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.’
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Denne historien er fra November/December 2016-utgaven av Minerva.
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ROMAN DISCOVERIES AT ANCIENT AUGUSTODUNUM
More than 230 graves have been uncovered at a necropolis in the French city of Autun, revealing a diverse mix in burial practices over a period of nearly 200 years, as well as luxury grave goods from the 3rd and 4th centuries AD that highlight the wealth of some of its ancient inhabitants.
SHAPING THE WORLD: SCULPTURE FROM PREHISTORY TO NOW
The sculptor Antony Gormley and the art historian and critic Martin Gayford have been talking about sculpture with each other for 20 years.
Amelia Edwards (1831-1892)
“I am essentially a worker, and a hard worker, and this I have been since my early girlhood.”
THE GREAT BEYOND
The ancient Greeks thought much about the dead – how their remains should be disposed of, how their spirits might be summoned, how malignant they could be if unavenged. Classicist David Stuttard brings us face to face with the Greek dead.
INTO THE VALLEY OF THE QUEENS
The Great Royal Wife of Ramesses II, Nefertari, was buried in one of the most spectacular tombs of Egypt’s Valley of the Queens. Well-educated and well-travelled, Nefertari played a crucial part in the political life of the pharaoh, and her importance was reflected through her magnificently decorated tomb. Lucia Marchini speaks to Jennifer Casler Price to find out more.
DEIR EL-BAHRI, 1894
Tensions were already high among the archaeologists, surveyors, and artists of the Archaeological Survey of Egypt in 1891 when an eventful dispute arose on Christmas Eve.
PUSHING BOUNDARIES
When the Etruscans expanded to the south and the vast plains of Campania, they found a land of cultural connections and confrontations, as luxurious grave goods found across the region reveal. An exhibition at the National Archaeological Museum in Naples sheds light on these ancient Italians at the frontier. Paolo Giulierini, director of the museum, is our guide.
CUZCO 'CENTRE AND HEAD OF ALL THE LAND'
Cuzco was the heart of the vast Inca empire, but all changed in the 16th century when the capital was conquered by Spanish invaders. Michael J Schreffler investigates the Inca city, and how it went from the centre of one empire to the periphery of another.
A STUDY IN PURPLE
A tiny speck of purple paint from the 2nd century AD may yield clues to how ancient artists created the extraordinary portrait panels that accompanied mummified bodies into the afterlife.
Rome In The 8th Century: A History In Art
John Osborne CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, £75 HARDBACK - ISBN 978-1108834582
