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, 
299 
