Born in Scarborough, Yorkshire, in 1830, Frederic Leighton was one of the most renowned artists of the Victorian era. He was a painter and sculptor, as well as a formidable presence in the art establishment, serving as a longtime president of the Royal Academy, and he forged an unusual path between academic classicism and the avant-garde. The recipient of many honors during his lifetime, he is the only British artist to have been ennobled, becoming Lord Leighton, Baron of Stretton, in the year of his death. Nevertheless, he left almost no followers, and his impressive oeuvre was largely forgotten in the twentieth century. Leighton’s virtuoso technique, extensive preparatory process, and intellectual subject matter were at odds with the generation of painters raised on Impressionism, with its emphasis on directness of execution. One of his last works, however, Flaming June, an idealized sleeping woman in a semi-transparent saffron gown, went on to enduring fame. From June 9 to September 6, Leighton’s masterpiece hangs at the Frick, on loan from the Museo de Arte de Ponce in Puerto Rico. The exhibition, which is accompanied by a publication and series of public programs, is organized by Susan Grace Galassi, Senior Curator, The Frick Collection.

Comments Galassi, “Despite the painting’s renown, it has never before been exhibited in New York. Alongside the imposing canvas will be displayed a small oil sketch from a private collection that Leighton made in developing the painting’s palette. The works have not been together since the late nineteenth century, and we couldn’t be more pleased to offer our visitors this special viewing opportunity. These two related works by Leighton will hang in the Oval Room, surrounded by the Frick’s four full-length portraits by American expatriate James McNeill Whistler, Leighton’s contemporary. This arrangement marks the return to view of the Whistler portraits and offers a fresh chance to consider the relationship of the two artists’ modern masterpieces.”

Frederic Leighton was the son of a wealthy English physician. At the age of fifteen, he began his artistic training at the Städelsches Kunstinstitut in Frankfurt, where his family had recently moved, eventually studying under Edward von Steinle, an artist of the Nazarene school. Having perfected his master’s precise, linear manner of drawing, he traveled to Rome to continue his studies, joining an international community of artists. While there, Leighton carried out a monumental oil painting richly filled with detail, Cimabue’s Celebrated Madonna is Carried in Procession through the Streets of Florence (1853–55, National Gallery, London, on loan from Her Majesty the Queen). His first work to be accepted for exhibition at the Royal Academy, it was bought by Queen Victoria for Buckingham Palace, making the twenty-four-year-old Leighton an instant celebrity. Following more than a decade in Germany and Italy, Leighton spent three years in Paris, at a time when Ingres and Delacroix dominated the scene. He became increasingly drawn to color, confessing to Steinle his “fanatic preference” for it over line, although he excelled in both. In 1859 he returned to his native country, where his strong academic training, immersion in Renaissance and classical art, and firsthand experience with the current trends in the major art capitals of Europe set him apart from many of his English contemporaries. In London, Leighton met members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones, as well as James McNeill Whistler; with them, he shaped the radical movement of Aestheticism, with its emphasis on the formal aspects of art. Yet despite Leighton’s insistence on the preeminence of composition, design, and the harmony of color over subject matter, his work frequently draws from literary sources and is imbued with poetic associations.

Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1895, Flaming June belongs to a group of works painted during Leighton’s final decade that feature idealized female figures. These physically robust and sensual protagonists take on a variety of attitudes—some pose as sibyls or muses in moments of inspiration while others are asleep or absorbed in meditative states. Of these powerful late works, Flaming June most immediately impacts the viewer with its eroticism and color harmony, its appealing composition, and elusive subject matter.

Wrapped in radiant, liquid drapery that reveals the form of her naked body beneath, a beautiful young woman seated in profile fills much of a perfectly square canvas. She is lost in a dream, but her body is dynamic, seeming to rotate in on itself in a continuous loop. Closer to a bas-relief than to a figure in the round, she is integrated into a spare classical setting resembling a marble terrace or parapet. On the right, a bouquet of oleanders rests on a ledge and a decorative awning borders the edge of the canvas. The finely blended brushstrokes used for the model’s flesh and areas of the chiffon dress are offset by thick impastoed strokes representing the shimmering sea in the distance.

While Leighton’s ingenious composition immediately draws the viewer in, the complex form of the body counters the apparent serenity of the sleeping woman. On closer inspection, a discrepancy between her upper and lower body emerges. Both legs are bent at sharp angles, and the left knee rises steeply above the right—almost to the level of the head. The right leg, greatly elongated, extends across her body in a powerful horizontal, diving downward at the knee in a sharp diagonal, the ball of her foot pressing into the floor. Her bare arms, bent at the elbows, mimic the angularity of her legs and create a frame for the lightly veiled breasts and head, which rests on the crook of her arm. While the two halves of the body mirror each other to a certain extent, the upper body is characterized by physical passivity and the flight of the conscious mind, while the lower is robustly physical, conveying a sense of restless vitality and sexuality. Associations with earlier works of art hint at another layer of meaning. Leighton would have expected contemporary viewers to note his references to famous works by Michelangelo, whom he revered. The configuration of the legs of Flaming June and her curled position evoke one of the sixteenth-century master’s most erotic works, Leda and the Swan of 1529, as well as his marble sculpture Night, created slightly earlier, on which Leda was based. While the model for Flaming June faces in the opposite direction, the allusions to these famous works bring with them connotations of death and blatant eroticism. Is Flaming June more femme fatale than sleeping beauty?

In his essay in the exhibition’s accompanying publication, Pablo Pérez d’Ors, Associate Curator of European Art at the Museo de Arte de Ponce in Puerto Rico, explores the interpretation of the painting in the context of Leighton’s life and in relation to themes and symbols in Victorian poetry, with which the highly literate artist would have been familiar. A medical condition, angina pectoris, from which Leighton was suffering at the time of painting Flaming June, would have made him aware that the end of his life was approaching; in fact, Leighton was too ill to attend the opening of the Royal Academy exhibition in May 1895, where Flaming June and several other canvases were accorded places of honor. The artist and longtime president of the Academy died eight months later. In Victorian poetry, sleep and death are frequently equated, while oleanders often symbolize danger. Fleshy in appearance and intensely fragrant, these voluptuous flowers appeal directly to the senses, yet are highly poisonous, leading Pérez d’Ors to question whether their presence in the painting suggests that the sleeping woman, like the flowers, might be as dangerous as she is alluring. Such associations, deliberately ambiguous, have undoubtedly contributed to the hold the painting has exerted on the imaginations of generations of viewers.

Although the meaning of Flaming June remains elusive, Leighton’s path to its creation was deliberate and well documented, as discussed in Susan Galassi’s catalogue essay. The number of extant drawings for Flaming June attests to the importance of the painting for him and provides a view into his creative process, which was shaped by the rigorous methods learned in the academies of Europe and practiced throughout his life. Beginning with a mental image of a pose, sparked by a chance observation or drawn from his imagination or a work of art of the past, Leighton made a series of studies of a nude model until he arrived at the position that coincided with his initial idea. He then made drawings of the model draped and a compositional study. With the format and composition established, his final step was to make an oil sketch to work out the painting’s palette (front page). Here he established the color scheme, using a vibrant red-orange for the dress and dark neutral tones for the draperies strewn on the bench. At far left on the horizon of a sparkling sea, he added an island (which would disappear in the finished work), as well as a scalloped-edged awning that runs across the top of the picture. On the canvas itself, measuring about forty-seven by forty-seven inches, Leighton made final adjustments. The scalloped edge of the awning is replaced by a straight edge, and the orange of the gown—painted in his characteristically meticulous manner—attains an even greater radiance.

The painting was generally well received at its presentation at the Royal Academy; one reviewer writing for the London Times (May 4, 1895) referred to “that peculiar reddish orange of which Sir Frederic Leighton’s palette alone seems to possess the secret, and this is harmonized, in that manner of his which is so familiar, against other draperies of dark crimson and pale olive. Nothing need be said in praise of the drawing of this figure, in the difficulties of which the artist has evidently found one of his chief pleasures; for problems of drawing are child’s play to him.”