'Leighton and Landscape: Impressions from Nature' (Leighton House, London until April 27 2025): Everyday Escape

Frederic Leighton, The Bay of Cadiz - Moonlight, 1866, Leighton House Museum, London

Frederic, Lord for a day, Leighton is easily pilloried as the epitome of Victorian academic art. His mighty, frozen in aspic, Cimabue's Celebrated Madonna usually greets visitors to the National Gallery. Flaming June is the height of chocolate box popularity. If you know his home, now Leighton House museum, you might sense another side, but that too can slot neatly into cliches about nineteenth century orientalism. However, the museum's current exhibition, Leighton and Landscape, tosses all that out the window. Leighton was a traveller, yes, to Italy, Spain, North Africa, but he was not a tourist. His paintings are small, quiet, celebrations of the ordinary. A surprisingly large, thoroughly researched and beautifully presented show ends up making the ordinary seem magical and turning Leighton from eminent Victorian into sympathetic interesting individual.

Leighton travelled throughout his life, compulsively, almost as therapy. It was a way of escaping his responsibilities, his public. As much a way of being alone as the ascetic bedroom you can visit at his home. It was, you feel, a way of getting back to his artistic roots, to the basic principles of observing and recording. The exhibition, consequently, is a means of discovering the man: you see what mattered to him through his eyes but you also sense the restlessness of someone who was receptive to new experiences, experimental in his approach, happy to leave his comfort zone. This was a man who could sketch alongside the rebel Newlyn artists in Cornwall, who was prepared to make a five hundred mile round trip to see Biskra on the edge of the Sahara. He could challenge himself to record every leaf of a lemon tree with precise, painstaking beauty, yet dash off, with almost impressionistic bravado, the swirling peatiness of Findhorn river. This was a man who turned his back on the Dome of the Rock because the opposite view was more interesting. 

Frederic Leighton, Sketch: Rocks and Water, Scotland (A Pool Findhorn), c.1890, Leighton House Museum, London

A much bigger exhibition than you might imagine, with over sixty works, spread across different exhibition spaces (one of my few criticisms, but they have to work with the architecture they have), there are surprises at every turn. It is impressively researched. Not only are there significant number of paintings from private collections, which must have involved a lot of leg-work, but there is an effort made to identify locations and provide near-contemporary photographs of them. Again, not an easy task. They point out the very odd occasion when Leighton referenced these landscapes in his history paintings. Finally, it is elegantly presented, especially in the main Verey Gallery. You are led of a winding journey of your own through free-standing panels, which stop the small paintings being overwhelmed, and allow you to get indecently close. 

The moonlit view of Cadiz which has become something of a poster-boy for the exhibition is in reality something of an outlier. Leighton rarely included figures or indeed a focal centre, and arguably his best works exploit strong sunlight with the same crisp effectiveness of Corot. Rocks, both formations and patina, and silhouettes; man-made geometry juxtaposed with vegetation, colour variations, especially in the elongated strata of his Nile paintings - these are the things which he takes notice of. Despite his draughtsmanship skills, which he practised rigorously throughout his career, his spare pencil drawings are the least engaging works in the show. Leighton is an oil painter through and through, you sense someone who has complete confidence in the medium, and that confidence is conveyed through the easy effortlessness of the works. Leighton was notorious for never cutting corners in the laborious ritual of his academic works, but here he puts himself completely in the moment - precision, fluidity, depth, detail are determined by what he sees rather than what he has learned.  Perhaps it helped that I went on a quiet day, when I largely had the place to myself, but the peaceful intimacy of these landscapes was profoundly therapeutic. I will never look at Leighton the same way again.