This mode of practice, however, served Leighton well in nearly everything he undertook. It enabled him to give charm and delicacy to his figure subjects, and wonderful virility and strength to his portraits, and in the painting of the landscapes which he so often used as backgrounds to his figure compositions, it helped him to attain an admirable serenity and breadth of effect. Where it led him astray was in his treatment of drapery, which under his deliberate method was apt to become lifeless through its very excess of realism. The masses of his draperies he designed with dignity, with a fine sense of line, and with a proper feeling for the forms of the figure beneath, but these masses he often cut up by a multiplicity of little folds, all so precisely drawn and carefully accounted for that they conveyed to the eye a map-like impression of lines without meaning, and surfaces without modelling. He seemed to have worried over them until he had lost by needless intricacy all largeness of suggestion. But in his portraits he maintained with rare discretion the right proportion between large character, and the little things by which the individuality of a face is determined. His heads of "Sir Richard Burton" and "Professor Costa," for instance, are magnificent and give him undoubtedly a place among the masters of portraiture.
If an attempt were made to explain in a few words Leighton's position in art, it would probably be most correct to say that he was, by instinct and habit of mind, more a sculptor than a painter. He looked at nature with a sculptor's eye, and he adopted a kind of technical process which in its progressive building up was closely akin to modelling. And if pictures like his "Phryne," his "Clytemnestra," his "Electra," and even his wholly charming "Bath of Psyche," are considered from this point of view, their resemblance to beautifully tinted sculpture is apparent enough. Even his "Cimabue's Madonna" and the "Daphnephoria" suggest bas-reliefs. That he had the sculptor's habit of mind is proved by many of his studies in which he drew a figure, or group of figures, from three or four points of view, so as to arrive at what may be called the anatomy of the pose.
But discussions as to his right to be described as a sculptor who chose to give himself up to painting, or as a painter who had all the qualifications to become a master of sculpture, are a little futile. He was a great artist and he proved his powers in both forms of practice. What is more material is that people should learn to do justice to his greatness, and should try to estimate at its proper worth everything that he did. To scoff at his art, as the unthinking are ready to do, is utter folly; to say that he has no place in art history, as a certain school of critics are in the habit of asserting, is merely stupid prejudice; he will in years to come, when the memories of his wonderful personality have died away, be accepted on his work alone as one of the noblest teachers of the fundamental principles of the best and purest type of æstheticism. His time has not yet arrived; had he lived three or four centuries ago he would be honoured now as a master. Because he was a man of the nineteenth century our familiarity with him has bred, if not actually contempt, at least a habit of undervaluing him which is almost as unreasonable.
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN.