Works by Frederic Leighton

Frederic Leighton, President of the Royal Academy from 1878 until his death, painted Greek myth and Bible stories in an academic style, often women wrapped in deep folds of thin, glowing cloth.

Eduard von Steinle and then Giovanni Costa taught him, both on the Continent. While studying at the academy in Florence he painted the procession of Cimabue's Madonna, c. 1853–1855, a long frieze of Florentines in bright robes escorting the garlanded panel through the Borgo Allegri. He lived in Paris from 1855 to 1859 but kept travelling, as he had since childhood; Garden of an Inn, Capri, from 1859, has no people at all: white columns sunk in vines under a palm, with a domed building, houses and a rocky cliff behind.

His 1865 portrait of Ellinor Guthrie sets her black silk dress against a red tablecloth and a bowl of roses. The sittings waited while she recovered from the birth of her fifth child, and the drooping blooms may hint at her weak health. The lettering on the etching Pastorale names him as both painter and etcher: a youth in a wreathed hat guides a girl's fingers on a pipe.

In Cymon and Iphigenia, 1884, a woman in pale drapery sleeps on red cushions with a low sun on the sea behind her, and a young man in a red cloak stands looking down at her. Flaming June, painted in 1895, the year before he died, curls a sleeping woman in sheer orange on a marble bench, a strip of glittering sea behind her.

Sources: Wikidata, Wikipedia, Museo de Arte de Ponce, The Dick Institute, Birmingham Museums Trust, Yale Center for British Art, Lady Lever Art Gallery, Art Gallery of New South Wales, National Gallery.