Lord Leighton by Richard Ormond; Leonée OrmondReview by: Richard DormentThe Art Bulletin, Vol. 59, No. 2 (Jun., 1977), pp. 292-293Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3049655 .

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292 THE ART BULLETIN

RICHARD and LEONtE ORMOND, Lord Leighton, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1976. Pp. 200; 194 black-and- white ills. $45

Richard and Leonee Ormond, Lord Leighton's (1830-1896) new biographers, have written the first serious book on the artist in 70 years. Their task was not easy. Aside from a problem often encounttred by historians of the period-an official Life that is both diffuse and unreliable (by Mrs. Russell Barrington, 1906)-the authors had to overcome the additional obstacles of the artist's own glacial reticence about himself and the posthumous destruction of his papers. But their balanced and exhaustively researched study easily supplants those by Mrs. Barrington and Alice Corkran (1904), both of whom had access to his letters and consulted his family, as well as the works by Ernest Rhys (1895) and Edgcumbe Staley (1906). More than this, the book demonstrates how little we knew, until now, about the life and achievements of the most eminent Victorian artist of all.

If this eminence is still anywhere in question, it should not be. Leighton's classical canvases are among the few by an Englishman that fit comfortably into the mainstream of European academic painting, and, at the same time, the blazing visions of his late style incarnate English romanticism on the wane. Although an almost Edwardian complacency pervades his pictures and they have neither the refinement of Albert Moore's nor the psychic unease of Edward Burne-Jones's, still they fuse a feverish sensibility with technical assurance and a superb sense of design.

On top of this, Leighton the academician turns out to be at least as interesting as Leighton the artist. In his role as President of the Royal Academy he not only devoted himself to that institution, but, what is rarer in its history, cared passionately for art. He used his position to promote into the Academy true artists like Alfred Gilbert, John Singer Sargent, G. E Watts, and Burne-Jones. As a private patron he supported artists as different as Giovanni Costa and Aubrey Beardsley. His diplomatic skill and social connections helped prevent the damaging restoration of the mosaics of St. Mark's in Venice and ensure the building of Alfred Stevens's Wellington Memorial in St. Paul's Cathedral. The time he spent assembling loan exhibitions at home and abroad influenced the formation of a younger generation of artists, and, through his princely example, he dignified the profession of the artist in Victorian society.

So broad was his field of achievement that the Ormonds might have limited their book to the paintings alone. Instead, they pursue him in all his manifestations, from birth to death, across the map of Europe. The chapter headings mark their route. "Frankfurt," "Italy," and "Paris" cover the years of study in Continental academies and ateliers from 1846 until his decision to settle in England in 1859. "The Outsider," "Between Styles," and "The Academician" treat the decade 1860-1870 when he established himself in London as a painter, illustrator, and decorator, as well as social lion and arbiter of taste. "The Classical Painter" discusses the machines of the late sixties and seventies-The Syracusan Bride (No. 121), Hercules Wrestling with Death for the Body of Alcestis (No. 193) and the Daphnephoria (No. 237). "The President," "The Late Paintings," and "The Last Years" are about his maturity as an artist and apotheosis as an administrator. In addition, there is a chapter on his ancestry and youth entitled "The Leightons," one on his early masterpiece Cimabue's Madonna, a description of the friendship between Leighton and Browning, and a chapter on Leighton as a landscape painter and collector of Islamic art called "The Eastern Traveller."

The biography is followed by a catalogue of the oil paintings, frescoes, and life-sized statues. Each of the 568 entries contains an apparatus, provenance, and list of exhibitions but not a full discussion of the pictures. This abbreviated form suffices because Leighton exhibited annually at the Academy; thus his paintings present few problems of attribution, chronology, or development. Then too, Leighton House, established soon after his death, tended his memory and conserved his pictures in the years after the decline of his reputation. Questions of iconography and iconology are handled in the Ormonds' text.

Leighton is the modern biographer's nightmare. He lived a

completely public life, full of events but empty of any recorded attitude toward them. Other than genuine affection for both his protegee, the actress Dorothy Dene, and the Royal Academy, he appears to have had few private struggles, commitments, or emotions.

Ironically, it is precisely as a biography of this public figure, rather than as an art-historical analysis of his work, that the book is most successful. In the last chapters, when an Olympian Leighton savors his position at the pinnacle of the artistic and social establishment, the book delightfully descends into anecdote; it is here, and not in discussions of his personal or artistic development, that the authors catch something of his brilliance. In chapter xII, "The President," for example, he is nearly likable as an energetic politician whose joy in manipulation, cajolery, and maneuvering is wholly innocent and whose pleasure in arranging exhibitions, arranging commissions, and arranging parties we come to share. The book is most lively when it recounts apparently trivial details, such as Leighton's letter to G. E Watts explaining that two pictures Watts sent to the Academy need revision (p. 105): '"A few touches will set right, for instance a perhaps rather abrupt red on the cheeks of your dear little 'Pickles' and a yellow on the foreleg of the old horse-not because that yellow is not often very strong in such cases but because it is a little out of key (I think)-but these are trifles indeed."

