LEIGHTON HOUSE 



Leighton's artistic bent displayed itself early ; he was a very 

 small boy when he first went on the Continent with his mother, 

 who was at the time out of health ; and he was but ten years old 

 when he took drawing lessons in Rome. Although he already 

 showed signs of talent, Dr. Leighton did not encourage his desire 

 to become an artist ; indeed, in those days many parents held 

 Art as a profession, in abhorrence, regarding its followers as but little 

 better than vagabonds, or strolling players. That this is not so 

 now, we owe primarily to Sir Joshua Reynolds, who, in his own 

 person, first established the claim of Art to be a career for gentle- 

 men but it was reserved for Frederick Leighton finally to raise 

 the social status of artists generally ; and he has elevated the rank 

 of a craftsman in the fine arts should he care to assume it even 

 to what it had been in the days of Titian, Rubens, and Vandyke 

 who were courtiers, ambassadors, and the companions of kings. 



Leighton was in Italy, and was only fourteen, when his father 

 consulted Hiram Power, the sculptor, in Rome touching his son's 

 career. " Shall I make him an artist ? " 



' Sir," replied the American, " you have no choice, he is one 

 already, and he may become as eminent as he pleases." 



Thus the boy obtained his heart's desire, but it was a desultory 

 sort of art training that in the intervals of his regular education, 

 now began. He who afterwards did so much to awaken and keep 

 alive an ideal of beauty amid the grime and smoke of London 

 derived his own passionate love of that beauty from his early 

 Italian surroundings. But the actual and existing Academies of 

 Art in Italy, were sadly decadent; and Florence was a bad place 

 to begin in, for the boy there picked up mannerisms that it took 

 long years to undo. But fortunately, his general education having 

 been begun in Frankfort, he returned there to continue it, and 

 came under the corrective and formative influence of Steinle, an 

 artist little known in England but to whom as a master though 

 he studied also in Brussels and Paris, Lord Leighton always 

 confessed the greatest obligations. 



In 1852, when twenty- two years of age, Leighton proceeded to 

 Rome, where he was well received by the English colony, and 

 where his long friendship with the Brownings began. Thackeray, 

 who was there at the time, was so greatly impressed by the young 

 artist's promise, that on his return to London, meeting Millais, 



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