Frederic Leighton: The Landscapes That Revealed His Private World
In 1869, Queen Victoria paid a visit to the painter Frederic Leighton’s studio-house in Holland Park. She recorded in her diary being shown his latest exhibition pictures, followed by ‘a quantity of sketches… just taken by him on the Nile, which were very interesting’.
There’s a fair bit to unpack in that anecdote. Firstly, the fact that the monarch had long been an admirer of Leighton’s work — dating back to 1855, when she bought the first painting he ever showed at the prestigious Royal Academy Exhibition, Cimabue’s Madonna Carried in Procession.
Frederic, Lord Leighton, P.R.A. (1830-1896), The Bay of Cadiz — Moonlight (detail). Oil on canvas. 20.5 x 29 cm. Leighton House, Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. Purchased with support from the Arts Council England/V&A Purchase Grant Fund and The Friends of Leighton House
The studio tour that Leighton gave her also offers insight into his artistic practice. That practice was essentially two-fold: consisting of highly finished paintings on the one hand, typically with a historical, mythological or religious subject; and landscape sketches in oils, created en plein air, on the other.
It is the former for which Leighton is best known, and on which his whole career success was based. These were the pictures he exhibited publicly, a famous example being Flaming June (1895), which depicts the sun-drenched slumber of a long-haired woman in a diaphanous orange gown. These were the pictures that helped earn Leighton the presidency of the Royal Academy (a post he held for 18 years, from 1878 until his death).
Frederic Leighton in the 1860s, photographed by David Wilkie Wynfield. Photo: © National Portrait Gallery, London
The landscape sketches, by contrast, were private pleasures, about which relatively little is known. The artist made around 180 in his lifetime, and 65 of these are on show in Leighton and Landscape: Impressions from Nature, an exhibition at Leighton House, the museum dedicated to him in in his erstwhile studio-home.
‘We hope this show resets people’s understanding of who Leighton was,’ says Daniel Robbins, senior curator at the museum. ‘He created landscape sketches in oils throughout his career, the product of numerous trips. They reveal that Leighton was an artist of greater range than is widely believed. There’s an immediacy and a spontaneity to the sketches that you just don’t see in his exhibition pictures.’
The Bay of Cadiz, Moonlight was produced on a trip to southern Spain in 1866. Recently acquired by Leighton House (the work was offered at Christie’s in June 2024), this nocturnal scene alluringly captures the moon and its reflection over the eponymous bay. It was likely created by the artist from his hotel balcony one night, and includes three relaxed figures perching on a sea wall.
Frederic Leighton P.R.A. (1830-1896), A Village on a Hill, Capri, 1859-60. Oil on canvas, laid on board. 390 x 273 mm. Leighton House, Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. In the distance are the ruins of the Villa Jovis, and the church of San Michele alla Croce to the left
This was, in fact, a rare example of a Leighton sketch featuring figures. It was also unusual in the way the artist directly transposed it for use in an exhibition painting — Spanish Dancing Girl: Cadiz in the Old Times — which he showed at the Royal Academy in 1867. The latter features three spectators clapping to music as they watch a woman dance, the coastline behind them clearly derived from Leighton’s sketch.
‘What he did, broadly speaking, was build up a stock of landscape sketches on his travels,’ says Robbins, ‘and then amend or amalgamate elements of them for the background of certain paintings later.’
A trip to the Italian island of Capri in 1871, for instance, resulted in a sketch — Buildings, Capri: Moonlight — which has strong echoes in the backdrop to a mythological painting from three years later, Clytemnestra from the Battlements of Argos Watches for the Beacon Fires Which Are to Announce the Return of Agamemnon. The echoes include a purple-hued mountain and a set of blocky stone buildings.
Leighton chose to expand the mountain to make it look more monumental, however, and to replace Capri’s houses and churches with crenellated turrets and the roofline of a Greek temple.
Frederic, Lord Leighton, P.R.A. (1830-1896), Clytemnestra from the Battlements of Argos Watches for the Beacon Fires which are to Announce the Return of Agamemnon, 1874. Oil on canvas. 173.5 x 123.8 cm. Leighton House, Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea
Leighton was born into a comfortably-off family in Yorkshire in the north of England in 1830. His father was a doctor: no bad thing, given that Leighton’s mother was chronically ill. The family travelled abroad with great frequency, allowing her to escape the cold British climate.
Young Frederic went on to study art at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence and the Städelsches Kunstinstitut in Frankfurt. Travel, then, was part of his life from an early age — and in this respect, his sketching trips were nothing out of the ordinary.
His cosmopolitan outlook extended to the decoration of his house — notably the splendid Narcissus Hall, with its blend of Greco-Roman and Middle Eastern influences.
