The Life, Letters and Work of Frederic Leighton Volume I Part 18

[Ill.u.s.tration: STUDY OF DECIDUOUS TREE.

Leighton House Collection]

As the vision of the artist which attracts this feeling for beauty focalises itself in the sight, he naturally perceives but vaguely any other objects before him; therefore, the facts inspired by such preference become accentuated, and all their surroundings subordinated to it. For this reason, also, what is called, somewhat erroneously, the sculptor's sense of line and form--the sense applying equally to the treatment of line and form on a flat surface as in the round--is not so obvious in a photograph as in a good drawing. The eye of one possessing a gift for drawing transmits to the brain the structure of an object, not only as it is outlined against other objects, but also as the different planes of which it is formed recede or advance, slant one way or another, curve or straighten. To a truly gifted draughtsman, such as Leighton, there is an absorbing interest in working out the forms of the objects he sees which delight his sense of beauty,--of guiding his pencil so that it echoes on the paper the gratification with which his senses are inspired through his artistic perceptions. The result will be--that the drawing he produces almost unconsciously accentuates what has delighted him most in the objects he is depicting, and, explaining further than does even an actual copy by photography the element of beauty which has inspired him, carries with it also an inspiring effect on the spectator: the drawing will have something in it which affects us as a living influence, an influence which the most perfect of photographs can never possess. The actual perspective may be absolutely correct in the photograph--so may be the placing on the paper of every turn and twist in a bough or a leaf as regards their outlines; but compared to a beautiful drawing we feel the want of mind behind it: no human sense has revelled in the intricacies of growth and foreshortening, no human eye has traced the exquisite grace and sweep of the curve and the happy spring of the shoot alive with uprising sap. Just that accentuation which unwittingly creeps into the human touch, denoting that the construction of the form has been perceived and appreciated with delight, is lacking. The line of a pathway rising up on the sweep of an upland, a line which is always so fascinatingly suggestive, does not lead you farther over the hill in a photograph as it does in a little woodcut by William Blake. Just that push and movement is wanting in the sense of the line which in a really fine drawing gives it a living quality. Another shortcoming is caused by the inevitable flattening of tone in a photograph. The brightest light does not detach itself, the darkest spot, to some degree always, even in the best print, is merged in the general shadow.

[Ill.u.s.tration: EARLY STUDIES OF KALMIA, OLEANDER, AND RHODODENDRON FLOWERS Leighton House Collection]

The idea that photography could supersede the art of the draughtsman soon exploded. Artists have used photography--some intelligently, as did Watts--many unintelligently. The illegitimate use of photography, the endeavour to make the lens do the work which alone the human eye and hand can effect, was seen in lifeless portraits, painted partly from the sitter, partly from a photograph. It is natural that any genuine artist should rebel against such cheapening of his art; and the deadening effects of relying on photography "to help you out" have brought about the result that the qualities in art which are furthest removed from those which it has in common with photography have been forced to the front, and the grammar of drawing, the groundwork of nature's structures which the human hand and the photographic lens can both record, has ceased to be considered as all-important. In Leighton's work this grammar was in itself developed into a fine art.

By comparing any sketch he made of a leaf or of a flower with a photograph of the same, this will be evident to any eye that can appreciate grace and quality in drawing.

The latest phase of using photography to help out the drawing is found in some modern ill.u.s.trations where the lens has found the outline, the right placing of the scene on the paper, the right proportion and perspective in buildings, and the general light and shade of the scene for the ill.u.s.trator--the human hand only coming in to give breadth of effect, to undo the tell-tale finish of the photograph, and to make it into what is called "a picture" on the lines of a Turner or a Whistler.

All these were unknown ways in Leighton's youth, and to the end of his life he could make no use whatever of photography in his work. He took a kodak with him once on his travels, but the results were amusingly negative. "From the moment an artist relies on photography he does no good," was a statement I heard him make. Leighton believed in no short cuts. Enthusiasm, labour, sacrifice, renouncement,--these, and these alone, he maintained, can secure for the artist a worthy success.

