Choosing presents is tricky. Books and booze usually go down well but “things” are often risky. Many people are reluctant to add to their clutter. I was given an unusual and most satisfactory Christmas present this year …
a ticket for a tour of Leighton House and I went on Wednesday evening after it had closed to the public. There were only fourteen of us and we had half an hour to chat and drink wine in the dining room before Kate Bryan of Art History UK started her tour. She speaks engagingly and explained about Leighton and his place in Victorian society. I learned a lot but there was more to our visit than that. At the end of his life, in 1895, Leighton asked some of his friends to come to Leighton House to see the pictures he was submitting to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition that year. Here is what they saw in his studio.
The tall picture third from the left is Lachrymae depicting a grieving woman leaning on a funerary monument. It now belongs to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The square picture on the right, called Flaming June, belongs to a art museum in Puerto Rico. What the curator and trustees of Leighton House have achieved is remarkable. These six paintings are re-united in Frederick Leighton’s studio where they were created in 1895.
Flaming June has had the most unusual history. It was bought from the RA exhibition by a magazine to reproduce as Christmas cards. It next turned up when builders were working on a house in South London. They discovered it boxed in when they were taking out a chimney breast. It found its way to a shop on the King’s Road where Andrew Lloyd Webber admired it but could not raise the £50 he needed to buy it. His aunt refused to lend him the money. Victorian art in this genre was deeply unfashionable in the 1960s you will recall and it was bought by a Puerto Rican business man building an art collection, the Museo de Arte de Ponce. Now it’s back in Leighton House until 2nd April. Well worth a visit even if you will be deprived of Kate Bryan’s insights. Before you go you might like to hear more about the picture in this short talk given by a curator at the Frick in New York (where FJ took a holiday in 2015).
Thanks for that heads-up. I wonder if I will ever develop a revivalist or revisionist taste in art which is ten years ahead of its time? ALW is to be admired for having done so. Me, I fall in love with this or that neglected genre and think myself a pioneer, only to find a major London museum is about to open its latest blockbuster on the theme. The latest case in point is the work of Kipling’s father at the V & A.
At least I can claim to be an early-adopter of the rightwing. This is the day to wish President Trump well. Even if he is as useless as the bien pensants presume him to be, he will have given the Tea Party their moment in the sun, and the liberal umma a decent shock.
I wonder if you know 18 Stafford Terrace, also in the council’s care? It is sort of bohemian Victorian and a rare privilege to have it preserved.