Part 9 (1/2)
Round three sides above the tiles runs a decorative mosaic frieze, by Walter Crane, of an arabesque design on a gold ground. It is a beautiful and fanciful piece of work in itself, and it serves moreover to blend the prevailing colour of the tiles with the gilding of the upper regions. But it does not continue round the fourth side, because over the entrance, above the great inscription, an oriel window of musharabiyeh work looks down into the hall from the first floor of the house.
The pierced windows, or at least eight of them, were brought from Cairo, and when bought had the original gla.s.s in them; but in the east the gla.s.s is stuck in with white of egg, and as they were, as usual, ill-packed, the gla.s.s all came out and was ground to fragments in the jolting of the journey. Only enough could be saved to fill the window in the upper part of the west recess opposite the entrance. The remainder had to be filled with English imitations.
Returning now to the staircase, we find it ends on the first floor in a landing leading to the great studio. On the left it is open to the little studio; so-called because, having a skylight, Lord Leighton used it for painting out-of-door effects until he had the gla.s.s studio built.
Adjoining it, or forming an extension of it, is another room, built only a year or two before the late owner's death. After the addition of the gla.s.s studio the two were only used as an antechamber, and were hung with the pictures presented by brother artists, and with a few old masters. The mouldings round the skylights are very pretty. The latticed window before mentioned looks down from the little studio into the Arab Hall.
The great studio is a large room about sixty feet by twenty-five and about seventeen in height. In the centre of the north side is the lofty window forming a bay and extending into a skylight in the top. High up on either side of it are the three small openings mentioned when speaking of the exterior. A curtain hangs in front of them, and in point of fact they were never used. In the west wall is an apse with a gilt semi-dome, which appears in some of Lord Leighton's pictures. Across the east end runs a gallery at about eight feet from the floor with bookshelves under it on either side, and in the middle a broad pa.s.sage leads into the gla.s.s studio, and still outside this is a wide balcony looking into the garden. Casts of a portion of the Panathenaic frieze of the Parthenon run along the upper part of the wall of the great studio, fit emblem of the lifelong devotion of the President to cla.s.sic art. Such then is the workshop. Even now, comparatively bare as it is at the present moment of writing, this is one of the most picturesque suites of rooms in existence; but to see it on one of the grand occasions of Leighton's musical receptions was a very different sight and one not easily to be forgotten. Then when walls and easels were covered with pictures, when rare carpets hung from the gallery, flowers and palms filled the bay window, beautiful women and men of every form of distinction crowded the floor to listen to Joachim and Piatti, nothing was wanting which could give beauty or interest to the spectacle.
It will be seen that the house is still rich in artistic beauty and still has objects of value. But the most precious of its contents are after all its a.s.sociations. Its floors have been trodden by all that was most notable in the society of its owner's day, people whose names alone would be an epitome of our times. It was also the workshop of a great artist. But, above all, it was the centre of a great influence which profoundly modified English art.
Whatever judgment the future may pa.s.s upon his own productions, the fact must never be lost sight of that even without them Leighton was a great man. Intellectually, spiritually, and socially he was the most brilliant leader and stimulator of artists we have ever seen in England. His earnest example and lifelong persistence fanned the flame of enthusiasm among all branches of art workers. He taught Englishmen to study form, and it was under his encouragement that sculpture, which was fallen so low, has now risen into so good a place. Finally he did more than anyone else has done to raise the status of the artist in society.
The house which he built himself was his hobby, and in the refinement and catholicity of taste it shows, there is so just a reflex of his characteristics that an account of it is indispensable to any book which claims to describe the man.
S. PEPYS c.o.c.kERELL.
CHAPTER XI
THE ARTIST AND HIS CRITICS
Before closing our record it will be well to quote, as we promised earlier, some of the contemporary criticism that Sir Frederic's work has encountered from time to time; and especially the criticism of his earlier performances, while he was still in the years of his pre-Academic probation.
As a provocation to criticism, most interesting of all is his picture, the _Cimabue's Madonna carried in Procession through the Streets of Florence_, upon which we have already commented. As we may here remind our readers, it was painted at Rome chiefly, in 1853-4, and was exhibited at the Academy of 1855. In that year, as good fortune would have it, Mr. Ruskin issued for the first time, ”Notes on some of the Princ.i.p.al Pictures Exhibited in the Rooms of the Royal Academy.” Some pages of this famous p.r.o.nouncement are devoted to this very picture, and we cannot do better than quote freely from a criticism so remarkable.
”This is a very important and very beautiful picture,” says Mr. Ruskin.
”It has both sincerity and grace, and is painted on the purest principles of Venetian art--that is to say, on the calm acceptance of the whole of nature, small and great, as, in its place, deserving of faithful rendering. The great secret of the Venetians was their simplicity. They were great colourists, not because they had peculiar secrets about oil and colour, but because when they saw a thing red, they painted it red; and ... when they saw it distinctly, they painted it distinctly. In all Paul Veronese's pictures, the lace borders of the table cloths or fringes of the dresses are painted with just as much care as the faces of the princ.i.p.al figures; and the reader may rest a.s.sured that in all great art it is so. Everything in it is done as well as it _can_ be done. Thus in the picture before us, in the background is the Church of San Miniato, strictly accurate in every detail; on the top of the wall are oleanders and pinks, as carefully painted as the church; the architecture of the shrine on the wall is well studied from thirteenth-century Gothic, and painted with as much care as the pinks; the dresses of the figures, very beautifully designed, are painted with as much care as the faces: that is to say, all things throughout with as much care as the painter could bestow. It necessarily follows that what is most difficult (_i.e._ the faces) should be comparatively the worst done. But if they are done as well as the painter could do them, it is all we have to ask; and modern artists are under a wonderful mistake in thinking that when they have painted faces ill, they make their pictures more valuable by painting the dresses worse.
”The painting before us has been objected to because it seems broken up in bits. Precisely the same objection would hold, and in very nearly the same degree, against the best works of the Venetians. All faithful colourists' work, in figure-painting, has a look of sharp separation between part and part.... Although, however, in common with all other works of its cla.s.s, it is marked by these sharp divisions, there is no confusion in its arrangement. The princ.i.p.al figure is n.o.bly princ.i.p.al, not by extraordinary light, but by its own pure whiteness; and both the Master and the young Giotto attract full regard by distinction of form and face. The features of the boy are carefully studied, and are indeed what, from the existing portraits of him, we know those of Giotto must have been in his youth. The head of the young girl who wears the garland of blue flowers is also very sweetly conceived.
”Such are the chief merits of the picture. Its defect is that the equal care given to the whole of it is not yet _care enough_. I am aware of no instance of a young painter, who was to be really great, who did not in his youth paint with intense effort and delicacy of finish. The handling here is much too broad; and the faces are, in many instances, out of drawing, and very opaque and feeble in colour. Nor have they in general the dignity of the countenance of the thirteenth century. The Dante especially is ill-conceived--far too haughty, and in no wise n.o.ble or thoughtful. It seems to me probable that Mr. Leighton has greatness in him, but there is no absolute proof of it in this picture; and if he does not, in succeeding years, paint far better, he will soon lose the power of painting so well.”
To Mr. Ruskin's account, which is sufficient to enable one to realize the picture in some detail, we may add further the criticism of the ”Athenaeum” of May 12th, 1855, which is interesting as showing how the work affected a contemporary critic of another order. It speaks of Mr.
Leighton as ”a young artist who, we believe, has studied in Italy,” and goes on to say: ”There can be no question that the picture is one of great power, although the composition is quaint even to sectarianism; and though the touch, in parts broad and masterly, is in the lesser parts of the roughest character.” The last clause of the sentence bears out, it may be perceived, a significant indictment in Mr. Ruskin's deliverance, which lays stress on a defect that the artist, in his maturer brush-work, does not show.
Rossetti, writing to his friend William Allingham, May 11th, 1855, says: ”There is a big picture of _Cimabue_, one of his works in procession, by a new man, living abroad, named Leighton--a huge thing, which the Queen has bought, which everyone talks of. The R.A.'s have been gasping for years for someone to back against Hunt and Millais, and here they have him, a fact that makes some people do the picture injustice in return.
It was _very_ uninteresting to me at first sight; but on looking more at it, I think there is great richness of arrangement, a quality which, when _really_ existing, as it does in the best old masters, and perhaps. .h.i.therto in no living man--at any rate English--ranks among the great qualities.
”But I am not quite sure yet either of this or of the faculty for colour, which I suspect exists very strongly, but is certainly at present under a thick veil of paint, owing, I fancy, to too much continental study. One undoubted excellence it has--facility, without much neatness or ultra-cleverness in the execution, which is greatly like that of Paul Veronese; and the colour may mature in future works to the same resemblance, I fancy. There is much feeling for beauty, too, in the women. As for purely intellectual qualities, expression, intention, etc., there is little as yet of them; but I think that in art richness of arrangement is so nearly allied to these, that where it exists (in an earnest man) they will probably supervene. However, the choice of subject, though interesting in a certain way, leaves one quite in the dark as to what faculty the man may have for representing incident or pa.s.sionate emotion. But I believe, as far as this showing goes, that he possesses qualities which the ma.s.s of our artists aim at chiefly, and only seem to possess. Whether he have those of which neither they nor he give sign, I cannot tell; but he is said to be only twenty-four years old. There is something very French in his work, at present, which is the most disagreeable thing about it; but this I dare say would leave him if he came to England.”[12]
In the year following Leighton's academical _debut_, he exhibited a picture ent.i.tled _The Triumph of Music_, which the ”Athenaeum,” hereafter so sympathetic towards his work, described as ”anything but a triumph of art.”
Partly, perhaps, because of the general tone of discouragement in all the criticisms of this year, the artist did not send in anything to the Academy of 1857. In 1858 his two pictures--_The Fisherman and the Syren_, and _Count Paris_, although admirably conceived, and extremely interesting to us now, received no word of friendly criticism that is worth recording.
At the Academy of 1859 were exhibited two pictures by him, which served to rea.s.sure at last those critics who had been shaking their heads over his supposed inability to follow up his first success. We turn to the ”Athenaeum” again, to study its gradual conversion from an att.i.tude of critical distrust to one of critical sympathy: