"'The idea originated,' says Dr. Brown, 'with Mr. Mark Lemon, Leech's friend and colleague, who saw that by a new invention—a beautiful piece of machinery—the impression of a block in Punch being first taken on a sheet of indiarubber, was enlarged; when by a lithographic process the copy thus got could be transferred to the stone and impressions printed upon a large sheet of canvas. Having thus obtained an outline groundwork, consisting of his own lines enlarged to some eight times the area of the original block, Leech proceeded to colour these. His knowledge of the manipulation of oil-colours was very slight, and it was under the guidance of his friend Millais that his first attempts were made, and crude enough they were. He used a kind of transparent colour, which allowed the coarse lines of the enlargement to show through, so that the production presented the appearance of indifferent lithographs slightly tinted. In a short time he obtained great mastery over oil-colour, and instead of allowing the thick, fatty lines of printer's ink to remain on the canvas, he, by the use of turpentine, removed the ink, particularly with regard to the lines of the faces and figures. These he redrew with his own hand in a fine and delicate manner. To this he added a delicacy of finish, particularly in flesh-colour, which greatly enhanced the value and beauty of his later works."
The catalogue to the sketches in oil is prefaced by a few modest words by the artist, who concludes some remarks upon their production thus:
"These sketches have no claim to be regarded, or tested, as finished pictures. It is impossible for anyone to know the fact better than I do. They have no pretensions to a higher name than the name I give them, 'Sketches in Oil.'"
The exhibition consisted of sixty-seven works, and the room containing them was filled all day long by a laughing crowd. Leech shrank from crowds at all times, and an assembly drawn together by his own works would have special terrors for him. After the opening of the gallery he was never known to visit it, mainly from his innate modesty, but also from his dread of being "caught and talked at by enthusiastic people."
A story is told of a visit of a sporting lord who took his huntsman—whose judgment of hounds and horses was celebrated for its acumen—to give his verdict on the Leech Exhibition in general, and on dogs and horses in particular.
"'Ah, my lord, nothin' but a party as knows 'osses could have drawed them there 'unters.'"
If the huntsman offered an opinion on other features of the exhibition, it is not recorded; he criticised only what he understood—therein giving a much-needed example to many critics.
In the few remarks in the way of criticism on the Leech Exhibition which I allow myself to make, I claim to be in the position of the huntsman whose experience of the horse made his opinion of that animal valuable; my own experience of pictures, as it extends over fifty years, may fairly claim for me the right of judgment, and I acknowledge myself to be one of those who thought the exhibition of "Sketches in Oil" did not increase Leech's reputation; though it happily did increase his own fortune, or the fortune of somebody else.
Dr. Brown says that Leech "obtained a great mastery over oil-colours." The huntsman may have thought as much; if he did, he was as much in error as Dr. Brown. The sketches lost much charm by their enlargement, and they were further greatly damaged by the crude and inharmonious way in which they were coloured. The girls' lovely faces, which delight us so thoroughly in their pencilled forms, became almost vulgar under the artist's attempts to paint flesh—the most difficult of all things to render truly. When he first gives them to us fresh from the wood block, conveying to us, as he does, the most ravishing beauty by a few pencil-marks, we paint the faces for ourselves with the colours and brushes of the mind, with a result unattainable by the colourman's tools unless they are in the hands of a Reynolds or a Vandyke. Leech's delightful backgrounds, too, were terribly spoilt by his oil-paints: air and distance disappeared altogether in many of them. But it is time my grumbling gave place to what Mr. Thackeray had to say about the Leech Exhibition in the Times of June 21, 1862: