In its next exhibition, that of 1867, the Academy held five pictures by the artist, including the delightful Pastoral, two small full-length figures standing in a landscape of a shepherd and a girl—whom he is teaching to play the pipes. This again might be considered a painter's translation from Theocritus, and the Venus Disrobing for the Bath, one of the most debated of all the artist's paintings of the nude. The paleness of the flesh-tint of this Venus aroused a criticism which has often been urged against his pictures—that such a hue was not in nature. In imparting an ideal effect to an ideal subject, Leighton always, however, followed his own conviction—that art has a law of its own, and a harmony of colour and form, derived and selected no doubt from natural loveliness, but not to be referred too closely to the natural, or to the average, in these things.
To the 1868 Academy Leighton contributed another biblical theme, Jonathan's Token to David. With this were four others, as widely varying in subject and conception as need be desired. One was a very charming portrait of a very pretty woman, Mrs. Frederick P. Cockerell. Then follow three more in that cycle of classic subjects, of which the painter never tired. The full title of the first runs, Ariadne abandoned by Theseus: Ariadne watches for his return: Artemis releases her by death. In it the figure of Ariadne, clothed in white drapery, is seen lying on a rocky promontory overlooking the sea. Acme and Septimius is a circular picture, with two small full-length figures reclining on a marble bench. This extract from Sir Theodore Martin's translation of Catullus was appended to its title in the catalogue:
"Then bending gently back her head,
With that sweet mouth so rosy red,
Upon his eyes she dropped a kiss,
Intoxicating him with bliss."
A love song on canvas, a pictorial transcript from Catullus, it was perhaps the most popular picture of the year. The last of the three was Actæa, the Nymph of the Shore. It represents a small full-length nude figure lying on white drapery by the sea-shore. Actæa is a lovely figure, full of that grace which Leighton so well knew how to impart to his idealized figures.
After this year, at any rate, there could be no longer any doubt but that the artist's power really lay in the creation of ideal forms; whether presented in monomime or combined in poetic and decorative groups, called up from the wonderful limbo of classic myth and history.
With 1869 came Electra at the Tomb of Agamemnon, a memorable picture, full of characteristic effects of colour and composition, and a notable exercise in the grand style. This work, considered from any side, must be seen to be the outcome of a unique faculty, so unprecedented in English art as to run every risk of misconception that native predilections could impose upon those who stopped to criticise it. The figure of Electra clad in black drapery offered a problem of peculiar difficulty.
Another painting shown this year was Dædalus and Icarus, a strikingly conceived picture. The two figures are singularly noble conceptions of the idealized nude; the drapery at the back of Icarus is typical of the painter in every fold, while the landscape seen far below the stone platform on which the figures stand, shows a bay of the blue Ægean sea in full sidelight, with a lovely glimpse of the white walls of a distant town.
The same exhibition of 1869 saw, also, the vigorously painted diploma picture, St. Jerome, which marked his election as R.A. In it the saint, nude to the waist, kneels with uplifted arms at the foot of a crucifix, his lion seen in the background. Helios and Rhodos, another painting exhibited at the same time, shows Helios descending from his chariot, which is in a cloud above, to embrace the nymph Rhodos, who has risen from the sea.
