In The Grand Style

Sydney Morning Herald

Tuesday August 20, 1996

Reviewed by JOHN McDONALD

FREDERIC, LORD LEIGHTON:

Eminent Victorian Artist

By Stephen Jones et al

Harry N. Abrams Inc. & Royal Academy of Arts, 256pp, $89.95 (hardcover)

ISBN 0-8109-3578-3

WILLIAM Gaunt sums up the life and character of Lord Leighton (1830-96) in a single sentence: "Magnificence was his proper element."

Residing for some years in Paris, the great artist took no pleasure in the Bohemian lifestyle pursued so eagerly by his peers. He winced at the thought of greasy chops, bottled beer and low company, preferring a night at the opera or a reception at the embassy. While artists such as Charles Conder or William Rothenstein were slowly sinking under tables in the Parisian bars and cabarets, Leighton was probably at home in bed with a well-thumbed copy of The Iliad.

Gaunt's book, Victorian Olympus (1952), is a brisk, racy account of those British artists - Leighton, Alma-Tadema , Moore and Poynter - who celebrated the classical world in their highly finished salon paintings of the late 19th century. They were the artistic giants of their day, whose fame would live forever in their works.

Yet, even in the last years of his life, Leighton's reputation began to slide. As the public eye accustomed itself to an Impressionism that had at first been an outrage to educated taste, Leighton's work began to seem too perfect, too anachronistic, too technically correct to the point of being soulless. After his death, the decline continued in inverse ratio to the inexorable rise of modernism, with one of his masterpieces, Flaming June (c 1895), packed off to a museum in Puerto Rico in 1963.

It was during the Thatcher years that Leighton's prices began to soar at auction, with the "nouveaux riches", including such luminaries as Andrew Lloyd-Webber, seeing a Leighton as the ultimate ornament for the grandest lifestyle money could buy.

The artist himself might have thought it a worse fate than being neglected but gradually, with the vogue for Victoriana and modern art's descent into the bathos of post modernism, Leighton's work attracted renewed attention from the art historians. Suddenly, these paintings were no longer pompous and stilted but brimful of sensuousness. The artist was not a reactionary relic but an open-minded and generous supporter of progress in art.

The culmination of Leighton's reassessment came this year with the London Royal Academy's first survey of his work since the memorial exhibition of 1897. In his centenary year, Leighton's reputation has come full circle.

This catalogue features the combined efforts of such scholars as Richard and Leonee Ormond, Christopher Newell, Stephen Jones and Benedict Read, who have led the campaign for the artist's reassessment. The Leighton who emerges from these pages is one of the most selfless and cosmopolitan figures of his age. In an era of small-minded nationalism, Leighton was a true European who did his earliest training in Frankfurt and was fluent in French, German and Italian. Alongside his grand machines for the academy, he painted small landscape studies that resemble the work of Corot , an artist he admired and collected.

With sculpture, he not only made a small but influential contribution in his own right, but spared no efforts to find patrons for such talented practitioners as Alfred Gilbert . Above all, he slaved tirelessly for the welfare of the Royal Academy, of which he was president from 1878 until his death. Realising how important it was for the institution to move with the times, he fought against the reactionary elements and brought in many reforms. His famous last words were: "Give my love to the Royal Academy."

The RA might well have been the only love object in Leighton's life. Although he was handsome, charming and wealthy, he lived alone, devoting himself to his work and his official duties, leaving us to speculate on his inclinations, with the lingering suspicion that his monumental nudes are masterpieces of sexual repression. With Ruskin and Carlyle , Henry James and John Singer Sargent as his contemporaries, he was not an isolated case.

In Australia, one grows accustomed to appreciating an artist's work through the reproductions in a catalogue, but Leighton is unusually wellrepresented in our public collections. Foremost among his paintings and drawings at the Art Gallery of NSW is Cymon and Iphigenia (1884) - perhaps the most radiantly beautiful picture in the entire museum. Apart from the meticulous painting of drapery and creamy flesh, it is the suffusion of a golden twilight atmosphere that makes this scene so mesmeric. To drag one's eyes from this work and glance around the room is to be made aware of Leighton's superiority to all his neighbours - from Poynter to Ford Madox Brown to Tissot .

We may thank the entrenched conservatism of Australian public galleries for our solid holdings of Lord Leighton. By the time museums in the United States were buying Impressionists by the boatload, we were still admiring the academic paintings of the RA and the French Salons. Cymon and Iphigenia entered the AGNSW's collection as late as 1976 when, presumably, everyone was still trying to come to terms with conceptual and minimalist art and the scramble for Leighton's work had not begun in earnest. It has proved to be a perspicacious purchase and the major legacy of Renee Free's curatorship.

On the other hand, one can only lament the New England Regional Art Museum's 1992 sale of Leighton's Moorish Garden from the Howard Hinton Bequest - a naive decision in light of the centenary exhibition and catalogue. One may only hope that, in the bundle of paintings recently deaccessioned by the AGNSW through Sotheby's, there were no neglected British geniuses soon to be rehabilitated.