Narcissus Hall at Leighton House, 1877-81, named for its centrepiece, a bronze of the eponymous figure from Greek mythology. The room acts as a link between the main part of the house and the Arab Hall. Photo: © Leighton House, RBKC
Leighton’s sketching trips were all but annual occurrences from the mid-1850s onwards, and followed a pretty standard timeline, lasting six to eight weeks between September and November. They often consisted of an initial period in Scotland or Ireland, before departure south into mainland Europe and sometimes beyond.
‘Aside from their artistic merit,’ says Robbins, ‘Leighton’s sketches are an incredible document of decades’ worth of travel, from the Scottish Highlands to the Sahara Desert. These trips were taken alone, and I think that a major motivation for them was the chance to get away from it all, especially as the responsibilities piled up during his years as president of the Royal Academy.
‘Painting landscapes in far-off locations was a kind of therapeutic experience for him. Alone, Leighton could decide what he wanted to paint, and spend as much time immersed in his art as he wanted.’
Frederic, Lord Leighton, P.R.A. (1830-1896), A Pool, Findhorn River, N.B., 1880s. Oil on panel. 12 x 18.5 cm. Leighton House, Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea
In most cases, the sketches were artworks in their own right — that is, without connection to any exhibition painting. They come in a variety of sizes, with diverse light effects and colour combinations, some with the paint thinly applied, others with it built up in thick layers.
Even on another continent, it wasn’t always easy for Leighton to go incommunicado, however. In 1895, from lodgings in Tangiers, he wrote to his neighbour back in London, Val Prinsep: ‘I came here largely to escape [but] a card was left within two hours of my arrival!! Ugh!!’
Leighton’s social status did bring its advantages, however — for example, when he took his aforementioned trip along the Nile late in 1868. A letter from the Prince of Wales to the Viceroy of Egypt introduced him as a ‘personal friend’ and resulted in an entire steamer and crew being put at Leighton’s disposal to take him up the river from Cairo to Philae and back again.
Frederic, Lord Leighton, P.R.A. (1830-1896), On the Nile, 1868. Oil on canvas. 18.7 x 27.2 cm. Leighton House, Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. The monastery of St Simeon is visible in the distance. Describing a similar scene in his diary, Leighton observed that towards the evenings ‘the earth was in colour like a lion’s skin; the sky of tremulous violet, fading in the zenith to a mysterious sapphire tint’
He produced more than 20 sketches on that trip. Interestingly, he chose not to depict the great Egyptian temples on his journey, preferring panoramic views of the mountainous terrain and desert landscape seen from the boat and on shore, such as On the Nile.
It’s not entirely clear how he picked his destinations, but what unites most of his landscape sketches is the avoidance of what might be called obvious subject matter. The exhibition includes a single work of Venice, for example: Study of Houses, Venice. It captures some unremarkable buildings in an unidentified corner of the lagoon, without a stretch of canal in sight.
Leighton gave his landscape sketches prominence within his studio and, as Queen Victoria recorded, enjoyed showing them to guests. A journalist for the Pall Mall Gazette, who stopped by to interview him one day in 1892, wrote that the artist ‘did not so much call attention to the three pictures almost finished on the easels, but was the more intent on describing the numerous sketches which almost fill the studio’.
Frederic, Lord Leighton, P.R.A. (1830-1896), Study of Houses, Venice, possibly 1867. Oil on canvas. 25 x 39.5 cm. Gere Collection, normally on long-term loan to the National Gallery, London
Leighton never sold his landscapes, and it was only late in his career that he considered exhibiting them, staging two shows at the Royal Society of British Artists in 1894 and 1895. Both received positive reviews, the critic for the London Evening Standard saying of the latter that ‘no one should omit to make acquaintance with Sir Frederic’s dignified and delightful studies’.
Notwithstanding these exhibitions, Leighton’s landscape sketches still weren’t exactly well known at the time of his death, in January 1896, aged 65. The contents of his studio-house were sold by Christie’s later that same year, including all 184 of his landscape oil sketches.
In recent years, Leighton House as a museum has been trying to buy examples back, though many remain lost. Robbins says he’s particularly keen to find a sketch of an Irish sunset that inspired the painting Clytie (1895-96), which explores the myth of a nymph who fell in love with the sun god Apollo.
It’s often said that there were two sides to Leighton: the public figure at the centre of London’s art world, who was knighted in 1878 (and later named both a baron and a lord); and the private individual, who lived alone and whose personal life remains obscure. If the exhibition paintings represent the former Leighton, one might say that the landscape sketches — rather intriguingly — represent the latter.
Leighton and Landscape: Impressions from Nature is at Leighton House, London, until 27 April 2025