Then too, in his later life Leighton was unable to repress one or two symptoms of fallibility. His incapacity to respond to John Everett Millais's sad late tribute to him or his chronic petulance even in the presence of members of the royal family are welcome ripples on the placid surface of his composure. Of greater interest to art historians, though, is the correspondence between Leighton, arranging a royal commission for another artist, and Queen Victoria's representative, angling for a big picture at a small price. The contrast between the Queen's bargain-hunting and Leighton's supreme pride in his profession is a rare glimpse both into the artist's soul and into the machinery of official patronage. This is fascinating history.

But Leighton was not usually this articulate, and when the authors try to find out what he thought and felt as well as what he did, they run into a brick wall. With extraordinary patience and imagination they hunt down contemporary diaries and memoirs in which he appears, but once found, these sources seldom deliver hard insights into his character or motives. For example, a man named J. H. Rivett-Carnac, in his autobiography of 1910, describes a visit to Padua in 1856, on his way to the Indian civil service. There, in the Arena Chapel, he met and spent a day with the artist. This sighting comes when glimpses of the young Leighton are rare and so is welcome, but Rivett-Carnac never mentions what the reader really wants to know-his companion's opinion of Giotto or which frescoes he admired. Neither do the authors say that Giotto had any subsequent influence on Leighton's work.

Reliance on 19th-century memoirs for information about a man as unforthcoming and self-possessed as Leighton has the great drawback that those who met him tended to see only what he wanted them to see. With the exception of three observers who were not impressed-Lady Paget, Henry James, and the Prince of Wales-the majority of those cited here seem not to describe a man but a public institution.

Thus it is not the authors' fault that, even in the later chapters, the book uncovers only fragments of the inner man. A fault that can be laid on their doorstep, however, is their failure in earlier chapters fully to examine Leighton as an artist. Here, more basic art history was needed, for the pertinent questions about this stage of his life are not so much biographical as art-historical. In particular, I wanted to know much more about the artist's standing among his English contem- poraries.

This lack is most evident in chapter vi, "The Outsider," which treats the critical years 1859-1863. Newly arrived in London, Leighton was an outsider both to conservative artists in the Royal Academy and to members of the Pre-Raphaelite circle. Yet he mixed freely in both groups. He also exhibited pictures quite unlike anything seen until then in England. For these, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Ruskin expressed admiration, and the reader naturally wants to know how Leighton's command of Venetian color and academic draftsmanship affected their work and thought. To spell

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BOOK REVIEWS 293

out Leighton's role at this complicated moment in the history of English painting would have meant a discussion of the work of artists other than Leighton and so would have enlarged the scope (and the length) of the biography, but to do so would also have given the reader vital perspective on Leighton's contribution to English art.

Again, in chapter vii, "Between Syles," his frescoes at the Church of St. Michael, Lyndhurst, of 1862-64 are carefully documented and related to precedents in German mural decoration. But there is no fuller discussion of the English context in which Leighton undertook the work, either its historical background (the Cambridge Movement and the Ecclesiologists) or its immediate antecedents (G. E Watts's fresco in G.E. Street's St. James the Less, Garden Street, Westminster, of 1858-1861, or Johann Friedrich Overbeck's altarpiece for William Butterfield's St. Thomas, Leeds, of 1847-1851).

Although trained abroad, surely Leighton remained more influenced by English painting and criticism than the authors allow. I miss a sense of connection between what the artist did at a particular moment and the English traditions and precedents behind it. For example, on p. 131 the Ormonds discuss a work of about 1892, the Garden of the Hesperides (No. 364), as a full-blown Symbolist painting, the subject of which they tentatively connect with an early poem by Tennyson. But they do not mention that the most famous treatment of the subject in English art was J.M.W. Turner's painting of 1806 (Tate Gallery). What is important here is not whether Leighton knew the Turner but that Ruskin had used it in a famous passage in the fifth volume of Modern Painters in 1860 to launch an elaborate exegesis on the Garden of the Hesperides as a symbol for the English mercantile empire and the dangers of materialism. Considering Leighton's youthful enthusiasm for Ruskin's books, and given the moment in English history when he chose to revive the subject, the Ormonds need a backward glance to Turner, Ruskin, and the roots of English Symbolism to help place the picture in its fullest context.

