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Lot Essay
This fine drawing is a portrait of Dorothy Dene, who so often modelled for Leighton's later work. Born Ada Alice Pullan on 11 April 1859, Dorothy was the eldest of five sisters, several of whom posed for the artist (see fig. 1). None of the others, however, was such a profound or constant source of inspiration.
The girls entered Leighton's life in 1879, a year after he became President of the Royal Academy and thereby assumed - partly ex officio, partly by virtue of his commanding personality and the glacially olympian nature of his work - an unrivalled position as head of the Victorian art establishment. His house, now known as Leighton House and a museum devoted to his memory, stood in the heart of the artists' colony which had sprung up in Kensington in the 1860s on ground which had been part of the Holland House estate. A magnificent building by his friend George Aitchison, who had recently enhanced it by adding the famous Arab Hall, it dominated the surrounding studio houses as effortlessly as Leighton himself dominated the art world of the day.
The Pullan sisters were discovered for Leighton by his friend and future biographer Mrs Russell Barrington, who saw Dorothy standing on the doorstep of a nearby studio. It may well have been that of Herbert Schmalz, who certainly used Dorothy as a model and married her younger sister Edith in 1888. The girls came from a working-class family in New Cross, south London, and were living in straightened circumstances. Their father, Abraham Pullan, had deserted them, and their mother was an invalid who was to die in 1881. Dorothy was endeavouring to bring up the family, and she and her sisters were earning what they could as artists' models, a profession that was hardly considered respectable at this date.
By the mid-1880s Dorothy was well established as Leighton's muse, her remarkable ability to strike a dramatic pose capturing his imagination and finding expression in a long series of paintings, including such masterpieces as The Last Watch of Hero (1887; Manchester), Captive Andromache (1888; Manchester), The Bath of Psyche (1890; Tate Gallery), The Garden of the Hesperides (1892; Port Sunlight) and Clytie (private collection), which remained unfinished at Leighton's death. Dorothy herself had ambitions to become an actress, training professionally and taking part in a number of productions both in London and the provinces. Dorothy Dene was the stage name she chose. However, despite Leighton's strenuous efforts to encourage and promote her, she met with little success. Only by painting her obsessively could he give her fame she craved.
Dorothy was certainly of more than professional interest to Leighton. He regarded the orphaned sisters as his adopted daughters. 'I go to see them', Mrs Barrington reports him as saying, 'when I want to let my hair down and get off the stilts.' Dorothy in particular brought a note of warmth and tenderness into his austere bachelor existence, dedicated to his art and official duties. Nonetheless, the inevitable rumours of a romantic entanglement or even marriage were unfounded, as Leighton was quick to stress when his sisters wrote to warn him that he was laying himself open to gossip. Leighton died on 25 January 1896 and Dorothy outlived him by a mere three years, dying of peritonitis on 27 January 1899 at the age of thirty-nine.
During the early years of his acquaintance with the Pullans, Leighton tended to employ the youngest sister, Isabell, or Lena, more than Dorothy. As enchantingly pretty child, Lena was the ideal model for such sentimental genre subjects as The Light of the Harem (RA 1880; private collection) or Kittens (RA 1883), which was sold in these Rooms on 24 January 1998. By the mid-1880s, however, Dorothy was beginning to exert her sway, and the present drawing appears to be a study for one of the first pictures by Leighton for which she modelled, 'Serenely Wandering in a Trance of Sober Thought', exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1885 (fig. 2). The head in the drawing is held more upright, but the right profile pose and the wide-brimmed, ruched- velvet hat leave little doubt of the connection.
