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Lot Essay
This long-lost painting, listed as 'untraced' in Leonée and Richard Ormond's monograph and apparently never reproduced before its appearance in the present catalogue, was one of the most important products of Leighton's five-week stay in Capri in the early summer of 1859. This sleepy and picturesque island at the southern point of the Bay of Naples had not yet been discovered by tourists. It had, however, long been a mecca for artists, as indeed it would remain. The young Sargent painted there in 1878, and another American, Elihu Vedder, had a house there for many years. Leighton had settled in Rome in 1852 at the age of twenty-one, and on 10 February 1855 he had written to his father to say that he 'contemplated before leaving Italy making a trip to Naples, Capri, Oschia [presumably Ischia], Amalfi, and all the spots about which artists rave.' Hoping, perhaps, that his father would increase his modest allowance and pay for the journey, he added wistfully that he feared the project would remain 'a financial château en Espagne'; and it was not in fact until four years later that the tour took place.
Leighton spent the early months of 1859 in Rome, completing a series of fanciful portraits of Nanna Risi, a local beauty who inspired many artists, notably Anselm Feuerbach, whose mistress as well as model she became. These studies finished, he journeyed south, visiting Naples and Paestum before going on to Capri. The journey cannot have been any easier then than it was nineteen years later for Sargent. 'Getting to the island proved a formidable task', wrote the artist's biographer Charles Merrill Mount. 'A steamer ran from Naples, but it had no particular day for leaving...Eventually he located a market boat and sailed to Capri packed in tightly with the vegetables, fruit, and garlic.' On the island Leighton seems to have stayed at the Albergo Pagano, a hotel, as Baedeker noted a few years later, 'of modest pretensions, especially recommended to gentlemen alone... a favourite resort of artists who occasionally spend several months in the island; the garden contains a magnificent palm.'
After a youth spent studying in almost every European capital, Leighton finally settled in London at the end of 1859. In the years to come, he would be an inveterate traveller, generally leaving London when the Season was over to spend the months of August to October touring leisurely in Italy, the Middle East and the Levant. The first anticipation of these journeys had occurred in September 1857, when he visited Algiers. It was a formative experience, the brilliant light, picturesque architecture, colourful costumes and relaxed lifestyle of the Arabs firing his enthusiasm for travel and having profound repercussions on his artistic development.
The five-week stay in Capri some eighteen months later was his next venture of this kind, and in one vital respect it was more typical of the many journeys that followed. The visit to Algiers, which was comparatively short, seems to have produced little in the way of paintings or drawings. The time spent in Capri, on the other hand, was intensely fertile, inspiring many of the studies from nature that Leighton would make in such numbers on his future travels. In fact the best-known product of the stay was the famous pencil drawing of a lemon tree (Fig. 2), a work of astonishingly minute and accurate detail that probably reflects Leighton's encounter with the Pre-Raphaelite circle in London in 1858, and certainly earned the fervent admiration of their mentor and champion John Ruskin. This, however, was a unique tour de force. More characteristic of Leighton's longterm perfomance was a series of small oil sketches. 'The views of streets, houses and gardens that he made at Capri in the early summer of 1859', Christopher Newall has written, are 'Leighton's first securely dated group of oil landscapes,' if not indeed 'his earliest surviving works of this type.' Four of them, including one made in the garden of Pagano's Hotel in which the 'magnificent palm' features, were in the Leighton Exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1996 (nos. 16-19, all illustrated in catalogue). The visit also resulted in two landscapes that were deemed sufficiently finished and important to be exhibited at the Royal Academy. The present picture, Capri - sunrise, was Leighton's only exhibit there in 1860. It was followed in 1861 by Capri - Pagano's, now in the Birmingham Art Gallery (Fig. 3). One of six works that he showed that year, the picture was a larger and more finished replica of the plein-air version made in the hotel garden. No such sketch for Capri - sunrise seems to survive, although it seems likely that one existed. Contrary to the claim made by a critic quoted below that it was 'painted on the spot', the picture has the careful design and finish which suggest that it was produced in the studio from a plein-air sketch.
