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Lot Essay
A wealthy Liverpool ship-owner, Leyland (1831-1892) became one of the most important figures in the development of the Aesthetic Movement. An important patron and collector of art, he was also a ruthless self-made business man, who was unpopular in Liverpool on account of his commercial practices. He married Frances Dawson (1834-1910) in 1855, the model for Rossetti’s aesthetic masterpiece Monna Rosa (Surtees, no. 198). She bore him one son, Frederick, and three daughters, however the marriage ended in divorce in 1879. He also had two sons by his mistress Annie Ellen Wooster.
Leyland began his collecting career buying the conventional pictures of the day, however by the late 1860s he had turned his attention to the Pre-Raphaelites and the Italian Masters. In this he was guided by Rossetti and two dealers Murray Marks (1840-1918) and Charles Augustus Howell (1840-1890), under whose aegis he built up an outstanding collection of Italian Renaissance and Baroque pictures including Botticelli’s Casa Pucci series Story of Nastagio degli Onesti, now in the Prado, Madrid.
It was with the help of Marks and the architects Norman Shaw and Thomas Jeckyll that he created two of the grandest aesthetic interiors of the 1870s and 1880: 22 Queen’s Gate and 49 Prince’s Gate. The house at Prince’s Gate became famous above all for James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s Peacock Room (Harmony in Blue and Gold) (fig. 1), but also boasted a magnificent staircase transferred from Northumberland House and many other works of art including French furniture, Flemish tapestries, Oriental Porcelain and Italian bronzes. He also had a superb collection of paintings by Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Albert Moore and Whistler including The Beguiling of Merlin (see lot 106). Whistler painted full-length portraits of both Leyland; Arrangement in Black and Mrs Leyland; Symphony in Flesh Colour and Pink, 1871-1874 (Frick Collection). Despite his notoriously difficult personality (he famously quarrelled with Whistler over the cost of the Peacock Room), he did appear to have a genuine affection for Rossetti, who was still engaged on work for Leyland when he died in 1882 and he attended Rossetti’s funeral at Birchington on 14 April 1882. Burne-Jones had commissions from Leyland on his easel when the ship-owner himself died a decade later.
The sale of Leyland’s collection was held in these Rooms, 28 May 1892 (fig. 2) and a description of the collection by his son-in-law Val Prinsep, and Lionel Robinson appeared in the Art Journal of that year, pp. 129-138.
The present drawing is one of only two portraits of Leyland that Rossetti executed. One, bought from Fanny Cornforth, is in the Bancroft Collection, Wilmington, Delaware (Surtees, no. 346). The present drawing, listed as untraced in Surtees, is referred to by Rossetti in a letter to Frederic Shields (1833-1911), dated 16 July 1879 'I am doing a head of him for a wedding present to his eldest daughter but have begun two already without quite pleasing myself. His head is really fine, but there are difficult points in it.’ Four days later Rossetti wrote to the poet Theodore Watts-Dunton (1832-1914), in reference to the present drawing, 'I have given Leyland a frill and everything & he’s ALL there now.’ The frill refers to the frilled shirts Leyland was accustomed to wear. Sadly the present drawing never reached his daughter, as she died in childbirth on the 2 March 1880 before it had been dispatched, leaving Leyland broken-hearted.
Leyland began his collecting career buying the conventional pictures of the day, however by the late 1860s he had turned his attention to the Pre-Raphaelites and the Italian Masters. In this he was guided by Rossetti and two dealers Murray Marks (1840-1918) and Charles Augustus Howell (1840-1890), under whose aegis he built up an outstanding collection of Italian Renaissance and Baroque pictures including Botticelli’s Casa Pucci series Story of Nastagio degli Onesti, now in the Prado, Madrid.
It was with the help of Marks and the architects Norman Shaw and Thomas Jeckyll that he created two of the grandest aesthetic interiors of the 1870s and 1880: 22 Queen’s Gate and 49 Prince’s Gate. The house at Prince’s Gate became famous above all for James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s Peacock Room (Harmony in Blue and Gold) (fig. 1), but also boasted a magnificent staircase transferred from Northumberland House and many other works of art including French furniture, Flemish tapestries, Oriental Porcelain and Italian bronzes. He also had a superb collection of paintings by Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Albert Moore and Whistler including The Beguiling of Merlin (see lot 106). Whistler painted full-length portraits of both Leyland; Arrangement in Black and Mrs Leyland; Symphony in Flesh Colour and Pink, 1871-1874 (Frick Collection). Despite his notoriously difficult personality (he famously quarrelled with Whistler over the cost of the Peacock Room), he did appear to have a genuine affection for Rossetti, who was still engaged on work for Leyland when he died in 1882 and he attended Rossetti’s funeral at Birchington on 14 April 1882. Burne-Jones had commissions from Leyland on his easel when the ship-owner himself died a decade later.
The sale of Leyland’s collection was held in these Rooms, 28 May 1892 (fig. 2) and a description of the collection by his son-in-law Val Prinsep, and Lionel Robinson appeared in the Art Journal of that year, pp. 129-138.
The present drawing is one of only two portraits of Leyland that Rossetti executed. One, bought from Fanny Cornforth, is in the Bancroft Collection, Wilmington, Delaware (Surtees, no. 346). The present drawing, listed as untraced in Surtees, is referred to by Rossetti in a letter to Frederic Shields (1833-1911), dated 16 July 1879 'I am doing a head of him for a wedding present to his eldest daughter but have begun two already without quite pleasing myself. His head is really fine, but there are difficult points in it.’ Four days later Rossetti wrote to the poet Theodore Watts-Dunton (1832-1914), in reference to the present drawing, 'I have given Leyland a frill and everything & he’s ALL there now.’ The frill refers to the frilled shirts Leyland was accustomed to wear. Sadly the present drawing never reached his daughter, as she died in childbirth on the 2 March 1880 before it had been dispatched, leaving Leyland broken-hearted.