The painting, and hence the drawing, seem to have had two sources of inspiration. One was Dorothy herself, who (although the taste was hardly unusual at the time) appears to have had a weakness for large hats. A friend recalled seeing her and Leighton together at one of Herkomer's musical plays, Leighton with his 'ruddily handsome face and grizzling beard', Dorothy 'beautifully dressed' in an ostrich-feather hat; and Mrs Russell Barrington recorded that Leighton teased Dorothy by calling her 'the mushroom' when she appeared in one of these creations. A hat almost identical to the one in our drawing is worn by Dorothy in a wood-engraved portrait, probably based on a carte-de-visite photograph, which was published in Punch on 29 May 1886 (fig. 3). A fortnight earlier Dorothy had achieved what was probably her greatest theatrical triumph, appearing as Cassandra in Professor George Warr's adaptation of the Oresteia at the Prince's Hall, Picadilly. The performance had been in aid of two London University colleges, and the fashionable audience had included the Prince and Princess of Wales. Leighton, who loyally attended all Dorothy's first nights, had also been present, 'beaming' and acting as 'a kind of presiding genius of classicism', while three other well-known artists, Watts, Poynter and Walter Crane, had designed tableaux-vivants. Punch took a jaudiced view of the performance, finding the text tedious and dismissing the cast as 'too weak for criticism'. There had, however, been one redeeming feature, Dorothy's dramatic appearance as Cassandra uttering dire warnings to the citizens of Troy. 'When...it was found that (she) put life and force into the captive prophetess, when for the moment she became actually inspired, casting aside the modern manner, and giving us tragedy as it should be acted and poetry as it should be spoken, the delighted audience, released from an imprisonment of dullness, broke out like schoolboys into the fresh air of appliance. Miss Dorothy Dene electrified them with her prophetic warning'.
Leighton's other source of inspiration was Gainsborough, who so often posed his sitters in large 'picture' hats. Leighton owned a drawing of precisely this type, one of a series of studies for the figures in Gainsborough's painting The Richmond Water-Walk, commissioned by George III as a companion to The Mall, the well-known picture in the Frick Collection, New York (fig. 4). It is not known when Leighton acquired this drawing, which appeared in his posthumous sale at Christie's in July 1896 (third day, lot 256), but it was surely before he conceived 'Serenely Wandering' about 1883-4. Both the wide-brimmed hat and the pose of the figure, moving gracefully from left to right, suggest a strong connection between drawing and painting. Not that he slavishly imitated Gainsborough; on the contrary, he brings to the basic compositional idea a totally original interpretation. Where Gainsborough's drawing is all rococo froth and evenescence, Leighton's painting has the bulk and weight of its period. Dorothy was only twenty-five at the time, but in Leighton's hands she becomes the epitome of the 'handsome' late-Victorian woman.
It is interesting to find Leighton laying himself open to the influence of an artist like Gainsborough. They are not normally associated, and Gainsborough does not feature in the indexes either of Mrs Barrington's biography (1906) or the Ormonds' more recent monograph (1975). On reflection, however, the link is not really suprising. Two winter exhibitions at the Grosvenor Gallery, one devoted to Reynolds in 1883-4, the other to Gainsborough in 1884-5, must have done much to direct Leighton's thoughts. Many Victorian artists, moreover, found inspiration in British art of the previous century. Eighteenth-century costume pieces were a familiar genre; artists as varied as Frith, Millais, Madox Brown, James Archer, Val Prinsep and G.D. Leslie were among its exponents. Then there was the eighteenth-century dimension to the Aesthetic Movement: Norman Shaw's 'Queen Anne' style in architecture and the Regency element in the popular book illustrations of Walter Crane, whom Leighton commissioned to design the mosaic frieze which adorned the Arab Hall at Leighton House.
Perhaps the most interesting parallels are offered by Millais, a friend of Leighton's for forty years and his successor, briefly, as PRA. Millais freely acknowledged the influence of eighteenth-century British art. It is evident in his two paintings of Jonathan Swift's heroines, Stella (Manchester City Art Gallery) and Vanessa (Sudley House, Liverpool), exhibited respectively at the RA in 1868 and 1869, and again in his well-known portrait to the three Armstrong sisters, Hearts are Trumps (RA 1872; Tate Gallery), painted in emulation of The Ladies Waldegrave by Reynolds (National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh). The same tendency is discernible in The Last Rose of Summer (private collection), a 'fancy' portrait of his daughter Mary, exhibited at the New Gallery in 1888, in which the sitter is shown standing in profile and wearing a large 'picture' hat. It is no accident that Leonée Ormond compares this work to Leighton's 'Serenely Wandering' in an article on the relationship between the two artists published to mark their joint centenary in 1996 (Apollo, February 1996, p. 44, figs. 7-8). As she observes, the two studies are 'nearly identical', the only significant difference being that Dorothy Dene faces to the right and Mary Millais to the left.