[Ill.u.s.tration: STUDY OF A FADED FLOWER OF PUMPKIN. Rome, 1854 Leighton House Collection]

[Ill.u.s.tration: STUDY OF FLOWER OF A PUMPKIN. Meran, 1856 Leighton House Collection]

[Ill.u.s.tration: STUDIES OF BRANCHES OF VINE. Bagni di Lucca, 1854 Leighton House Collection]

[Ill.u.s.tration: BRANCH OF VINE. Bellosquardo, Florence, 1856 Leighton House Collection]

There are those who would define genius by describing it as the faculty for taking infinite pains. But obviously genius is in itself a power, born of inspiration, which so completely overmasters all other conditions in a nature, that no labour nor time is taken into account so long as the impelling force obtains utterance. The inborn conviction in a nature that it has the power to create, demolishes all impediments which come in the way to hinder this power from stamping itself into a form. The necessity of taking infinite pains is but the natural and inevitable consequence of the burning desire born, who knows how? in the spirit of those who are blessed with genius, and the faculty to discern how best to develop it. Leighton, by reason, perhaps, of the very spontaneity of his own gifts, and also of his extreme natural modesty, allied to the conscientiousness with which he carried out his feeling of duty towards his vocation, was apt to lay more stress on the necessity for taking pains than on the necessity of possessing the real source of his power of industry. He saw too often the fatal results of artists depending on talent to achieve what only talent allied to industry can perform, for him not to accentuate the all-importance of unceasing labour. He wrote to his elder sister with reference to one of these fatal results: "I have not seen that young man's recent work, neither do I hunger and thirst thereafter; twenty-one years ago, or more, his parents brought me a composition of his--it justified the highest hopes--it was very ambitious in its scope (though the work of a child), and the ambition was justified in the ability it displayed. Nothing that I could have done at his age approached it. I told his parents so. He ought now to have been a very considerable artist, to say the least--he no longer even _aims_! He told me a year or two ago that he had _ceased to design_! He paints portraits, and twists a little moustache under an eyegla.s.s. He is _nothing_, as far as the world knows, and I doubt whether he is hiding himself under a bushel. I fear vanity and idleness have rotted out his talents. It is a strange and a sad case. I often quote it (without names) to those who show precocious gifts." His attached friend and fellow-Academician, Mr. Briton Riviere, writes of Leighton:--

"I have always believed that his ruling pa.s.sion was Duty--the keenest possible sense of it; to do anything he had to do as perfectly as possible, and to be always at his best. He was evidently a believer in Goethe's maxim that 'an artist who does anything, does all.' In his own work, in what concerned his colleagues and the outside body of artists, in fact in everything he did. Nothing easily or pa.s.sively done satisfied him; but in every case the decision and action were brought by care and work--if possible, executed by himself; and no pressure of time or labour ever made him escape such personal trouble, or caused him to transfer it to the shoulders of another. This temper of mind was shown even in small matters, which so busy a man might well have left for others to do. I think it sometimes injured his own work as an artist, because, though a great artist can never be evolved except by years of patient work and strenuous effort to do his very best always, yet, on the other hand, it is often the happy, easy work and absolutely spontaneous effort at the moment by such a hand which is his very best. Such happy, easy work probably Leighton would seldom allow himself to do, and never would leave at the right moment, but would still strive to make better and more complete. He must still elaborate it and try to make it more perfect; and this it was which made his old friend and enthusiastic admirer, Watts, sometimes say "how much finer Leighton's work would be if he would admit the accidental into it."

I remember once casually remarking to Leighton how much easier writing was than painting. He answered quickly but seriously--quite impressively: "Believe me, nothing is easy if it is done as well as you can possibly do it." This was Leighton's creed of creeds. Whatever genius or facilities an artist may possess, he must ignore them as factors in the fight. He must possess them unconsciously--the whole conscious effort being concentrated on surmounting difficulties, not on encouraging facilities.