Neither is Leighton's influence on specific artists always fully discussed. When he persuaded the reluctant Burne-Jones to accept associate membership in the Royal Academy, the first and only picture Burne-Jones exhibited there was his Depths of the Sea of 1886 (private collection, Australia). This enigmatic subject-a mermaid dragging a sailor under water-I had assumed was unique in English painting. But Leighton exhibited a picture with the same theme and a similar composition, the Fisherman and the Syren-from a Ballad by Goethe (No. 37), at the Academy as early as 1858, and the Ormonds show that the visual source for this work was a painting by Wilhelm von Lindenschmit (Staatsgemildesammlungen, Munich). But, unexpectedly, they never then infer that the source for Burne-Jones's painting might have been Leighton's earlier one and, therefore, that the subject was apt for Burne-Jones's debut at the Royal Academy. For the art historian, the connection between Burne-Jones and a subject from Goethe through Leighton is startling, and within the wider context of the book the connection demonstrates German culture, disseminated by Leighton, affecting not only the style but also the iconography of English pictures.

It is this wider context that got lost in condensing what must have been a huge amount of material on the artist's life. From the description of public reaction to Leighton's death given in the last pages of the biography, the naive reader might assume that all English artists were disconsolate at the loss of the President of the Royal Academy. This was, of course, not the case, especially among younger artists. Even Burne-Jones, who liked Leighton personally, gave a scathing estimation of his work in a conversation in the early 1890's with Thomas Rooke, Burne-Jones's studio assistant, recorded in Rooke's unpublished diary, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum (pp. 564-65): :"[Leighton's] an Academic painter. I always think of him less as an artist than as a highly cultivated gentleman who paints; someone of more than usual talent, industry and acquirements who chooses to occupy himself in that manner. About music I know nothing, but there seems to me a great likeness in the work of Leighton and Mendelssohn. I don't care in the least for either. They've no interest for me and don't impress me."

The book often turns to literature and the methods of literary criticism to explain the subjects of the more complex mythological

pictures. This can mean a simple inquiry into Leighton's literary sources and influence (Browning on Hercules Wrestling with Death, Leighton's Orpheus and Eurydice on Browning.) Or the authors can compare Leighton's work to that of a poet in more general terms. This method works with Browning and Leighton, who knew each other well and where a comparison between their imagery comes naturally, but is more problematic when the analogy is between Leighton's late paintings and Tennyson's poetry (pp. 131-32).

The Ormonds point out that Tennyson was "captivated by the idea of death-in-life, a suspended state, which may or may not prefigure movement," and certainly Tennyson's heroes are generally immobile and eternally hesitate on the verge of action. But these are characteristics of the Pre-Raphaelite hero, and Tennyson's Ulysses should be compared to Burne-Jones's St. George or the Prince in the Briar Rose series-for all are symbols of the active life but all are presented as contemplative, frozen with doubt, and unable to act. In contrast, Leighton's Hercules or Perseus is already in the middle of the drama, not waiting to come on stage, and his maidens are merely asleep in decorative attitudes, not torn by repressed passion or corroding ennui, like Tennyson's.

The authors always discuss intelligently the connection between Leighton's paintings and developments in contemporary literature, but they could have gone even further in the use of the tools of literary criticism to examine the way in which the artist achieved his effects. For example, a discussion of Leighton's use of personification as a poetic device in his later paintings would tell us much about his aims as an artist and how they differed from those of his contem- poraries. The two classically draped women drowsing in Summer Moon of 1872 (no. 201) are surely personifications of moonlight. Moreover, they were painted at just the moment when James McNeill Whistler first tried to paint moonlight naturalistically in his Nocturnes and at the moment when the two artists' careers, hitherto surprisingly parallel, diverged. At the same time, it is the symbolism in Summer Moon that differentiates it from a superficially similar painting, Albert Moore's Dreamers of 1882 (City Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham).

The book is handsomely produced and all the major paintings are illustrated. But it is cumbersome to use: there is no chronology, not even dates at the chapter headings indicating the years under discussion. This lack is maddening in a book that will be used for quick reference by scholars, teachers, and dealers. Nor is there a bibliography, with the result that the keys to further research remain buried in the text.

These few shortcomings mar an otherwise completely professional biography. It is, perhaps, ungrateful to say that a book that is already so good could have been better, but the questions, and even frustrations, the work arouses indicate how rich a vein the Ormonds have tried to mine. It is an extraordinary accomplishment to have grappled with a figure as complicated and elusive as Leighton, and the groundwork done here on his life will be the basis for all future historians of his art.

RICHARD DORMENT

London

A. CHARLES SEWTER, The Stained Glass of William Morris and His Circle, Vol. I, New Haven and London, Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 1975. Pp. 344; 16 color pls., 665 black-and-white ills. $70 We have been waiting for this book a long time. Sewter started to publish the result of his research into the glass of the Morris firm already in 1960 with articles in the Architectural Review and the Journal of the British Society of Master Glass Painters. The long wait has been worthwhile, for we now have a major work befitting the importance of its subject, a book which stands with Mary Bennett's exhibition catalogues of the paintings of Madox Brown, Hunt, and Millais, Virginia Surtees's catalogue raisonne of Rossetti's pictures, and John Christian's Burne-Jones exhibition catalogue as a firm foundation stone in the current spate of publications on Victorian

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