps because of – only occasional meeting and correspondence. Leighton was invited to Denmark Hill to see Ruskin’s Turners and other drawings, and Ruskin delighted in the intimate opulence of Leighton House in later years, with its “Arabian fountain … and Aladdin’s palace glass.”
The artist was prevailed upon to lend two of his finest early pencil drawings, A Byzantine Well (1852) and the celebrated Lemon Tree of 1859, as examples for students in Ruskin’s drawing school at Oxford University. These are mentioned in the Oxford lecture of May 1883 on Leighton and G.F. Watts, entitled ‘Classic Schools of Painting,’ in which Ruskin praised Leighton’s skill as a draughtsman and colourist. One of Ruskin’s last documented public appearances was at the private view of the winter exhibition of Old Masters at the Royal Academy in 1887, presided over by Leighton.
Like the Ruskin Library, Leighton House has recently benefited from Heritage Lottery Fund assistance in the conservation of a large number of drawings.
This display of 40 studies and finished drawings continues and expands a tour to museums and galleries in the U.K., and includes complementary drawings by Ruskin. Grateful thanks go to the Curator of Leighton House Museum, Daniel Robbins, and his staff, especially Sally Dobinson.
Frederic, Lord Leighton: Ca d'Oro, Venice
Leighton House website: http://www.rbkc.gov.uk/subsites/museums/leightonhousemuseum.aspx
Images (C) Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. Photographer: John Rogers.
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