Even those most strongly opposed to his method, manner, and 

 style if they judge him only from the amount, and the serious 

 quality of the work he left behind him and consider how far he 

 carried out his own ideals will generally be found to admit that 

 if there were greater painters in the latter half of the nineteenth 

 century, there was no greater all-round artist, and certainly there 

 was no other who, by common consent owing to a rare union of 

 intellectual and physical gifts seemed so marked out by nature 

 for his great position was born to be President of the Royal 

 Academy. 



Singularly handsome, of distinguished presence, genial in 

 manner, speaking fluently many tongues ; a much-travelled man 

 who had lived long in several Continental cities ; a thoughtful and 

 eloquent speaker, and moreover a ready one for I myself have 

 heard him speak at a moment's notice, effectively and well 

 Frederick Leighton had the high-bred air, and the accomplishments, 

 of a finished courtier. But the charm of voice and smile, the 

 graces of manner and of mind, that attracted all who came near 

 him, were not learnt in courts for though of gentle blood, he 

 was not high-born ; and the President's courtliness was the out- 

 come of a courtesy that was innate. 



Born at Scarborough in 1830, he was the grandson of a man who, 

 during two reigns, had been physician to the court of St. Peters- 

 burg. His father also was a medical man, one who might have 

 made in medicine a greater mark than he did, had not a cold caught 

 at the outset of his career, just after he had taken his Edinburgh 

 degree left him partially deaf. Frederick was the eldest child, 

 an only son ; he had two sisters, one of whom, the late Mrs. Suther- 

 land Orr, made some mark in literature ; the remaining sister,, 

 Mrs. Matthews, survives him. 



The family seems to have been of a roving inclination, for we 

 hear of them as resident for a time in Florence, Rome, Paris, and 

 Frankfort ; and the cosmopolitan tastes and habits thus acquired 

 by the young Frederick, no doubt stood him in good stead in the 

 part he afterwards so admirably played in London society ; for 

 though insularity may assist in forming the individuality of an artist 

 who is destined ultimately to become a pillar of a national school 

 of painting it is by no means an asset in the equipment of one 

 whose business it is to represent that school in the world at large. 



298 



