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Edmund Blair Leighton, To Arms!, Oil on Canvas, 1888, 60 x
41½ in., Private Collection
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The outstanding medievalist painting shown above by the lesser known of the two Leightons, Edmund Blair Leighton, just sold for $485,000 at Christie’s auction of 19th Century Art this week in New York. I thought this exquisitely crafted painting was executed by Frederic, Lord Leighton when I saw it on the wall at Christie’s on Sunday. So did my painter friend, Michelle, until she checked the name more closely. I wonder if I’ve always thought works of this quality, featuring handsome knights and beautiful damsels, were done by the extremely well-known Lord Leighton, neglecting to see beyond the last name. I should know better, I guess. But you know, years ago I might have been exposed to that distinction. And it’s important to point out that I don’t remember everything I once thought I knew. Very little has been retained, as a matter of fact.
This confusion over the two Leightons is not that uncommon
today, since little biographical information is available about Blair Leighton. Lord Leighton, on the other hand, was a President of the Royal
Academy and received a lot of
public attention as the leading Victorian academic painter of his day. He associated with the Pre-Raphaelites and lived in a grand manner. Blair Leighton, however, was also a big hit with
the public in his lifetime, and reproductions of his romantic, anecdotal paintings of
medieval life entered countless households.
A Christie’s expert cleared up some of our confusion and told us the two
Leightons were not related. The rest is
Google history. Blair Leighton was never
made a Royal Academician, despite exhibiting 66 paintings at the Royal
Academy summer exhibitions for 42
years, including some of the most popular paintings of the day. That’s the way it goes sometimes.
Michelle and I both had great fun poring over the exquisite
details of this painting, To Arms!” Sweet bridal hymn, that issuing through
the porch is rudely challenged with the cry 'to arms!’ What a bummer! The wedding day was grand, we can imagine, but there will be
no wedding night for this handsome couple.
Truthfully, the lovely, flaxen-haired bride doesn’t look as downhearted
as the groom does. There’s no doubt that
he is pretty distressed by this inopportune intrusion on his nuptial day. The young couple’s parents pictured behind
them are also quite concerned, although in a “stiff upper lip” British manner,
it seems to me. That knight in armor bearing the marching orders is definitely psyched for battle. All the details in this painting are
extremely well drawn and painted, from the flowers strewn in the foreground to
the onlookers peering from their windows across the way in the background. The story is clear to any viewer of this
painting, which is a genre masterpiece.
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Edmund Blair Leighton, The End of the Song, Oil on Canvas,
1902, 50.6 x 58 in., Private Collection
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| Edmund Blair Leighton |
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| Frederic, Lord Leighton |
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Frederic, Lord Leighton, Flaming June, 1895, Oil on Canvas,
47 3/8 x 47 3/8 in., Museum of Art
of Ponce (Puerto Rico)
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Neither of the Leightons left diaries for later generations to explore. Edmund Blair Leighton (1852-1922), the son of a painter, was married and had a son and a daughter. The son also became a painter. Blair Leighton trained in London, where he lived all his life, it seems, and apparently was a normal sort of guy. That’s one of the reasons fame tilted greatly in the direction of Frederic, Lord Leighton (1830-1896). But Lord Leighton’s treatments of often similar historical themes are less anecdotal and detail oriented, and consequently more aesthetically pleasing, in the long run, it seems to me, now that I’m paying attention.
Lord Leighton (1830-1896), who was also an excellent
sculptor, was a cosmopolitan bachelor who trained on the continent and
hobnobbed with a lot of celebrity artists in his day. He might have had an illegitimate child with
one of his models, and was a suspected but unproven homosexual, having a long
relationship of some sort with an older poet, Henry William Greville. Par for the course in Victorian England, one is led to believe. Lord Leighton, who was knighted in 1878, was
created a baronet in 1896 and died the day after of a heart attack. He thus has the two uncommon distinctions of
being the first painter to be granted a peerage as well as being the bearer of
the shortest-lived one in history. That’s
the kind of stuff the public likes to read about in the papers.
