Victorian Classics

As the iconic painting Flaming June returns to Leighton House Museum in London, Dominic Green looks at the influence of the Classical World on the inscrutable artist Frederic, Lord Leighton.

Beneath an awning on a marble balcony, a young woman sleeps coiled into the folds of an orange dress and her long brown hair. Below the balcony, the reflection of the noonday sun on the Mediterranean Sea is like molten silver. A branch of flowering oleander, fragrant, fleshy and poisonous, climbs over the balcony – beauty and danger, sleep and death. Flaming June is Frederic, Lord Leighton’s most popular painting, and one of his last. Leighton submitted it to the Royal Academy of Art’s exhibition in 1895, but he was too ill from angina to attend the opening. He died in January 1896 from heart failure, an unfinished study of a Bacchante, drawn in chalk on a ‘piece of coarse brown wrapping-paper’, by his bed.

This month, Flaming June returns to the artist’s London house and studio, now Leighton House Museum, to be reunited with four other paintings that together comprise Leighton’s final artistic statement. Twixt Hope and Fear, The Maid with Golden Hair and Candida are loaned from private collections; Lachrymae is from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; while Flaming June has come all the way from the Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico.

‘I am delighted that, over 125 years on, we can reunite these five paintings created by Leighton in the home and studio he cherished,’ says Daniel Robbins, Senior Curator at Leighton House Museum. ‘This exhibition will give visitors the chance to look more closely into this final body of work with Flaming June as its centrepiece, and to consider afresh Leighton’s achievements as an artist.’