"WINDING THE SKEIN." 1880
By permission of the Fine Art Society, the owners of the Copyright[ToList]
"MUSIC LESSON." 1877
By permission of the Fine Art Society, the owners of the Copyright[ToList]
Some critics have, however, gone beyond the mark in emphasising this characteristic of Leighton's methods. One writes: "Deliberateness of workmanship and calculation of effect, into which inspiration of the moment is never allowed to enter, are the chief characteristics of the painter's craftsmanship. The inspiration stage was practically passed when he took the crayon in his hand; and to this circumstance probably is to be assigned the absence of realism which arrests the attention." This statement is contrary to many which I have heard fall from Leighton's own lips. He constantly drew my attention to the fact—a fact on which he laid great stress, and of which many models were witnesses—that he invariably recurred to Nature in the later stages of his pictures, in order to imbibe renewed inspiration from the source of all his æsthetic emotions—Nature. Any one who carefully studies Leighton's pictures will find evidence of this in the works themselves, in the accessories no less than in the principal figures. During the exhibition of some thirty of Leighton's finest paintings at Leighton House in 1900, I was daily more and more impressed by the fact that the final touches in those pictures had been inspired by the actual subtlety of Nature's aspects, and transmitted to the canvas by the artist direct from the objects before him without conscious calculation. Very obviously was this the case not only in the principal features of the design—the countenances and the hands and feet of the figures—but in such details as the flowers, fabrics of draperies, carpets, mother-of-pearl inlaying, found (for instance) in "A Noble Venetian Lady," "Summer Moon," "Sister's Kiss," "Weaving the Wreath," "Winding the Skein," "The Music Lesson," "Atalanta." In all these pictures exists the internal convincing evidence contradicting the statement that "the inspiration stage was practically past when he took the crayon in his hand." This, however, did not obscure in some of Leighton's large finished pictures undoubted evidences of arrangements and calculated effects, which are not over-ruled by an art which conceals them, by the art which disguises art,—the clenching force of the inevitable. The beauty of line, the grouping of masses, the "composition" evident in the posing of the figures—admirable and unlaboured as all these arrangements are—not infrequently lack this convincing sign of the inevitable. It is too obvious that they have been chosen by the intellectual taste of their maker. When Goethe was expatiating on Shakespeare and comparing his genius with his own, he said, as a proof of his own inferiority, that he knew well how every word was made to come in its place, but with Shakespeare they came without Shakespeare knowing.[46] Leighton, like Goethe, was conscious that his genius could not vie with the greatest in the world—the genius he was able to appreciate as Goethe did Shakespeare's; but he also knew, as did Goethe, exactly the place his own art ought to take; he knew that in his sense of style—which, in its true meaning, is the echo of Nature in her choicest, noblest moods,—in his sense of the beauty of the human structure, in his power of draughtsmanship, his work was superior to that of any of his contemporaries in England. The fact of the greatness of Leighton's powers in some directions challenges a comparison between his work and that of the giants of old who possess enormous power in all directions. No one knew so well as did Leighton the place he must take when he entered the lists with the giants: "I have not and never shall have 'enormous power.'" He writes in 1856 from Paris to his Master, Steinle:—
Translation.]
Paris, Rue Pigalle 21.
My good and dear Friend,—Accidentally I had an idle morning when I received your dear letter, and therefore answer it immediately. With your usual modesty you put aside all that I say of goodness and love, but I repeat it unweariedly. Steinle, my good Master, if in this insincere world I have an unfeigned, pure feeling, it is my warm gratitude and love for you; and the time when I bloomed, gay and full of hope, in your garden will light me through life like a sunny spot in the past; and I yield myself to this feeling the more confidently, since I know that I am under no delusion in it. I have fairly strong insight, and know exactly what I owe to you, and for what I have to thank nature; I can already appraise my moderate natural gifts; but I know also that these gifts received through you alone the impression of taste that can alone make them effective, and that in your hands they were refined as in a furnace. An English painter seldom lacks fancy and invention, but taste, that which forms and embellishes the raw material, that is almost always wanting with us—and it is you I must thank for the little I possess.