This is not the place to pursue the subject further, but when it eventually receives the full light of critical attention, 'Serenely Wandering', our related drawing and their Gainsborough source will earn at least a footnote in the story. They belong to a fascinating aspect of late Victorian and Edwardian taste which reaches far beyond the sphere of painting. The Gainsborough and Reynolds exhibitions at the Grosvenor Gallery have already been mentioned. Numerous monographs on eigtheenth-century painters - not only such great names as Reynolds, Gainsborough, Romney and Lawrence, but Zoffany, Kauffmann, Morland, Gardner, Downman and others - appeared from around the turn of the century until well into the 1920s. G.C. Williamson, Lady Victoria Manners, Humphrey Ward, W. Roberts and the ubiquitous Lord Ronald Sutherland Gower, whom Millais had painted in 1876, were among the most prolific authors in this field. Meanwhile collecting kept pace with scholarship. This was the age of the mezzotint revival, when astonishingly high prices were paid for fine impressions of these contemporary reproductions after the great eighteenth-century masters. Now was the taste confirmed to this country. The final chapter of the movement saw many of the finest paintings leave their ancestral moorings in English country houses for new homes in America, their exodus hastened by economic necessity and the hard-nosed salesmanship of Duveen.
According to an old label on the mount, our drawing was dedicated or given ('widmung') by Leighton in 1884 to the Dutch genre painter Cecil (or Carl) van Hannen (1844-1915). Van Hannen had a long association with England. He exhibited at the Royal Academy throughout the 1880s, and at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1883 and 1885. In 1880-81 he had studios in London (Baker Street and the Strand), after which he seems to have settled in Venice, where he found most of his picturesque subjects. He and Leighton were friends for many years; in their monograph, the Ormonds show Leighton discussing a new vehicle for oil paint with van Haanen in October 1895, only a few weeks before his death. Leighton's posthumous sale at Christie's (14 July 1896, lots 317-8) included two oil studies of Venetian girls that van Haanen had given him in 1883, and our drawing was probably a reciprocal gift. It is interesting that Leighton should have given away a work so recent that van Haanen was in possession of the drawing even before 'Serenely Wandering' had been exhibited.
Before leaving the drawing, it is worth considering its relationship to a small painting of a woman by Leighton that was sold in these Rooms on 14 June 1991, lot 294 (fig. 5). The sitter was unidentified, but her profile pose and large hat are so reminiscent of the drawing that it is hard to resist the conclusion that she is Dorothy Dene. Admittedly she looks older, but then the picture seems to be twelve years later than the drawing. When sold, it bore an old label in French stating that it was Leighton's 'dernier oeuvre'. If this is true, it must have been painted only a few days before his death on 25 January 1896.
We are grateful to Leonée and Richard Ormond for their help in preparing this entry.
The girls entered Leighton's life in 1879, a year after he became President of the Royal Academy and thereby assumed - partly ex officio, partly by virtue of his commanding personality and the glacially olympian nature of his work - an unrivalled position as head of the Victorian art establishment. His house, now known as Leighton House and a museum devoted to his memory, stood in the heart of the artists' colony which had sprung up in Kensington in the 1860s on ground which had been part of the Holland House estate. A magnificent building by his friend George Aitchison, who had recently enhanced it by adding the famous Arab Hall, it dominated the surrounding studio houses as effortlessly as Leighton himself dominated the art world of the day.
The Pullan sisters were discovered for Leighton by his friend and future biographer Mrs Russell Barrington, who saw Dorothy standing on the doorstep of a nearby studio. It may well have been that of Herbert Schmalz, who certainly used Dorothy as a model and married her younger sister Edith in 1888. The girls came from a working-class family in New Cross, south London, and were living in straightened circumstances. Their father, Abraham Pullan, had deserted them, and their mother was an invalid who was to die in 1881. Dorothy was endeavouring to bring up the family, and she and her sisters were earning what they could as artists' models, a profession that was hardly considered respectable at this date.
By the mid-1880s Dorothy was well established as Leighton's muse, her remarkable ability to strike a dramatic pose capturing his imagination and finding expression in a long series of paintings, including such masterpieces as The Last Watch of Hero (1887; Manchester), Captive Andromache (1888; Manchester), The Bath of Psyche (1890; Tate Gallery), The Garden of the Hesperides (1892; Port Sunlight) and Clytie (private collection), which remained unfinished at Leighton's death. Dorothy herself had ambitions to become an actress, training professionally and taking part in a number of productions both in London and the provinces. Dorothy Dene was the stage name she chose. However, despite Leighton's strenuous efforts to encourage and promote her, she met with little success. Only by painting her obsessively could he give her fame she craved.
