Vivid and sensual: Flaming June, 1895, by Frederic LeightonMuseo de Arte de PonceReview at a glance
When Flaming June was shown by Frederic Leighton in his final submission to the Royal Academy in 1895 (he died early in 1896), it sold for £1,154.
Within decades it was unloved: between the Thirties and Sixties, it went unrecorded, surfacing in 1962 when a builder claimed he had found it in a house he was demolishing. He sold it for £60.
Even when it was bought in 1963 from an art dealer, it was extraordinarily cheap — snapped up for £2,000 by Luis Ferré, the founder of a Puerto Rican museum. It remains there today.
In its first return since 1930 to the house where it was created, it’s part of a small but thoroughly absorbing show. There are two strands: a gathering of the uneven group of pictures that were Leighton’s final submission to the Academy — Flaming June is infinitely the best picture — and a cluster of exquisite sketches.
Flaming June is, in part, a homage to Michelangelo and a paean to the classical world. But it’s not steeped in an academic past: its light, that glistering sea and the oleander flower that flowers at the top right evoke Leighton’s visits to Mediterranean climes.
The figure is the opposite of studied remoteness: it’s as vivid and sensual as any in 19th-century British painting. Leighton describes the naked form beneath the see-through saffron robe with extraordinary sensitivity — the elegant chalk drawings show his steady journey to that precise, seemingly effortless pose.
It’s not perfect, with overcomplicated, unnatural drapery and a sunlit ocean that needs some of Turner’s evanescence. But it’s a powerful summation of Leighton’s art-for-art’s-sake aims, where line and colour combine into a seductive decorativeness.
Until April 2, Leighton House Museum; leightonhouse.co.uk
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