Capri - sunrise and the Birmingham picture have sometimes been seen as a pair. Edgecumbe Staley, in his early monograph on Leighton, refers to them as Capri - sunrise and Capri - sunset, while the Ormonds describe them as 'companions'. It is true that the two pictures are more or less the same size (Capri - sunrise being 19½ x 28¾ in. while Capri - Pagano's is 19¼ x 26¼ in.), but in spirit and composition they could hardly be more different. Capri - Pagano's (which is not, incidentally, an obvious 'sunset' scene, although the lengthening shadows seem to indicate late afternoon) is essentially a study of foreground vegetation. Supported by a pergola placed parallel to the picture plane, and including the enormous palm tree which rises to the upper frame, this completely dominates the design; even Monte Solaro, Capri's highest point, and the church of S. Costanzo, which appear in the distance to left and right, cannot compete. The Ormonds rightly describe the picture as 'airless and claustrophobic', the conception so emphasising the lush foreground foliage 'that the background looks incongruous and unreal.'
Our picture, by contrast, is an open panorama. We look northwards across the island, with the Bay of Naples and the Italian mainland in the distance. Leighton has moved some ninety degrees clockwise from the viewpoint he had adopted in Capri - Pagano's. Monte Solaro is still seen on the left but now looms much closer, while S. Costanzo, with its distinctive Byzantine dome (the church was built in the eleventh century to house the remains of Capri's patron saint, a Patriarch of Constantinople who had miraculously saved the island from Saracen attack in AD 881) appears almost in the centre of the composition. The Marina Grande, the normal landing place for ships, lies on the far side of the church. To the right, the town of Capri nestles among the hills of S. Michele and Castiglione, and beyond them, invisible in the picture, are the ruins of the Villa Jovis, a magnificent palace probably built by the Emperor Tiberius, who retired to Capri in AD 27 and lived there for ten years, indulging, according to Suetonius, in unspeakably sadistic orgies. In the foreground are some of the olive trees which flourish in the island's warm climate, while the middle-distance, into which the eye is led by the serpentine forms of old fortifications, is dotted with white and honey-coloured villas, making an effect which Norman Douglas describes in his book Footnote on Capri (1952) as 'like drying laundry.' The sky is cloudless, and the entire scene is bathed in early morning light.
The 1860 Academy was distinguished by such works as Dyce's Pegwell Bay (Tate Gallery), Millais' Black Brunswicker (Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight), Landseer's Flood in the Highlands (Aberdeen Art Gallery) and Watts's Mrs Cavendish - Bentinck and her Children (Tate Gallery). Leighton's picture, however, was not overlooked by the reviewers, and was generally liked. It is true the Art Journal dismissed it as 'but a local memento', and for the artist himself 'a divertissement, a relief from the practice of the figure.' But the writer had clearly not looked at it very carefully, idiotically describing it as showing 'not the island, but the town, - an interior view, without a glimpse of the sea.'
Tom Taylor in the Times was more perceptive. 'Mr Leighton,' he wrote, 'sends nothing this year but a strikingly faithful view of Capri, with its white and yellow houses standing coldly out against a grey early morning sky. Those who know Southern Italy well will recognise the remarkable truth of this sober picture.'
The critic on the Athenaeum (not yet F.G. Stephens, who did not join the staff until the following year) also admired the painting's veracity, even if he expressed himself in rather more colourful terms. Having discussed E.W. Cooke's account of HMS Terror stuck in the ice of Frozen Strait during an Arctic expedition of 1837, the writer continued: 'We may warm ourselves again...by looking at Mr Leighton's landscape, Capri - sunrise, painted on the spot: the purple-bluish haze dominating the whole atmosphere is the effect of the sirocco, whose sulphorous blush deepens the sky without a cloud, and makes the white buildings look ghastly and bleached, like dead men's bones. A horrid torridity of heat seems to prevail, making the vegetation shrink, crackle, and turn yellow in its breathless grasp. This little picture is very successful in rendering the peculiar aspect of nature.'
Despite these eulogies, the picture remained on Leighton's hands until 1872, when it was bought by the Brighton wine merchant John Hamilton Trist (1811-1891) for £105. Trist had a large and varied collection of modern British paintings and watercolours. He was a longstanding patron of Arthur Hughes, owning no fewer than twenty-one of the artist's pictures at the time of his death; but he also had works by Rossettti, Madox Brown, Burne-Jones, Legros, G.P. Boyce, Albert Moore, Alma-Tadema, B.W. Leader, G.D. Leslie, and others. He tended to buy direct from the artists, recording his purchases in a manuscript catalogue now in the Tate Gallery archive.
After Trist's death, his pictures (117 lots in all) were sent for sale at Christie's. Capri - sunrise, which fetched 47 guineas, was one of twenty-one that were bought in by his son, Herbert (1852-1935). They descended to Herbert's widow, and in 1937, two years after his death, she offered them again at Christie's. This time Capri - sunrise realised 38 guineas, the fall in value probably reflecting the decline in esteem that Victorian pictures had suffered since the 1890s. It was sold with Leighton's 'original receipt and some remarks by the artist thereon.' This is now lost, and indeed the picture itself has not been recorded since the 1937 sale.
