Leighton's sympathies were adverse to the more sensuous qualities in painting. Often, in discussing the works by Watts, he would strongly discourage those who were, he considered, unduly influenced by the charm of the great painter's quality and texture, from endeavouring to aim at it in their own work. Such a treatment, Leighton maintained, might be legitimate as the natural expression of the intuitive genius of one gifted individual, but was not the treatment to copy by the student on account of any intrinsic merit. He had almost an aversion to any process which obtained effects through roughness and inequality of surface. His genuine youthful predilection, which he retained consistently throughout his life, was for the early Italian art and Italian method of painting al fresco. "To see the old Florentine school again is a thing which always enchants me anew, for one can never be sated with seeing the noble sweetness, the child-like simplicity, allied with high manly feeling, which breathes in it. But I speak to you of plain things which you know far better than I."—(Letter to Steinle from Florence, 1857.)
GREEK GIRLS PICKING UP SHELLS BY THE SEASHORE. 1871
By permission of The Right Hon. Joseph Chamberlain[ToList]
After Leighton became President of the Royal Academy he made Perugia his halting-place for some weeks during his autumn travels, while he wrote his biennial discourses for the students. He invariably stayed at the well-known Brufani Hotel,—Mrs. Brufani, with whom he made great friends, always reserving the same two rooms for him, from the windows of which he could watch the sun set behind the glorious piles of Umbrian mountains to the west of Perugia. From these windows he also made sketches in silver point of the distant ranges, each form modelled with exquisite delicacy and perfection, though in faintest tones. Other inmates of the Brufani supposed he lived in his two rooms, as he was seldom seen elsewhere in the hotel; but Leighton had found a restaurant which, like his old quarters in Rome—the Café Greco—was the resort of the artists living in Perugia. There he would lunch, and then repair to the Sala del Cambio. Sitting on the raised seat near the window, he would, day after day, spend an hour or more revelling in the beauty of the frescoes by Perugino. Then he would mount to the Pinacoteca and take a deep draught of enjoyment from the tempera paintings of Perugino's master, Benedetto Bonfiglio, Leighton's favourite of favourites ("They are all my Bonfigli!" he would exclaim), whose angels' aureoles rest on wreaths of roses, and whose lovely work Perugia seems to have monopolised. The old paintings of Martino, Gentile da Fabiano, Pietro da Foligno, and their followers Leighton also loved, likewise the later work of Bernardino Pinturicchio and Lo Spagna, pupils with Raphael of Perugino. Among his greatest favourites were the painted banners—the Gonfalone—which are peculiar to the Umbrian cities. He loved the freshness of their quality—the result of a first painting never retouched—the masterly ease of the workmanship, full of tender, gracious beauty. These days were Leighton's real holidays, where, in rapturous admiration of the art he loved so profoundly, he put behind him for the time the weight of official responsibility, and the no less exhausting social duties of his life.
Had Leighton been able to devote himself to the method of painting in fresco, and to work in a warm, dry climate, which admits of painting into the wet surface of plaster without danger of the wall retaining the moisture, he would, undoubtedly, have felt a freer impulse to work rapidly and more spontaneously than when his touch was controlled by the complicated procedures in oil painting. In the process of painting al fresco, colour, in a sense, models itself—its absorption into the wet plaster softening the edges of one touch into another; hence, over a first painting no half obliteration is necessary, and any elaborate finish is avoided. Being obliged to complete before the plaster was dry, Leighton could not have yielded to the temptation to over-refine his surface; and his splendid power as a draughtsman, allied to his sense of beauty, would have found a perfectly spontaneous, happy utterance. As a boy he had imbibed one great principle, and from this principle he never deviated. He wrote, "The thoroughness of all the great masters is so pervading a quality that I look upon them all as forming one aristocracy." In his sketches alone did Leighton relax from the strain which absolute thoroughness involves; and then, in all the fervour of æsthetic inspiration, colour would fly on canvas, chalk or paper, with a charm of quality and exquisite grace of line and form which, as Mr. Briton Rivière remarks, is the very best that can be obtained from a great artist thoroughly trained, but which condition Leighton would never admit into what he considered his serious work. He writes to his father from Rome, January 1853: "I was deeply impressed with the glorious works of art I saw in Venice and Florence, and was particularly struck with the exquisitely elaborate finish of most of the leading works by whatever master; the highest possible finish combined with the greatest possible breadth and grandeur of disposition in the principal masses. Art with the old masters was full of love, refined,—sterling." Leighton formed his standard from these old masters, and never for a moment allowed his standard to be replaced by another. In certain types of Englishmen chivalric loyalty develops at times into obstinacy. Leighton, with all his passion for Italy, his artistic sensitiveness, his excitability, his finely wrought nervous temperament, and his intense power of sympathy, had also in his blood something of the old English Tory, which made him adhere and remain loyal to the strongest impressions of his youth. Catholic and generous as he always proved himself to be when it was a question of considering the work of others, when he was considering his own he ever maintained absolute consistency with the tenets of his early illuminations. Speaking of his extraordinary sense of duty and the consequent tension involved, Mr. Briton Rivière writes:—
"No doubt the constant wear and tear occasioned by the perpetual strain of mental and physical watchfulness did much to shorten his life; I think it sometimes injured his own work as an artist, because, though a great artist can never be evolved except by years of patient work and strenuous effort to do his very best always, yet, on the other hand, it is often the happy, easy work and absolutely spontaneous effort of the moment by such a hand which is his very best. Such happy, easy work probably Leighton would seldom allow himself to do, and never would leave at the right moment, but would still strive to make better and more complete. He must still elaborate it and try to make it more perfect; and this it was that made his enthusiastic admirer Watts sometimes say, 'How much finer Leighton's work would be if he would admit the accidental into it.'"
A fact, little suspected by the public, certainly affected the element of strength in some of Leighton's works. Besides often suffering from a positive want of health, his normal physical condition was far from robust; and, as appears in his letters, he suffered much through weakness and irritation in the eyes from the time he was a boy. He did not wear his physical (or any other) distress on his sleeve, and experienced many hindrances in his work never dreamt of, even by his intimate acquaintances. These might not have been so serious had he been willing to sacrifice all other duties in life to his own special vocation; but though he realised that Art, the language of beauty, was his main passion, his conscience would not allow him to make this passion an excuse for avoiding help to his generation on other lines, if he distinctly felt he could do so. In the happiest of surroundings, with his life unburdened by public responsibilities, he painted "Cimabue's Madonna"; and, for pure vigour in the manipulation, this painting has a robust quality which is scarcely to be found in any other of the larger works which followed, though these may possess many other virtues, and evince a more definite individuality, than does the early work.
Leighton's art appeals to the artists (comparatively few in England) possessed of cosmopolitan culture—also to many who love beauty, a sense of refined distinction in feeling and in form and in the arrangement of line. Beyond these it appeals also to the great public outside the radius of specialists, a public which is impressed by a sense of beauty and achievement without possessing the knowledge of experts. It is not much cared for by the disciples of either of the latest schools in England, and in France, which have governed fashion in the matter of taste for the last twenty years. In the first place, it appeals but little to those to whom the highest province of art appears to consist in conveying didactic sentiments and poetic ideas through a language of form and colour—to suggest thought to the brain rather than beauty to the eye. Respecting this theory of the province of art, Leighton expresses himself clearly in his second address to the Royal Academy students in December 1881:—
"Now the language of Art is not the appointed vehicle of ethic truths; of these, as of all knowledge as distinct from emotion, though not necessarily separated from it, the obvious and only fitted vehicle is speech, written or spoken—words, the symbols of ideas. The simplest spoken homily, if sincere in spirit and lofty in tone, will have more direct didactic efficacy than all the works of all the most pious painters and sculptors from Giotto to Michael Angelo; more than the Passion music of Bach, more than a Requiem by Cherubini, more than an Oratorio of Handel.