To return to the subject of this chapter. It would be obviously unreasonable to attempt to compare slight studies of plants and flowers, however precious, with finished important works of art such as "Cimabue's Madonna," "A Syracusan Bride," "Daphnephoria," "Captive Andromache," "The Return of Persephone," or, in fact, with any of Leighton's well-known paintings--or indeed with those masterly studies of the figure and draperies in black and white chalk, drawn for his pictures, or when he was seized with the beauty of an att.i.tude while his model was resting. These, though executed in a few seconds, are true and subtle records of the perfection in the form and structure of the human figure, proving the existence of a knowledge and of a sense of beauty which Watts declared were unrivalled since the days of Pheidias. The later masterly studies of landscape in oil-colour which formerly lined the walls of his Kensington studio, in which can be so truly discerned the distinctive colouring and atmosphere of the various countries where they were painted, also are greater as achievements than the pencil drawings. Nevertheless, when studying Leighton's genius with a view to gauge rightly its power and also its limitations, it is, I maintain, essential to take into account these direct studies from Nature, made with the object solely of following, watching, and copying her faithfully, ingenuously, "choosing nothing and rejecting nothing," but into which crept unconsciously the undeniable evidence of his native gifts. As proofs of spontaneous power in the quality of his genius, they refute much unjust criticism which has been hurled at Leighton's art since his death. Sir William Richmond wrote[44]:--

"That term of abuse and of contempt, trite now, on account of the mannerism of its constant adoption by ephemeral critics, and sometimes adopted by poorly equipped artists, 'academic,' has been most unjustly, in its derogatory sense, applied to Leighton's art.

"In point of fact, it is academic, but only in the good sense of being highly educated, very scientific, and restrained. And in that sense it is a pity that there is not more of such academic art. The bad sense, wherein such criticism is applicable, being justly advanced towards work that displays no inspiration, no originality, that is correct and commonplace, balanced without enthusiasm, adequate without reason, and accurate without good taste in the choice of beautiful and expressive gestures, forms, and colours, and is preoccupied and narrow."

It is probably the restraint, the science, the high education in Leighton's finished pictures which have provoked unsympathetic critics to endeavour to demolish Leighton's reputation as a great artist. To these, such qualities would seem to deny the existence of any sensitiveness, any spontaneity in his art. They have a.s.serted that it is cold, dry--academic. For the reason that science, calculated effects, style, and high education--qualities rarely found in modern English art--are evident in Leighton's pictures, they conclude that the painter is possessed of no intuitive genius. They take essentially a British, a non-cosmopolitan standpoint from which to preach. They do not take into account the standard towards which Leighton was ever aiming. He may not have attained the goal towards which he worked, but the nature of that goal should be understood and recognised before any criticism on his work can pa.s.s as intelligent and just; and these exquisite drawings of flowers and plants come to our aid in confuting sterile estimates of Leighton's art, which deny any other elements but those which can be acquired by painstaking and teachable qualities.

Here are records of Nature complicated by no intellectual choice, no academic learning, no results of high education; and what is the result? an undeniable evidence of the finest, most tender sensitiveness for beauty, resulting in a complete and perfect rendering of the subtlest forms of growth. When "face to face" with Nature, Leighton's aesthetic emotions were keen enough and all-sufficient to create these perfect records, as later in his life he created unrivalled drawings of the human figure in even more spontaneous and certainly more rapid strokes of his pencil, and landscape sketches which prove undeniably his gifts as a colourist; but it may be questioned whether his aesthetic emotions had as great a _staying_ power as those qualities of heart and brain which made Leighton a great man, independent of the position he held as a great artist. His sensibilities were of the keenest; the agility and vitality of his brain power were quite abnormal. As Watts wrote, a "magnificent intellectual capacity, and an unerring and instantaneous spring upon the point to unravel." It seemed, however, that this vitality and agility did at times run away with that more abiding strength of aesthetic emotion which impregnates the very greatest art with a serenity, a sublime atmosphere,--an emotion which denotes a mood in which the artist has been steeped throughout the creation of a work, from the first moment he conceives it to the moment when he puts the last touch to the canvas, and affects the actual manipulation of the pigment. The above criticism applies only justly to certain of Leighton's works. In many of his paintings the poetic motive which inspired their invention,--their mental atmosphere,--governs the achievements throughout, though doubtless these works also would have had a more convincing effect as art had the surface possessed a more vibrating quality. Among those pictures in which form, colour, tone, and expression are completely dominated by their poetic meaning are "Lieder ohne Worte," a lovely, though youthful, work; "David;"

"Ariadne," a picture little known, but in some respects perhaps the most poetic Leighton ever painted; "Summer Moon" (Watts' favourite Leighton), "Elisha Raising the Son of the Shunammite," "Winding the Skein," "Music Lesson," "Antique Juggling Girl," "Daedalus and Icarus,"

"Helios and Rhodos," "Golden Hours," "Cymon and Iphigenia," "The Spirit of the Summit," "Flaming June," "Clytie" (unfinished).

[Ill.u.s.tration: "ARIADNE ABANDONED BY THESEUS; WATCHES FOR HIS RETURN. ARTEMIS RELEASES HER BY DEATH." 1868 By permission of Lord Pirrie]

[Ill.u.s.tration: "ELISHA RAISING THE SON OF THE SHUNAMMITE." 1881]

[Ill.u.s.tration: "DaeDALUS AND ICARUS." 1869 By permission of Sir Alexander Henderson]

No aspect of his own work was a secret from Leighton. No one knew better than he did his own limitations, or why it was necessary to keep himself in hand by methods of procedure in his painting which he could guide by his ever present intellectual ac.u.men. He wrote to his father on March 2, 1855, having just completed the two pictures, "Cimabue's Madonna" and "Romeo": "You ask for _my_ opinion of my pictures; you couldn't ask a more embarra.s.sing and unsatisfactory question; I think, indeed, that they are very creditable works for my age, but I am anything but satisfied with them, and believe that I could paint both of them better now. I am particularly anxious that persons whom I love or esteem should think neither more nor less of my artistic capacity than I deserve--_the plain truth_; I am therefore very circ.u.mspect in pa.s.sing a verdict on myself in addressing myself to such persons; I think, however, you may expect me to become eventually the best draughtsman in my country."

A biographer's obvious moral duty is to aim at presenting impartially "the plain truth," following Leighton's lead in not desiring to give either a more or less favourable view of his capacities as an artist than they deserve. On May 7, 1864, Leighton writes in a letter to his father and mother: "I had a kind note this morning from Ruskin in which, after criticising two or three things, he speaks very warmly of other points in my work and of the development of what he calls 'enormous power and sense of beauty.' I quote this for what it is worth, because I know it will give you pleasure, but I have _not_ and _never shall have_ 'enormous power,' though I have some 'sense of beauty.'" Leighton remained ever far from being contented with his own work. "I alone know how far I have fallen short of my ideal," he says, many years later, to the old acquaintance of the Lucca days. He had studied under the shadow of the great masters; and though never an imitator even of the greatest,[45] he had set himself a standard of supreme excellence, more easily approached under the conditions in which artists worked in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries than it possibly could be in those of the nineteenth. With respect to his power of draughtsmans.h.i.+p and his natural sense of beauty, Leighton knew his place was among the greatest. His appreciation and love of colour were also far keener than those possessed by the average artist. He felt nevertheless that he lacked the inevitable and continuous force which alone gives "_enormous power_" and ease to the craftsman, when he deals with work on a large scale, and which carries with it the absolutely convincing effect of the world-renowned art of the past. Realising that the "enormous power" was not there because the ever conclusively propelling force was lacking, perhaps owing partly to the want of robust health, and also doubtless from the scattering of his powers in many directions to which he was drawn by a sense of duty, Leighton, in working out the designs of his large pictures, clung all the more resolutely to the exercise of that system which he had adopted, and which many of his friends--Watts and Briton Riviere among the number--thought tended to cramp his genius. He was not sufficiently sure of himself to admit the "accidental" into his work.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "CAPTIVE ANDROMACHE." 1888 The Corporation of Manchester]