Its rediscovery restores an important work to Leighton's oeuvre. The emperor Augustus was as fond of Capri as his successor Tiberius. The place is littered with Roman antiquities, and it is not hard to see Leighton being wooed by his exposure to this culture in the direction of the classicism he was to espouse so wholeheartedly in the later 1860s. Capri - sunrise, in which the artist clearly revels in the scene before him, so rich in classical associations and so enchantingly displayed in the early morning light, represents, so to speak , the seduction at its most intense.
The picture's significance within the narrower field of Leighton's development as a landscape painter has already been mooted. The Capri studies are not only the first of the many landscapes he was to paint on his foreign travels but tell us much about his landscape style. Their 'effect is effortless', Christopher Newall has written, 'understated and modern, and quite unlike anything that Leighton's contemporaries among English landscape painters were attempting.' Newall sees Corot's early Italian landscapes as the principal influence on Leighton here, pointing out that although the two artists had not yet met, nor had Leighton acquired the paintings by Corot that would later enter his collection, he would have had ample opportunity to study Corot's work when he was living in Paris during the second half of the 1850s.
Equally important, in 1853 Leighton had met in Rome two artists with whom he felt a great affinity, Giovanni Costa and George Heming Mason. Although the so-called Etruscan school of landscape painting was not to achieve formal coherence until the early 1880s, Costa and Mason were already developing its stylistic principles; and the impact of these is more evident in our picture than in any other product of Leighton's stay in Capri. The Italian subject with its classical references, the wide viewpoint and the narrow 'landscape' format, the probability that Leighton was working in the studio from sketches, and his obvious response to the poetry inherent in his theme - all these reflect the Etruscan aesthetic. This dimension, moreover, is reinforced by the picture's presence in the Trist collection, for although it was his only work by Leighton, Trist clearly had a keen appreciation of this type of landscape. He also owned three pictures by Costa (probably bought at the instigation of Leighton, who was a tireless promoter of his friend's career), as well as pictures by two other members of the Etruscan circle, George Mason and William Blake Richmond. Further examples of David Cox, G.P. Boyce, Charles Napier Hemy, John Samuel Raven and others, created a more general context of poetic landscape within which Capri - sunrise would have been seen on the wine merchant's walls.
Fig. 1 Photograph of Leighton, late 1850's(?) inserted into Wilfred Meynell's copy of Mrs Barrington's biography
Fig. 2 Frederic, Lord Leighton
A Lemon Tree
(Private Collection)
Fig. 3 Frederic, Lord Leighton
Capri - Pagano's
(Courtesy of Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery)
Leighton spent the early months of 1859 in Rome, completing a series of fanciful portraits of Nanna Risi, a local beauty who inspired many artists, notably Anselm Feuerbach, whose mistress as well as model she became. These studies finished, he journeyed south, visiting Naples and Paestum before going on to Capri. The journey cannot have been any easier then than it was nineteen years later for Sargent. 'Getting to the island proved a formidable task', wrote the artist's biographer Charles Merrill Mount. 'A steamer ran from Naples, but it had no particular day for leaving...Eventually he located a market boat and sailed to Capri packed in tightly with the vegetables, fruit, and garlic.' On the island Leighton seems to have stayed at the Albergo Pagano, a hotel, as Baedeker noted a few years later, 'of modest pretensions, especially recommended to gentlemen alone... a favourite resort of artists who occasionally spend several months in the island; the garden contains a magnificent palm.'
After a youth spent studying in almost every European capital, Leighton finally settled in London at the end of 1859. In the years to come, he would be an inveterate traveller, generally leaving London when the Season was over to spend the months of August to October touring leisurely in Italy, the Middle East and the Levant. The first anticipation of these journeys had occurred in September 1857, when he visited Algiers. It was a formative experience, the brilliant light, picturesque architecture, colourful costumes and relaxed lifestyle of the Arabs firing his enthusiasm for travel and having profound repercussions on his artistic development.
