Showing posts with label Frederic Lord Leighton. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Frederic Lord Leighton. Show all posts
Thursday, July 21, 2011
Friday, July 15, 2011
Monday, July 11, 2011
Sunday, June 19, 2011
Frederic Lord Leighton - The Sluggard
Price Realized £20,000
signed 'Fred Leighton', inscribed 'FOUNDED/BY J. W. SINGER & SONS./FROME SOMERSET.' and 'PUBLISHED BY ARTHUR LESLIE COLLIE/39B OLD BOND STREET LONDON/MAY 1ST 1890' and with title to the front
bronze with a brown patina
20 3/8 (51.7 cm.) high
Probably inspired by his model Angelo Colorossi, seen stretching after a sitting, The Sluggard, or An Athlete Awakening from Sleep, the work's original title, was almost certainly conceived as a pendant to An Athlete Strangling a Python (1877). The full scale work was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1886 and was awarded a medal of honour when it was shown at the Paris Exposition Universelle three years later. Acquired from Leighton's studio sale in 1896 by Henry
Tate, the full size bronze is now in the Tate Gallery. Benedict Read suggests the subject can be seen 'as a symbol of the art of sculpture, liberated by Leighton, flexing itself for renewed activity after a long time in the shackles of convention.'
http://www.christies.com/LotFinder/lot_details.aspx?from=salesummary&pos=10&intObjectID=5451277&sid=94259890-b0ce-4b69-b0f5-38c9dc37555e
Saturday, June 18, 2011
Frederic Lord Leighton - Head of a Girl in a White Dress
Price Realized £75,650
oil on canvas
15 x 10 in. (38.1 x 25.4 cm.)
The picture is generally dated to the 1890s, making it a late work, but hitherto it has not been identified with any particular item in the records. The most likely candidate seems to be the Head of a Girl in a White Dress that appeared in Leighton's studio sale at Christie's in July 1896; and the picture is catalogued here on the assumption that it is this work. However, the connection has not been fully established. The present canvas has virtually the same dimensions as the picture in the studio sale, and the model does indeed wear a white dress. But to put the matter beyond doubt it would be necessary to find an old reproduction of the picture sold in 1896.
At the studio sale the Head of a Girl in a White Dress was bought by Agnew's. The following year it was lent to Leighton's memorial exhibition at the Royal Academy, and a year later again it re-surfaced at Christie's in the posthumous sale of Joseph Ruston of Monk's Manor, Lincoln. Ruston had a major collection of both old and modern masters, the modern works including four more Leightons and important examples of Rossetti, Burne-Jones, G. F. Watts and others. The Head of a Girl was again bought by Agnew's, but it then disappeared. When the Ormonds' monograph appeared in 1975 it was 'untraced'.
http://www.christies.com/LotFinder/lot_details.aspx?from=salesummary&pos=1&intObjectID=5451278&sid=94259890-b0ce-4b69-b0f5-38c9dc37555e
Frederic Lord Leighton - Head of a Roman Model
Price Realized £31,250
signed with monogram (centre right)
oil on paper laid down on canvas
9¾ x 8 1/8 in. (24.6 x 20.6 cm.)
This picture is testament to the enduring friendship between Leighton and Giovanni Costa which lasted for more than half a century. Thought to have been executed in 1858, five years after the artists met, it is one of several paintings that changed hands between the two men over the course of their careers.
Costa 'who as an artist is one in hundreds and as a man one in thousands', as Leighton told Walter Crane in 1872 - was the central figure in the Etruscan School of landscape painters. The name does not refer, as might be imagined to Tuscany, but to his nickname 'The Etruscan'. The group acquired some formal coherence in 1883, but long before this it had existed in a looser sense. Its aim was to express poetry and emotion through landscape, studied at first hand, but given a distinctly abstract interpretation; a narrow rectangular format was perhaps the most obvious hallmark of the Etruscan style. Although many of its exponents were Italian, the group attracted a number of English acolytes who visited or settled in Italy, including George Howard, George Heming Mason, William Blake Richmond, Walter Crane and Mathew Ridley Corbet.
Costa was born in Rome in 1833 and had a lifelong attachment to the city and the Roman Campana. He first met Leighton in 1853 when the artist was in Rome to paint Cimabue's Madonna (The Royal Collection, on loan to the National Gallery, London). Their friendship deepened to the point where Leighton would revisit Italy almost every year, and spend a few days with Costa looking at the Old Masters they both so passionately admired. They also went on sketching trips, a process vital to the development of the Etruscan school.
The present picture is typical of the small scale works that Leighton made in such numbers on his foreign travels. Essentially executed for his own pleasure, some served as aides-memoires for the large scale subject pictures that he would later compose in the studio. Photographs of Leighton's studio in his lifetime show many of them hanging on his walls for daily reference. This completed sketch was undoubtedly given to his friend as a momento of one of their shared painting trips.
http://www.christies.com/LotFinder/lot_details.aspx?from=salesummary&pos=2&intObjectID=5451279&sid=94259890-b0ce-4b69-b0f5-38c9dc37555e
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