Dorothy was certainly of more than professional interest to Leighton. He regarded the orphaned sisters as his adopted daughters. 'I go to see them', Mrs Barrington reports him as saying, 'when I want to let my hair down and get off the stilts.' Dorothy in particular brought a note of warmth and tenderness into his austere bachelor existence, dedicated to his art and official duties. Nonetheless, the inevitable rumours of a romantic entanglement or even marriage were unfounded, as Leighton was quick to stress when his sisters wrote to warn him that he was laying himself open to gossip. Leighton died on 25 January 1896 and Dorothy outlived him by a mere three years, dying of peritonitis on 27 January 1899 at the age of thirty-nine.
During the early years of his acquaintance with the Pullans, Leighton tended to employ the youngest sister, Isabell, or Lena, more than Dorothy. As enchantingly pretty child, Lena was the ideal model for such sentimental genre subjects as The Light of the Harem (RA 1880; private collection) or Kittens (RA 1883), which was sold in these Rooms on 24 January 1998. By the mid-1880s, however, Dorothy was beginning to exert her sway, and the present drawing appears to be a study for one of the first pictures by Leighton for which she modelled, 'Serenely Wandering in a Trance of Sober Thought', exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1885 (fig. 2). The head in the drawing is held more upright, but the right profile pose and the wide-brimmed, ruched- velvet hat leave little doubt of the connection.
The painting, and hence the drawing, seem to have had two sources of inspiration. One was Dorothy herself, who (although the taste was hardly unusual at the time) appears to have had a weakness for large hats. A friend recalled seeing her and Leighton together at one of Herkomer's musical plays, Leighton with his 'ruddily handsome face and grizzling beard', Dorothy 'beautifully dressed' in an ostrich-feather hat; and Mrs Russell Barrington recorded that Leighton teased Dorothy by calling her 'the mushroom' when she appeared in one of these creations. A hat almost identical to the one in our drawing is worn by Dorothy in a wood-engraved portrait, probably based on a carte-de-visite photograph, which was published in Punch on 29 May 1886 (fig. 3). A fortnight earlier Dorothy had achieved what was probably her greatest theatrical triumph, appearing as Cassandra in Professor George Warr's adaptation of the Oresteia at the Prince's Hall, Picadilly. The performance had been in aid of two London University colleges, and the fashionable audience had included the Prince and Princess of Wales. Leighton, who loyally attended all Dorothy's first nights, had also been present, 'beaming' and acting as 'a kind of presiding genius of classicism', while three other well-known artists, Watts, Poynter and Walter Crane, had designed tableaux-vivants. Punch took a jaudiced view of the performance, finding the text tedious and dismissing the cast as 'too weak for criticism'. There had, however, been one redeeming feature, Dorothy's dramatic appearance as Cassandra uttering dire warnings to the citizens of Troy. 'When...it was found that (she) put life and force into the captive prophetess, when for the moment she became actually inspired, casting aside the modern manner, and giving us tragedy as it should be acted and poetry as it should be spoken, the delighted audience, released from an imprisonment of dullness, broke out like schoolboys into the fresh air of appliance. Miss Dorothy Dene electrified them with her prophetic warning'.
Leighton's other source of inspiration was Gainsborough, who so often posed his sitters in large 'picture' hats. Leighton owned a drawing of precisely this type, one of a series of studies for the figures in Gainsborough's painting The Richmond Water-Walk, commissioned by George III as a companion to The Mall, the well-known picture in the Frick Collection, New York (fig. 4). It is not known when Leighton acquired this drawing, which appeared in his posthumous sale at Christie's in July 1896 (third day, lot 256), but it was surely before he conceived 'Serenely Wandering' about 1883-4. Both the wide-brimmed hat and the pose of the figure, moving gracefully from left to right, suggest a strong connection between drawing and painting. Not that he slavishly imitated Gainsborough; on the contrary, he brings to the basic compositional idea a totally original interpretation. Where Gainsborough's drawing is all rococo froth and evenescence, Leighton's painting has the bulk and weight of its period. Dorothy was only twenty-five at the time, but in Leighton's hands she becomes the epitome of the 'handsome' late-Victorian woman.