The five-week stay in Capri some eighteen months later was his next venture of this kind, and in one vital respect it was more typical of the many journeys that followed. The visit to Algiers, which was comparatively short, seems to have produced little in the way of paintings or drawings. The time spent in Capri, on the other hand, was intensely fertile, inspiring many of the studies from nature that Leighton would make in such numbers on his future travels. In fact the best-known product of the stay was the famous pencil drawing of a lemon tree (Fig. 2), a work of astonishingly minute and accurate detail that probably reflects Leighton's encounter with the Pre-Raphaelite circle in London in 1858, and certainly earned the fervent admiration of their mentor and champion John Ruskin. This, however, was a unique tour de force. More characteristic of Leighton's longterm perfomance was a series of small oil sketches. 'The views of streets, houses and gardens that he made at Capri in the early summer of 1859', Christopher Newall has written, are 'Leighton's first securely dated group of oil landscapes,' if not indeed 'his earliest surviving works of this type.' Four of them, including one made in the garden of Pagano's Hotel in which the 'magnificent palm' features, were in the Leighton Exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1996 (nos. 16-19, all illustrated in catalogue). The visit also resulted in two landscapes that were deemed sufficiently finished and important to be exhibited at the Royal Academy. The present picture, Capri - sunrise, was Leighton's only exhibit there in 1860. It was followed in 1861 by Capri - Pagano's, now in the Birmingham Art Gallery (Fig. 3). One of six works that he showed that year, the picture was a larger and more finished replica of the plein-air version made in the hotel garden. No such sketch for Capri - sunrise seems to survive, although it seems likely that one existed. Contrary to the claim made by a critic quoted below that it was 'painted on the spot', the picture has the careful design and finish which suggest that it was produced in the studio from a plein-air sketch.
Capri - sunrise and the Birmingham picture have sometimes been seen as a pair. Edgecumbe Staley, in his early monograph on Leighton, refers to them as Capri - sunrise and Capri - sunset, while the Ormonds describe them as 'companions'. It is true that the two pictures are more or less the same size (Capri - sunrise being 19½ x 28¾ in. while Capri - Pagano's is 19¼ x 26¼ in.), but in spirit and composition they could hardly be more different. Capri - Pagano's (which is not, incidentally, an obvious 'sunset' scene, although the lengthening shadows seem to indicate late afternoon) is essentially a study of foreground vegetation. Supported by a pergola placed parallel to the picture plane, and including the enormous palm tree which rises to the upper frame, this completely dominates the design; even Monte Solaro, Capri's highest point, and the church of S. Costanzo, which appear in the distance to left and right, cannot compete. The Ormonds rightly describe the picture as 'airless and claustrophobic', the conception so emphasising the lush foreground foliage 'that the background looks incongruous and unreal.'
Our picture, by contrast, is an open panorama. We look northwards across the island, with the Bay of Naples and the Italian mainland in the distance. Leighton has moved some ninety degrees clockwise from the viewpoint he had adopted in Capri - Pagano's. Monte Solaro is still seen on the left but now looms much closer, while S. Costanzo, with its distinctive Byzantine dome (the church was built in the eleventh century to house the remains of Capri's patron saint, a Patriarch of Constantinople who had miraculously saved the island from Saracen attack in AD 881) appears almost in the centre of the composition. The Marina Grande, the normal landing place for ships, lies on the far side of the church. To the right, the town of Capri nestles among the hills of S. Michele and Castiglione, and beyond them, invisible in the picture, are the ruins of the Villa Jovis, a magnificent palace probably built by the Emperor Tiberius, who retired to Capri in AD 27 and lived there for ten years, indulging, according to Suetonius, in unspeakably sadistic orgies. In the foreground are some of the olive trees which flourish in the island's warm climate, while the middle-distance, into which the eye is led by the serpentine forms of old fortifications, is dotted with white and honey-coloured villas, making an effect which Norman Douglas describes in his book Footnote on Capri (1952) as 'like drying laundry.' The sky is cloudless, and the entire scene is bathed in early morning light.
The 1860 Academy was distinguished by such works as Dyce's Pegwell Bay (Tate Gallery), Millais' Black Brunswicker (Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight), Landseer's Flood in the Highlands (Aberdeen Art Gallery) and Watts's Mrs Cavendish - Bentinck and her Children (Tate Gallery). Leighton's picture, however, was not overlooked by the reviewers, and was generally liked. It is true the Art Journal dismissed it as 'but a local memento', and for the artist himself 'a divertissement, a relief from the practice of the figure.' But the writer had clearly not looked at it very carefully, idiotically describing it as showing 'not the island, but the town, - an interior view, without a glimpse of the sea.'
Tom Taylor in the Times was more perceptive. 'Mr Leighton,' he wrote, 'sends nothing this year but a strikingly faithful view of Capri, with its white and yellow houses standing coldly out against a grey early morning sky. Those who know Southern Italy well will recognise the remarkable truth of this sober picture.'
