Leighton writes to a friend in 1879:—
"I have just remembered a circumstance which might be worth mentioning: I painted pictures in an out-of-door top light and with realistic aims (of course, subordinate to style) in the old Frankfurt days before I came over here, and long before I heard of 'modern' ideas in painting. In this, perhaps, more than in anything, the boy was the father of the man, for it is still the corner-stone of my faith that Art is not a corpse, but a living thing, and that the highest respect for the old masters, who are and will remain supreme, does not lie in doing as they did, but as men of their strength would do if they were now (oh, derisim!) amongst us."
Leighton taught Watts to appreciate the Greek inheritance to be found in early Italian art; and I have frequently heard Watts comment on the evidence of this legacy in Giotto's work. Watts, by ventilating the results of his studies of Pheidian art with Leighton, and analysing the elemental principles on which it was grounded, aided his brother artist in securing a faster hold on the sources of his individual preferences.
No two characters could have been more dissimilar than those of Watts and Leighton, no two men could have led more different external lives; Leighton's great and varied gifts requiring for their full exercise the whole area of life's stage, Watts' genius demanding seclusion, and days undisturbed by friction with the outer world. Watts' first and great object in life was to preserve his work, and to bequeath it to his country, which he, happily for his country, was enabled to do; Leighton's object was to complete a work as far as industry and his gifts would enable him to complete it, then—as he would say—"to get rid of it and never see it again; but try to do better next time"! The one was frank, free, courageous; the other almost morbidly self-depreciative, sensitive, and timid. All the same, no two workmen could have had more sympathy with one another in their true aims and aspirations, or more mutual admiration for each other's artistic gifts.
"VENUS DISROBING FOR THE BATH." 1867
By permission of Sir A. Henderson, Bart.[ToList]
"PHRYNE AT ELEUSIS." 1882[ToList]