It is interesting to find Leighton laying himself open to the influence of an artist like Gainsborough. They are not normally associated, and Gainsborough does not feature in the indexes either of Mrs Barrington's biography (1906) or the Ormonds' more recent monograph (1975). On reflection, however, the link is not really suprising. Two winter exhibitions at the Grosvenor Gallery, one devoted to Reynolds in 1883-4, the other to Gainsborough in 1884-5, must have done much to direct Leighton's thoughts. Many Victorian artists, moreover, found inspiration in British art of the previous century. Eighteenth-century costume pieces were a familiar genre; artists as varied as Frith, Millais, Madox Brown, James Archer, Val Prinsep and G.D. Leslie were among its exponents. Then there was the eighteenth-century dimension to the Aesthetic Movement: Norman Shaw's 'Queen Anne' style in architecture and the Regency element in the popular book illustrations of Walter Crane, whom Leighton commissioned to design the mosaic frieze which adorned the Arab Hall at Leighton House.
Perhaps the most interesting parallels are offered by Millais, a friend of Leighton's for forty years and his successor, briefly, as PRA. Millais freely acknowledged the influence of eighteenth-century British art. It is evident in his two paintings of Jonathan Swift's heroines, Stella (Manchester City Art Gallery) and Vanessa (Sudley House, Liverpool), exhibited respectively at the RA in 1868 and 1869, and again in his well-known portrait to the three Armstrong sisters, Hearts are Trumps (RA 1872; Tate Gallery), painted in emulation of The Ladies Waldegrave by Reynolds (National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh). The same tendency is discernible in The Last Rose of Summer (private collection), a 'fancy' portrait of his daughter Mary, exhibited at the New Gallery in 1888, in which the sitter is shown standing in profile and wearing a large 'picture' hat. It is no accident that Leonée Ormond compares this work to Leighton's 'Serenely Wandering' in an article on the relationship between the two artists published to mark their joint centenary in 1996 (Apollo, February 1996, p. 44, figs. 7-8). As she observes, the two studies are 'nearly identical', the only significant difference being that Dorothy Dene faces to the right and Mary Millais to the left.
This is not the place to pursue the subject further, but when it eventually receives the full light of critical attention, 'Serenely Wandering', our related drawing and their Gainsborough source will earn at least a footnote in the story. They belong to a fascinating aspect of late Victorian and Edwardian taste which reaches far beyond the sphere of painting. The Gainsborough and Reynolds exhibitions at the Grosvenor Gallery have already been mentioned. Numerous monographs on eigtheenth-century painters - not only such great names as Reynolds, Gainsborough, Romney and Lawrence, but Zoffany, Kauffmann, Morland, Gardner, Downman and others - appeared from around the turn of the century until well into the 1920s. G.C. Williamson, Lady Victoria Manners, Humphrey Ward, W. Roberts and the ubiquitous Lord Ronald Sutherland Gower, whom Millais had painted in 1876, were among the most prolific authors in this field. Meanwhile collecting kept pace with scholarship. This was the age of the mezzotint revival, when astonishingly high prices were paid for fine impressions of these contemporary reproductions after the great eighteenth-century masters. Now was the taste confirmed to this country. The final chapter of the movement saw many of the finest paintings leave their ancestral moorings in English country houses for new homes in America, their exodus hastened by economic necessity and the hard-nosed salesmanship of Duveen.
According to an old label on the mount, our drawing was dedicated or given ('widmung') by Leighton in 1884 to the Dutch genre painter Cecil (or Carl) van Hannen (1844-1915). Van Hannen had a long association with England. He exhibited at the Royal Academy throughout the 1880s, and at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1883 and 1885. In 1880-81 he had studios in London (Baker Street and the Strand), after which he seems to have settled in Venice, where he found most of his picturesque subjects. He and Leighton were friends for many years; in their monograph, the Ormonds show Leighton discussing a new vehicle for oil paint with van Haanen in October 1895, only a few weeks before his death. Leighton's posthumous sale at Christie's (14 July 1896, lots 317-8) included two oil studies of Venetian girls that van Haanen had given him in 1883, and our drawing was probably a reciprocal gift. It is interesting that Leighton should have given away a work so recent that van Haanen was in possession of the drawing even before 'Serenely Wandering' had been exhibited.
Before leaving the drawing, it is worth considering its relationship to a small painting of a woman by Leighton that was sold in these Rooms on 14 June 1991, lot 294 (fig. 5). The sitter was unidentified, but her profile pose and large hat are so reminiscent of the drawing that it is hard to resist the conclusion that she is Dorothy Dene. Admittedly she looks older, but then the picture seems to be twelve years later than the drawing. When sold, it bore an old label in French stating that it was Leighton's 'dernier oeuvre'. If this is true, it must have been painted only a few days before his death on 25 January 1896.
We are grateful to Leonée and Richard Ormond for their help in preparing this entry.