Charles Dickens.
It was in 1863 that Leighton paid the notable visit to his friend of the Roman days, George Mason, to whom the world's Art owes so much. Assuredly, without Leighton's encouragement and help, those lovely idylls which stand with the most precious treasures of the English school of painting would never have been created. Mason had returned to England in 1856; he married and settled in his own manor-house, Wetley Abbey. Children were born and expenses increased, and little or nothing was there with which to meet them. After Rome England seemed a hopeless place to work in, and Mason's surroundings were quite dumb to his artistic sense. Leighton, when he heard of his depression and poverty, sought him out in his rural retreat, beamed mental sunshine on his spirits, made him walk with him, pointing out the pictorial beauties of Mason's own native country, and ended by taking him a tour through the Black Country. Mason's poetic sense was again awakened; an artistic purpose was again inspired; and, feeling the despair of hopeless poverty removed (Leighton was ever ready with substantial aid), he painted the pictures for which the world has so much reason to be grateful. When in 1872—nine years after this visit—George Mason died, Leighton arranged for a sale of his pictures and property, from the proceeds of which his wife and children obtained an income of £600 a year. Leighton wrote to Mrs. Matthews at the time of Mason's death: "Poor Mason's death has been a great shock to me, though indeed I should have been prepared for it at any time. His loss is quite irreparable for English Art, for he stood entirely alone in his especial charm, and he was one of the most lovable of men besides."
FOOTNOTES:
[8] The critics, judging from the following extracts, were amiably inclined towards him that year:—"Among the pictures familiar to London loungers of 1858, is Mr. F. Leighton's scene from 'Romeo and Juliet,' a work lost and, it may be submitted, undervalued, owing to the disadvantageous place given it in Trafalgar Square. The depth and richness of its colour, the picturesque manner in which the story is told, the contrast in some of the heads, that, for instance, of Friar Lawrence, hopeful in the consciousness of knowledge of Juliet's secret, with that of the entrancing maiden of Verona, or again with that of the weeping nurse, whose grief is a trifle too accentué. The truthful conception and careful labour of this picture have now a chance of being appreciated, and but that Pre-Raphaelitism is resolute not to give in, might fairly have entitled it to the prize bestowed elsewhere."—Athenæum, 1858.
"We will take the second-named gentleman first, and come at once to his 'Fisherman and Syren.' The picture is not of any commanding size, nor does it relate any very exciting legend. The story is of the mystic Undine tinge, and with a shadowy semblance in it to that strange legend, current among the peasants of Southern Russia, of the 'White Lady' with the long hair, who, with loving and languishing gestures, decoys the unwary into her fantastic skiff, then, pressing her baleful lips to theirs, folds them to her fell embrace, and drags them shrieking beneath the engulfing waves. The 'Fisherman and Syren' of Mr. Leighton has something of this unreal, legendary fatality pervading it throughout. There is irresistible seductiveness on the one side, pusillanimous fondness on the other. That it is all over with the fisherman, and that the syren will have her wicked will of him to his destruction, is palpable. But it is not alone for the admirable manner in which the story is told that we commend this picture; the drawing is eruditely correct, most graceful, and most symmetrical. The syren is a model of form in its most charming undulations. The fisherman is a type of manly elegance. That Mr. Leighton understands, to its remotest substructure, the vital principle of the line of beauty, is pleasurably manifest. But there is evidence here even more pleasing that the painter, in the gift of a glowing imagination, and a refined ideality, in his mastery of the nobler parts of pictorial manipulation, is worthy to be reckoned among the glorious brotherhood of disciples of the Italian masters—of the grand old men whose pictures, faded and time-worn as they are, in the National Gallery hard by, laugh to scorn the futile fripperies that depend for half their sheen on gilt frames and copal varnish. This young artist is one of Langis' and Nasasi's men. He has plainly drunk long and eagerly at the painter's Castaly. The fount of beauty and of grace that assuaged the thirst of those who painted the 'Monna Lisa' and the 'Belle Jardinière'; who modelled the 'Horned Moses' and the 'Slave'; who designed Peter's great Basilica, and the Ghiberti Gates at Florence."—Daily Telegraph, 3rd May 1858.
[9] The Prince of Wales, who lent the picture to the exhibition of Leighton's works at Burlington House, 1897.
[10] Mr. Augustus Craven's wife, née Pauline la Ferronnay, was the authoress of the famous book, Le Récit d'une sœur, in which several of the most charming scenes took place at Naples.
[11] Mr. George Aitchison wrote: "In 1859, while at Capri, he drew the celebrated Lemon Tree, working from daylight to dusk for a week or two, and giving large details in the margin of the snails on the tree."
[12] The drawing had been lent to Ruskin at the time he was lecturing at Oxford.