[69] Now in the Tate Gallery, purchased under the terms of the Chantrey Bequest.
[70] The owners of Leighton's pictures must feel satisfaction, not only in the fact that in all cases the beauty of the forms and arrangements of line grow on the eye more and more the longer they are studied, but also that the work itself improves by keeping. I noticed this to be the case very decidedly in "Cymon and Iphigenia." I had seen it when completed, the day before it left the studio in 1884; and when it returned there in 1901 (the owner, Sir Cuthbert Quilter, having kindly lent it for exhibition), and was placed in precisely the same light, I was surprised to see how much it had improved in tone during those seventeen years; it had gained so very greatly in those qualities which suggest the feeling Leighton wished it to inspire.
[71] Leighton kept these precious studies he made for his pictures in a drawer where I was often invited, rather apologetically, to turn them over as if they were absolutely of no importance. I protested against the cursory treatment they received at the hand of their creator; and on seeing one superlatively beautiful study of drapery pinned on his easel one day, I implored him to have it glazed and framed before it ran any danger of being rubbed. He did so, and always alluded to it after as "that sketch you lost for me," because, being framed, he lent it to some one—he did not remember to whom—and it never came back. Periodically I asked if it had returned; "No—some one, I suppose, has taken a fancy to it," Leighton would reply. The pace at which he had to live in order to fulfil the work he had set himself, enforced great carelessness about his own interests in such matters. Unfortunately, after Leighton's death, the sketches were exposed to much defacement, a natural consequence of their being moved before being secured under glass.
[72] Ceiling for a music room, painted for Mr. Marquand, New York.
[73] Mr. Brock gave a replica of this bust to the Leighton House Collection in 1897. It is from some points of view the most characteristic portrait of Leighton in existence.
[74] Miss Emily Hickey, the poetess, was inspired by Leighton's picture to write the following lines:—
SOLITUDE
O'er the grey rocks, like monarchs robed and crowned,
High tower the firs in swart magnificence,
Where, winter after winter, vehemence
Of the wild torrent's rush, unstayed, unbound,
Hath scooped and worn the rocks till so profound
The deep pool's depth that all the gazer's sense
Fills with the absolute, dark-brown night intense.
The rapid current swirls, but never a sound.
By the high grandeur of the silence wooed
Into its bond of comradeship, the maid
Sits with the quiet on her bosom laid;
Not on the great unknowable to brood;
Only to wait a while till, unafraid,
She see the spirit of the solitude.
E.H. Hickey.
Oct. 26, '91.
[75] As portraits, the two heads Watts painted from "Dorothy Dene" were superior to those Leighton painted.