Fred Leighton.
P.S.—Having lived much abroad during my young years, the years when one is wax, I have been in turn, thoroughly and sincerely, an Italian artist, a German artist, and a French artist. I need not say that, though every man is of a nation (and I am most emphatically an Englishman), all Art intentionally national is an error to my thinking. But I think I have gained in balance and insight by my varied experience.
It is not possible to question the justice of this brief record of his aims in Art with which Leighton so courteously supplied me, and that he never swerved from his fidelity to those aims may be generously acknowledged even by those who were never deeply moved by his painting.
If he failed to reach the goal towards which he was ever striving, it was from no lack of persistent purpose or earnest faith; and the courage and devotion which he exhibited in his life as an artist were no less manifest in the discharge of every duty which his high official position called upon him to perform.
I was an occasional visitor to his studio for many years after this first introduction to him in 1873, but I cannot boast of ever having been, in any true sense of the word, his friend. To my temperament he was a man easy to know, but difficult to know well; of unfailing kindness in any service demanded of him, but with no quick link of sympathy to encourage a closer intimacy.
Gifted with an appearance at once imposing and picturesque, it was impossible not to agree with Millais that the choice of the Academy when they elected him as their President was rightly made. For all the official duties that are attached to that office he was admirably equipped, but it was difficult in ordinary converse to feel that he had ever quite thrown off his official garb.
Even in those earlier days, before he became President, he was apt in his hearing to convey the feeling that he was playing a part. His mind seemed always to move in some carefully chosen raiment which it was impossible for his nature ever wholly to discard.
As he said in the postscript of his letter, “I have been in turn thoroughly and sincerely an Italian artist, a German artist, and a French artist”; and so in his life he was in turn thoroughly and sincerely either a polished member of society or the careless Bohemian.
I remember once noticing him in the stalls of the Palais-Royal Theatre in Paris habited in a brown velveteen jacket, and suggesting to me that he was in this way resuming the days of his studentship in the Quartier Latin. His appearance on that evening seemed to me a little characteristic of the man. But among the many phases of his varied life, the sense of his personality as an artist was always uppermost; and however distinguished might be the throng of fashionable visitors who filled his studio, the entry of any one who had any call upon him as an artist would at once claim his attention.
To his older friends I know he was untiring in his devotion, and one of them once told me that at a little Christmas party in a remote quarter of London to which he had been bidden, nearly all the other guests kept away by reason of a severe snowstorm, but that Leighton turned up faithful to his appointment, having walked all the way from Kensington to keep his engagement.