The Deathly Sleep of Frederic Leighton's Painted Women

Abstract

In this article, the author argues that, towards the end of his life, Frederic Leighton (president of the Royal Academy from 1878 to 1896) became increasingly preoccupied with painting sleeping and entranced women as a way of simulating death. In turn, death in Leighton's art comes to look like pleasured sinking into unconsciousness accompanied by an irreversible bodily dissolution, which is registered in the multiplying of the ‘endless folds’ in the figures’ drapery. The author analyses key examples of paintings by Leighton of sleeping and sleepy women—namely, Cymon and Iphigenia (1884), The Garden of the Hesperides (1892) and Flaming June (1895)—within the context of late Victorian anxieties around sleep and its resemblance to death. In these works, Leighton twists and elongates the sleeping women's necks and limbs to make them appear dangerously serpentine, while increasing the activity of the drapery to register both the meanderings of the subconscious and the dissolution of the body. The drapery disorganizes classical form, taking on the appearance of liquid, hair and melted wax.

Keywords:

• aestheticism
• beauty
• Cymon and Iphigenia (1884)
• death
• drapery
• Flaming June (1895)
• Frederic Leighton (1830–96)
• The Garden of the Hesperides (1892)
• sleep

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Caroline Arscott, Lucetta Johnson, Linda Nead, Elizabeth Prettejohn, Barbara Rosenbaum and the anonymous reviewers for this journal for their helpful comments on previous drafts of this article.

Notes

¹Quoted in Sarah Webster Goodwin and Elizabeth Bronfen (eds), Death and Representation, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993, p. 4.

²I am referring principally to the poetry of Robert Browning, which Stephen Cheeke discusses in relation to Leighton's Orpheus and Eurydice (1864) in Writing for Art: The Aesthetics of Ekphrasis, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008, pp. 11–23.

³Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio, introd. by Henry Morley, London: George Routledge, 1884, p. 151 (Fifth Day, Novel I).

⁴Emilia Barrington, The Life, Letters and Work of Frederic Leighton, vols, London: George Allen, Ruskin House, 1906, vol. 1 of 2 vols., p. 258.

⁶Frederic Leighton, Addresses Delivered to the Students of the Royal Academy by the Late Lord Leighton, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trüber, 1896, p. 54. The address was delivered on 10 December 1881.

⁵Leighton routinely showed his art in Whitechapel Loan Society exhibitions in London's East End in the season following their first exhibition at the Royal Academy, with the intention of uplifting the hearts and souls of the working classes through the contemplation of beauty. I am indebted to Caroline Arscott for this observation. Also see Giles Waterfield (ed.), Art for the People: Culture in the Slums of Late Victorian Britain, London: Dulwich Picture Gallery, 1994.

⁷‘The Royal Academy: First Notice’, Daily News, 3 May 1884, p. 8.

⁸Barrington, The Life, vol. 2, p. 258 (original emphasis).

¹⁰Henry James, ‘A Private Life’ [1892], in Leon Edel (ed.), The Complete Tales of Henry James, vol. 8, London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1963, p. 196.

⁹Henry James, ‘A Private Life’ [1892], in Leon Edel (ed.), The Complete Tales of Henry James, vol. 8, London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1963, pp. 189–227 (p. 211).

¹¹‘The Royal Academy’, Daily News, 3 May 1884, p. 2.

¹²For a further elaboration of this point, see Caroline Arscott, ‘The Artist as Artificer’, in Tim Barringer and Elizabeth Prettejohn (eds), Frederic Leighton: Antiquity, Renaissance, Modernity, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999, pp. 3–18. It is important to note that Arscott's argument is not specific to female bodies, finding Leighton's exploration of bodily stretchiness to take place in both male and female examples.

¹³Boccaccio, The Decameron, p. 151.

¹⁴ Cymon and Iphigenia Painted by Sir F. Leighton, P.R.A. The Story of the Picture, London: The Fine Art Society, 1884, p. 6.

¹⁵ Cymon and Iphigenia Painted by Sir F. Leighton, P.R.A. The Story of the Picture, London: The Fine Art Society, 1884, p. 14.

¹⁶Leonee Ormond and Richard Ormond, Lord Leighton, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975, p. 232.

¹⁷In her analysis of Leighton's The Garden of the Hesperides and Flaming June, Susan P. Casteras refers to the artist's ‘pictorial preoccupation with the hypnotic and sensuous appeal of female dreamers’. See Susan P. Casteras, Images of Victorian Womanhood in English Art, Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1987, p. 171.

¹⁸Edgar Allan Poe, ‘Mesmeric Revelation’ [1850], in The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, London: Penguin, 1982, pp. 88–95 (p. 88).

¹⁹Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850–1914, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, p. 120.

²¹George Du Maurier, Trilby [1894], Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 210.

²⁰Bram Stoker, Dracula [1897], Ware: Wordsworth, 2000, p. 260.

²²George Du Maurier, Trilby [1894], Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 282.

²³‘Fine Art Gossip’, Athenaeum 3329, 15 August 1891, p. 234.

²⁴In Leighton's 1891 address to the students of the Royal Academy on the topic of French gothic architecture, which owes much to John Ruskin's ‘The Nature of Gothic’ published in the second edition of The Stones of Venice (1853), he invoked the serpentine line to describe French decorative forms. Ruskin had made the connection between the serpentine line and medieval ornamentation in his 1869 essay The Queen of the Air, when he wrote that: ‘In the Psalter of S. Louis itself, half of its letters are twisted snakes; there is scarcely a wreathed ornament, employed in Christian dress, or architecture, which cannot be traced back to the serpent's coil’. See John Ruskin, The Queen of the Air: Being a Study of the Greek Myths of Cloud and Storm, London: Smith, Elder, 1869, p. 365.

²⁵‘The Summer Exhibitions at Home and Abroad 1.—The Royal Academy and the New Gallery’, Art Journal, June 1892, p. 188.

²⁶Shearer West tentatively associates the artistic aims of Frances Macdonald, Burne-Jones and Leighton with the aspirations of French symbolism in ‘The Visual Arts’, in Gail Marshall (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 131–152 (p. 143).

²⁷‘Heard at the Academy—No.1. And Noted Down by Our Specialist Special’, Moonshine, 1 June 1895, p. 264.

²⁸‘Fine Art: The Royal Academy (First Notice)’, Athenaeum 3523, 4 May 1895, p. 576.

²⁹Elizabeth Prettejohn, Art for Art's Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007, p. 146.

³⁰Elizabeth Prettejohn, Art for Art's Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007, p. 149. The figure is also characterized as Michelangeleque and thereby ‘Mannerist’ by Richard Jenkyns in Dignity and Decadence: Victorian Art and the Classical Inheritance, London: HarperCollins, 1991, p. 216.

³¹Elizabeth Prettejohn, ‘Late Paintings’, in Stephen Calloway and Lynn Federle Orr (eds), The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860–1900, London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2011, (p. 238).

³²Elizabeth Prettejohn, ‘Late Paintings’, in Stephen Calloway and Lynn Federle Orr (eds), The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860–1900, London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2011, p. 240.

³³Arscott, ‘The Artist as Artificer’, p. 13.

³⁴‘Fine Art: The Royal Academy (First Notice)’.

³⁵Arscott, ‘The Artist as Artificer’, p. 14.

³⁶Margaret Anne Doody, ‘Deserts, Ruins and Troubled Waters: Female Dreams in Fiction and the Development of the Gothic Novel’, Genre 10, 1977, pp. 529–71. Doody analyses the distinctions between male and female visions/dreams, relating this to gendered notions of madness, especially in eighteenth-century gothic literature.