[Ill.u.s.tration: STUDY IN COLOUR FOR "CAPTIVE ANDROMACHE." 1888 By permission of Mrs. Stewart Hodgson]

[Ill.u.s.tration: "WEAVING THE WREATH." 1873]

[Ill.u.s.tration: "WINDING THE SKEIN." 1880 By permission of the Fine Art Society, the owners of the Copyright]

[Ill.u.s.tration: "MUSIC LESSON." 1877 By permission of the Fine Art Society, the owners of the Copyright]

Some critics have, however, gone beyond the mark in emphasising this characteristic of Leighton's methods. One writes: "Deliberateness of workmans.h.i.+p and calculation of effect, into which inspiration of the moment is never allowed to enter, are the chief characteristics of the painter's craftsmans.h.i.+p. The inspiration stage was practically pa.s.sed when he took the crayon in his hand; and to this circ.u.mstance probably is to be a.s.signed the absence of realism which arrests the attention."

This statement is contrary to many which I have heard fall from Leighton's own lips. He constantly drew my attention to the fact--a fact on which he laid great stress, and of which many models were witnesses--that he _invariably_ recurred to Nature in the later stages of his pictures, in order to imbibe renewed inspiration from the source of all his aesthetic emotions--Nature. Any one who carefully studies Leighton's pictures will find evidence of this in the works themselves, in the accessories no less than in the princ.i.p.al figures. During the exhibition of some thirty of Leighton's finest paintings at Leighton House in 1900, I was daily more and more impressed by the fact that the final touches in those pictures had been inspired by the actual subtlety of Nature's aspects, and transmitted to the canvas by the artist direct from the objects before him without conscious calculation. Very obviously was this the case not only in the princ.i.p.al features of the design--the countenances and the hands and feet of the figures--but in such details as the flowers, fabrics of draperies, carpets, mother-of-pearl inlaying, found (for instance) in "A n.o.ble Venetian Lady," "Summer Moon," "Sister's Kiss," "Weaving the Wreath,"

"Winding the Skein," "The Music Lesson," "Atalanta." In all these pictures exists the internal convincing evidence contradicting the statement that "the inspiration stage was practically past when he took the crayon in his hand." This, however, did not obscure in some of Leighton's large finished pictures undoubted evidences of arrangements and calculated effects, which are not over-ruled by an art which conceals them, by the art which disguises art,--the clenching force of the inevitable. The beauty of line, the grouping of ma.s.ses, the "composition" evident in the posing of the figures--admirable and unlaboured as all these arrangements are--not infrequently lack this convincing sign of the inevitable. It is too obvious that they have been chosen by the intellectual taste of their maker. When Goethe was expatiating on Shakespeare and comparing his genius with his own, he said, as a proof of his own inferiority, that he knew well how every word was made to come in its place, but with Shakespeare they came without Shakespeare knowing.[46] Leighton, like Goethe, was conscious that his genius could not vie with the greatest in the world--the genius he was able to appreciate as Goethe did Shakespeare's; but he also knew, as did Goethe, exactly the place his own art ought to take; he knew that in his sense of style--which, in its true meaning, is the echo of Nature in her choicest, n.o.blest moods,--in his sense of the beauty of the human structure, in his power of draughtsmans.h.i.+p, his work was superior to that of any of his contemporaries in England. The fact of the greatness of Leighton's powers in some directions challenges a comparison between his work and that of the giants of old who possess enormous power in all directions. No one knew so well as did Leighton the place he must take when he entered the lists with the giants: "I have _not_ and _never shall have_ 'enormous power.'" He writes in 1856 from Paris to his Master, Steinle:--

_Translation._]

PARIS, RUE PIGALLE 21.

MY GOOD AND DEAR FRIEND,--Accidentally I had an idle morning when I received your dear letter, and therefore answer it immediately. With your usual modesty you put aside all that I say of goodness and love, but I repeat it unweariedly.

Steinle, my good Master, if in this insincere world I have an unfeigned, pure feeling, it is my warm grat.i.tude and love for you; and the time when I bloomed, gay and full of hope, in your garden will light me through life like a sunny spot in the past; and I yield myself to this feeling the more confidently, since I _know_ that I am under no delusion in it.

I have fairly strong insight, and know exactly what I owe to you, and for what I have to thank nature; I can already appraise my moderate natural gifts; but I know also that these gifts received _through you alone_ the impression of _taste_ that can alone make them effective, and that in your hands they were refined as in a furnace. An English painter seldom lacks fancy and invention, but _taste_, that which forms and embellishes the raw material, _that_ is almost always wanting with us--and it is you I must thank for the _little_ I possess.

To flatter was an impossibility with Leighton. He paid every artist the respect of believing he desired the same sincerity shown in the criticism of his work that he,--Leighton,--wished when his own was judged, and with which he judged it himself. A remarkable feature in his character was the power he had of retaining so secure a hold on his own standards of excellence without for a moment losing his individual self-centre, yet at the same time possessing that of entering sympathetically into the view of other artists--a view often quite contrary to his own--and generously acknowledging every merit that could by any possibility be extracted from their work. Mr. Briton Riviere writes: "The intensity of his own personal belief was well known to himself. He once said to me, in reference to a clever picture which he greatly admired for some of its qualities, that he could not really enjoy it, owing to its careless drawing. On another occasion, when at Mr. Russell's sale I had bought a very vigorous study by Etty, and Leighton was quite enthusiastic about its colour and painting, he said, 'But I could not bear it on my wall, with that drawing,' and he laughed at himself for this strictness, and said, 'I know that I am a prig about drawing.' However, not only did this never blind him to the claims of another kind of art, but I think he was even more keen to recommend for approval the work of any school of painting for which, personally, he had no particular liking or sympathy. 'It is not whether you or I like it, but what it is on its own merits,' was a favourite warning of his to any rapid opinion expressed on a picture.

To any one intimately acquainted with his own real views and opinions it was sometimes surprising to find how well he realised the intentions, and put himself in the place, of some artist who had produced something very foreign to his own point of view, and quite repugnant to his beliefs. This is not a common quality among artists, whose critical tolerance is often in an inverse ratio to the firmness of their own particular creed of art faith; and it was one of the many qualities which marked Leighton out as so admirably fitted for the Presidency."

