Study for 'Captive Andromache'

These characteristic studies are for figures in Leighton's Captive Andromache, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1888 and bought at the time for the Manchester City Art Gallery. Leighton had been elected President of the R.A. a decade earlier, and was now at the peak of his career, the unrivalled leader of the Victorian art establishment. Captive Andromache is the perfect expression of this pre-eminence. Enormous in scale and, typically, processional in format, it has every claim to be the artist's masterpiece.