G. Smith sent me a kind note and a cheque to fill up for drawing in the Cornhill ("Ariadne"). I put ten guineas, telling him that I could not, as a general rule, interrupt my work for that sum, but that I would not take more because the cut had turned out so extremely bad.
I am going to expend the money, adding a few pounds, on a cup, to be shot for in the spring by our Rifle Corps. Arthur Lewis has already given one, and another of our men has promised a second prize to go with my cup. My picture will be finished by the time I go to Bath. My eye is too accustomed to it to know whether it is successful; I shall know better when I return from the country.
I have no news, so good-bye, dear Mammy. Best love to all.—From your very affectionate boy,
Fred.
I go to Windsor (to Miss Thackeray) for two days next week; that also is an old invitation; I have no time for it, but must go. I keep my parties going tolerably, but shall give that up with a few exceptions when I settle here; it makes work impossible from unavoidably late hours, and produces a general deterioration of mind and body, mostly the former; the Hollands I shall always keep up—they are most kind; I dine there frequently and meet interesting and remarkable people.
Very remarkable drawings in pencil on other lines followed the celebrated "Lemon Tree"—surpassing in dramatic truth of expression any Leighton had executed since the early design he drew of the "Plague in Florence in 1850."[26]
SKETCH FOR "MICHAEL ANGELO NURSING HIS DYING SERVANT." 1862
Leighton House Collection[ToList]
The group of drawings for "Michael Angelo Nursing his Dying Servant" are among those preserved in the Leighton House collection, but were not seen by the public before Leighton's death. Though slight, they are among the most admirable he ever achieved in subtle tenderness of feeling and expressive truth of drawing. The feeble twitching clutch of the hands of the old man—announcing the speedy approach of Death—is a convincing proof of imaginative realism of a high order. This group of sketches, however, exemplify the curious artistic discrepancy which at times existed, especially before and about the time when the Michael Angelo was painted, between Leighton's pictures and the studies he made for them—a discrepancy which had no reference to his feeling for colour, but simply arose from an absence of sensitiveness for texture. In turning from the drawings to the painting, we find the noble feeling and conception, the lines and forms of the design much the same in all; but the heavy and yet insufficient texture of the actual surface mars the full conveying, even in the completed painting, of the feeling of the motive—so imperative is a simultaneous union of the idea with a happy echo of it in the touch of the human hand, if a work of art is fully to convey its message. Leighton's genius for using the point is referred to in a letter from Mrs. Browning, on the subject of a drawing he had made of her husband:—