Leighton was, undoubtedly, an absolutely competent critic of his own art; and the fact that his principles had been inspired by a spontaneous and sincere reverence and admiration for the creations of artists whom time has crowned as the greatest in the world, and that with his critical faculty he perceived in what measure he had succeeded in following in their steps, enabled him to gauge with absolute justice the merits and shortcomings of his own work, compared with that of his contemporaries. Whatever those shortcomings were, certain it is that they did not arise from an absence of those natural gifts which are the outcome of emotional sensitiveness, nor from a want of intense feeling for the beauty of Nature, nor from a poverty of invention. The theory that his art was solely the result of his having an abnormal power of industry and of taking pains--a theory which has been advanced many times since Leighton's death--cannot hold good for a moment with those who impartially study his work from the beginning of his career. The spontaneity of the impulse to produce in every born artist is described in the following pa.s.sage from Leighton's first discourse, when President, to the students of the Royal Academy, December 10, 1879, and the description is obviously drawn from his own personal experience: "The gift of artistic production manifests itself in the young in an impulse so spontaneous and so imperative, and is in its origin so wholly emotional and independent of the action of the intellect, that it at first and for some time entirely absorbs their energies. The student's first steps on the bright paths of his working life are obscured by no shadows save those cast by the difficulties of a technical nature which lie before him, and these difficulties, which indeed he only half discerns, serve rather to whet his appet.i.te than to hamper or discourage him; for his heart whispers that, when he shall have brushed them aside, the road will be clear before him, and the utterance of what he feels stirring within him will be from thenceforward one long unchecked delight. This spirit of spontaneous, unquestioning rejoicing in production, which is still the privilege of youth, and which, even now, the very strong sometimes carry with them through their lives, was indeed, when Art herself was in her prime, the normal and constant condition of the artistic temper, and shone out in all artistic work. It is this spirit which gave a perennial freshness to Athenian Art--the serenest and most spontaneous men have ever seen. And when again, after many centuries, another Art was born out of the night of the Dark Ages, and shed its gentle light over the chaos of society, this spirit once more burst through it into flame.

All forms of Art are alike fired with it. Architecture first, exulting in new flights of vigorous and bold creation; then Sculpture; last, Painting, virtually a new Art, looked out on to the world with the wondering delight of a child, timidly at first, but soon to fill it with the bright expression of its joy. Those were halcyon days; the questions, 'Why do I paint?' 'Why do I model?' 'Why should I build beautifully?' 'What--how--shall I build, model, paint?' had no existence in the mind of the artist. 'Why,' he might have answered, 'does the lark soar and sing?'"

Though his direct study from Nature mostly took the form, in later years, of sketching in oil colour views in the different countries in which he travelled, Leighton showed to the end of his life his great delight in flowers by continuing to make sketches from them. In 1895, at Malinmore, he was fascinated by the sea-thistle, and there are four pages in a sketch-book devoted to rapid sketches of the plant, _callantra_, which he made there. Notes are written on the first sketch indicating the colours. It is interesting to compare the early pencil work executed between 1850 and 1860 with that of forty years later. Though the handling may be different, there is the same complete sense and enjoyment of the wonderful architecture of plants and flowers obvious in both.[47]

[Ill.u.s.tration: STUDY OF SEA THISTLE. Malinmore, Ireland, 1895 From Sketch-book]

[Ill.u.s.tration: STUDY OF SEA THISTLE. Malinmore, Ireland, 1895 From Sketch-book]

[Ill.u.s.tration: "RETURN OF PERSEPHONE." 1891]

[Ill.u.s.tration: STUDY IN COLOUR FOR "RETURN OF PERSEPHONE." 1891 By permission of Mrs. Stewart Hodgson]

FOOTNOTES:

[37] See Appendix, Vol. II., description in Preface to "Catalogue of the Leighton House Collection."

[38] An artist who was a great flower lover, when relating her experiences, maintained that it was in the revelation, to her perceptions, of the infinite perfection of the structure and form of one flower, that she had realised in her own nature a more intimate recognition and response to that of the Creator of the Infinite than had ever been elicited by any church services or creeds, or even, in fact, by the most sublime scenery. In one small flower she had found an epitome of the wonders and beauties of all creation, so focussed as to be grasped closely, and responded to, from the innermost intimate recesses of her nature with a joy unspeakable.

[39] See Appendix, Vol. II., Preface to "Catalogue of the Leighton House Collection."

[40] See Appendix, Vol. II., "Lord Leighton, P.R.A., Some Reminiscences."

[41] Appendix, Vol. II.

[42] Ruskin was mistaken in thinking that the "Lemon Tree" and the "Byzantine Well" are of the same date. The former drawing was made in 1859, the latter seven years earlier in 1852 (reproduced facing page 80), and is referred to in his diary, "Pebbles." I think this is the most beautiful drawing of the kind I have ever seen.