Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, July 31, 2023: Lord Frederic Leighton, a British Victorian painter, draughtsman, and sculptor. (#1873)

Lord Frederic Leighton 1st Baron Leighton, PRA (1830 – 1896), known as Sir Frederic Leighton between 1878 and 1896, was a British Victorian painter, draughtsman, and sculptor. His works depicted historical, biblical, and classical subject matter in an academic style. His paintings were enormously popular, and expensive, during his lifetime, but fell out of critical favour for many decades in the early 20th century.

Lord Frederic Leighton was one of the most influential and virtuosic artists of the Victorian era, a brilliant and stylistically adventurous painter of bodies and landscapes, who later in his career launched a new movement in British sculpture. He even earned the nickname Jupiter Olympus - for being both a titan of British art and devotee of Classical Art.

Having spent his early adulthood touring Europe, Leighton developed an almost impossibly wide circle of acquaintances spanning the full gamut of contemporary artistic schools, from Academic History Painting to Naturalism, Romanticism, and, most significantly, Aestheticism. His own style gradually developed into a kind of hyper-real Neoclassicism, which prefigured the dreamlike vividness of the Pre-Raphaelites while leaning on the exotic, erotic mythography of Symbolism. His emphasis on beauty - particularly the beauty of the male body - pre-empted the art-for-art's-sake decadence of the fin de siècle, but he remained a bastion of the artistic establishment, ultimately becoming President of the Royal Academy and a hereditary peer. Several of his artworks, including An Athlete Wrestling with a Python and Flaming June, are now recognized as seminal works of their time.

Frederic Leighton's work impresses with an intensity that seems entirely original. At the same time, it represents an important transitional phase between the Neoclassical and Academic History Painting of the early nineteenth century and those avant-garde movements of the later nineteenth century - Symbolism, Pre-Raphaelitism - which continued to place an emphasis on technical precision. Early works such as Cimabue's Celebrated Madonna (1853-55) predict the surreal vividness of John William Waterhouse or Edward Burne-Jones, but their subject matter remains historical and mythological in a more traditional sense.

Though primarily remembered as a painter, Leighton is also credited as having inspired the development of New Sculpture, a movement in British sculpture which emerged from the circle around French sculptor Jules Dalou in 1870s London. The style was given vital impetus by the display, in 1877, of Leighton's first sculpture An Athlete Wrestling with a Python, which was seen to bring a new physical dynamism and naturalism to a tired medium.

Though his own sexuality remains a mystery, Frederic Leighton's work - particularly his late statuary - has been celebrated for its vivid depictions of male beauty. Standing at the forefront of a whole late-nineteenth-century tradition - perhaps most evident in Symbolism and the Decadent Movement - works like The Sluggard (1885) refine the homoerotic energy of Renaissance sculpture, presenting the male body as gentle, seductive, and physically imposing in equal parts.

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