The critic on the Athenaeum (not yet F.G. Stephens, who did not join the staff until the following year) also admired the painting's veracity, even if he expressed himself in rather more colourful terms. Having discussed E.W. Cooke's account of HMS Terror stuck in the ice of Frozen Strait during an Arctic expedition of 1837, the writer continued: 'We may warm ourselves again...by looking at Mr Leighton's landscape, Capri - sunrise, painted on the spot: the purple-bluish haze dominating the whole atmosphere is the effect of the sirocco, whose sulphorous blush deepens the sky without a cloud, and makes the white buildings look ghastly and bleached, like dead men's bones. A horrid torridity of heat seems to prevail, making the vegetation shrink, crackle, and turn yellow in its breathless grasp. This little picture is very successful in rendering the peculiar aspect of nature.'
Despite these eulogies, the picture remained on Leighton's hands until 1872, when it was bought by the Brighton wine merchant John Hamilton Trist (1811-1891) for £105. Trist had a large and varied collection of modern British paintings and watercolours. He was a longstanding patron of Arthur Hughes, owning no fewer than twenty-one of the artist's pictures at the time of his death; but he also had works by Rossettti, Madox Brown, Burne-Jones, Legros, G.P. Boyce, Albert Moore, Alma-Tadema, B.W. Leader, G.D. Leslie, and others. He tended to buy direct from the artists, recording his purchases in a manuscript catalogue now in the Tate Gallery archive.
After Trist's death, his pictures (117 lots in all) were sent for sale at Christie's. Capri - sunrise, which fetched 47 guineas, was one of twenty-one that were bought in by his son, Herbert (1852-1935). They descended to Herbert's widow, and in 1937, two years after his death, she offered them again at Christie's. This time Capri - sunrise realised 38 guineas, the fall in value probably reflecting the decline in esteem that Victorian pictures had suffered since the 1890s. It was sold with Leighton's 'original receipt and some remarks by the artist thereon.' This is now lost, and indeed the picture itself has not been recorded since the 1937 sale.
Its rediscovery restores an important work to Leighton's oeuvre. The emperor Augustus was as fond of Capri as his successor Tiberius. The place is littered with Roman antiquities, and it is not hard to see Leighton being wooed by his exposure to this culture in the direction of the classicism he was to espouse so wholeheartedly in the later 1860s. Capri - sunrise, in which the artist clearly revels in the scene before him, so rich in classical associations and so enchantingly displayed in the early morning light, represents, so to speak , the seduction at its most intense.
The picture's significance within the narrower field of Leighton's development as a landscape painter has already been mooted. The Capri studies are not only the first of the many landscapes he was to paint on his foreign travels but tell us much about his landscape style. Their 'effect is effortless', Christopher Newall has written, 'understated and modern, and quite unlike anything that Leighton's contemporaries among English landscape painters were attempting.' Newall sees Corot's early Italian landscapes as the principal influence on Leighton here, pointing out that although the two artists had not yet met, nor had Leighton acquired the paintings by Corot that would later enter his collection, he would have had ample opportunity to study Corot's work when he was living in Paris during the second half of the 1850s.
Equally important, in 1853 Leighton had met in Rome two artists with whom he felt a great affinity, Giovanni Costa and George Heming Mason. Although the so-called Etruscan school of landscape painting was not to achieve formal coherence until the early 1880s, Costa and Mason were already developing its stylistic principles; and the impact of these is more evident in our picture than in any other product of Leighton's stay in Capri. The Italian subject with its classical references, the wide viewpoint and the narrow 'landscape' format, the probability that Leighton was working in the studio from sketches, and his obvious response to the poetry inherent in his theme - all these reflect the Etruscan aesthetic. This dimension, moreover, is reinforced by the picture's presence in the Trist collection, for although it was his only work by Leighton, Trist clearly had a keen appreciation of this type of landscape. He also owned three pictures by Costa (probably bought at the instigation of Leighton, who was a tireless promoter of his friend's career), as well as pictures by two other members of the Etruscan circle, George Mason and William Blake Richmond. Further examples of David Cox, G.P. Boyce, Charles Napier Hemy, John Samuel Raven and others, created a more general context of poetic landscape within which Capri - sunrise would have been seen on the wine merchant's walls.
Fig. 1 Photograph of Leighton, late 1850's(?) inserted into Wilfred Meynell's copy of Mrs Barrington's biography
Fig. 2 Frederic, Lord Leighton
A Lemon Tree
(Private Collection)
Fig. 3 Frederic, Lord Leighton
Capri - Pagano's
(Courtesy of Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery)