artist details

Lord Frederick Leighton (1830 - 1896)

English Painter and Sculpture

Sir Frederic Leighton was an English Victorian neoclassicist painter and sculptor. He was the second child of Frederic Septimus Leighton and Augusta Susan Nash, born at number 13, Bunswick Terrace, Scarborough, England on the 3rd of December 1830.

His family travelled extensively during his youth and he gained his general education and training in Rome, Frankfurt and Florence While he was still abroad, his first Royal Academy exhibit, Cimabue's celebrated Madonna carried in procession through the streets of Florence was bought by Queen Victoria, giving initial royal patronage to a long and successful career.

When Leighton settled in London in 1860, his work turned from biblical and medieval subjects to mythological and Hellenic themes, developing from his foreign experience a cosmopolitan academicism which exerted a strong influence on other British artists.

He was a friend of Whistler and used some of the same models, for example, Connie Gilchrist (painted by Whistler in Harmony in Yellow and Gold: The Gold Girl - Connie Gilchris, The Pettigrew sisters also posed regularly for Leighton.

Frederic Leighton had an extraordinary and far-ranging talent; as a painter this is recognisable in his works, from his large-scale Academy pictures to his highly personal oil studies and landscapes. Perhaps partly as a result of his upbringing and academic art education in various parts of Europe Leighton had a more sophisticated understanding of aesthetics than almost any of his British contemporaries.

Throughout his career he was closely involved with the Royal Academy; his most important pictures were exhibited there, and were generally met with an enthusiastic response. He succeeded Sir Francis Grant as President of the Royal Academy in 1878, and despite the schism that had been caused in the sphere of painting by the inception of the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877, he himself was sufficiently august a figure to transcend the divisions and rivalries of the period. Leighton's greatest paintings are mythological subjects or scenes from ancient or Biblical history.

Unlike many of his contemporaries he understood the true spirit of classicism in painting and therefore did not rely on mere archaeological reconstruction, but rather created timeless settings of simplicity and great visual strength. Nothing conflicts with, or distracts from, the physical or emotional drama which is the subject of the picture. Leighton is arguably the greatest of High Victorian painters.

Only Burne-Jones has any claim to compete with him for this primacy.
Leighton regarded himself as a very different school to that of the Pre-Raphaelites, yet was friends with many of them, and you can see many links between his Classicism and their style. His intensive early training and study on the Continent always gave to his paintings a highly professional and competent quality. H

is interest in the detailed depiction of soft drapery as it covers the human form shows his knowledge of classical sculpture. In later life he executed some sculpture himself, and was tremendously influential in raising the profile of sculpture in establishment circles.

He was made a member of the Royal Academy in 1869, and president in 1878, the same year he was knighted. In 1886 he was made a baronet, and then a baron just one day before his death (the first English painter to be so honoured). After his death on the 25th of January 1896, the Leighton Fund was set up to purchase/commission works of art for public places. Leighton House is open to the public and contains many studies and finished pictures.

Also available for viewing are some of the many objects Leighton collected from abroad.
His home at 12 Holland Park Road, London, was designed by George Aitchison in 1864 and housed a large studio and his own art collection. Leighton lived there from 1866 until his death, continually extending the building and studio. In 1877 he started work on the famous Arab Hall at Leighton House. The house is now a museum open to the public.

Leightons purported last words before he died were….
"Give my love to all at the Academy."