A King and a Beggar Maid

Edmund Blair Leighton was well known in his day. He contributed a total of sixty-six pictures to the Royal Academy summer exhibitions. Often large and eye-catching works, they were popular with the public and widely reproduced. 'No work is more popular than his among publishers', wrote a critic in 1900, and his Times obituary noted that his pictures were, 'in photogravure form,...seen in so many homes.' The Art Journal devoted an article to him in 1900, and at Christmas 1913 he was the subject of its Art Annual. He had an entry in Who's Who, and not only the Times but the Connoisseur carried an obituary.

Yet today Blair Leighton is a somewhat mysterious figure. His pictures are by no means unknown in the saleroom. There is a major example in the Leeds Art Gallery (Lady Godiva, 1892). One of his earliest works (A Flaw in the Title, 1878) is at Royal Holloway College, and a characteristic eighteenth-century genre scene (Launched in Life, 1894) will be familiar to those who patronise the St James's Restaurant at Fortnum and Mason's. But there was never a Chantrey picture in the Tate to appear from time to time and, even in the days when such works were ridiculed, keep his memory green. Nor, so far as we know, has any modern scholar made him the subject of research.

His father, Charles Blair Leighton (1823-1855), was a short-lived painter of portraits, historical subjects and genre. He studied under Benjamin Robert Haydon, being a fellow pupil of Landseer, Eastlake, George Lance and William Bewick, and exhibited for several years at the Royal Acaemy and the British Institution. His chalk drawing of the radical politician Joseph Hume (1777-1855) is in the National Portrait Gallery. He also conducted research into colour lithography, being a senior partner in a family firm, Leighton Bros, which specialised in lithographic reproduction. From 1852 he had a studio at 4 Red Lion Square in London's bohemian quarter, Bloomsbury, but he can hardly have had any contact with the famous occupants of no.17. Rossetti and Walter Howell Deverel had moved out in 1851, and Morris and Burne-Jones did not arrive until 1856, by which time Charles Leighton was dead.

Edmund was born in London on 21 September 1858, one of three children of whom the other two were girls. Since he lost his father two years later, there was obviously no question of receiving parental guidance in even the rudiments of art. Indeed, no sooner had he finished his formal education at University College School than, at the age of fifteen, he was sent to work for a tea merchant in the City. Possibly money was short, or perhaps the fact that the family had always been involved in commerce made this seem a natural course. At all events, the boy was determined to follow his father's profession. He attended evening classes at South Kensington and Heatherley's, and in 1874, at the age of twenty-one, he left his job and entered the Royal Academy Schools.

He was to remain an RA student for five years, winning a £10 premium for the best drawing done in the Life School in 1878, and in 1879 narrowly losing the Gold Medal for Painting to Henry La Thangue. Meanwhile, like so many young artists at this date, including his exact contemporary Frank Dicksee, he was finding employment as an illustrator with the prolific publishers, Cassell's. He began to exhibit the same year that he became a probationer in the RA Schools, sending a picture called An Answer Required to the Society of British Artists in Suffolk Street, modestly priced at 10 guineas. Four years later he had two pictures accepted by the Royal Academy, A Flaw in the Title, already mentioned as at Royal Holloway College, and Witness my Act and Seal, which was sold at Christie's, London on 29 March 1996, lot 108. Seventeenth and eighteenth-cetury genre scenes with legal connotations, they were clearly the work of an ambitious young artist eager to show his mantle. Their careful finish betrayed an anxiety to forestall criticism, and in fact they were well received. The Times admired the way in which the artist had avoided the 'besetting fault' of so many genre paintings, 'too strong a smack of the stage', while the Illustrated London News observed that although 'the faces [were] limned with well-nigh Holbein-like minuteness, and the details of the furniture and drapery [were] all handled with exact care,...the general effect...[was], nevertheless, broad and powerful'. A Flaw in the Title was bought by Thomas Taylor, a wealthy cotton manufacturer, and entered Thomas Holloway's collection when Taylor's pictures were sold at Christie's in 1883.

Blair Leighton's debut at the Royal Academy occurred the same year that Frederic Leighton became President, and it is possible that he emphasised his second forename, making it almost part of his surname, to avoid confusion with his famous but totally unrelated namesake. He identified closely with the RA, and maintained an unbroken record of exhibiting there for forty-two years (1878-1920). He continued to show occasionally at Suffolk Street until 1883, and towards the end of his life he became a member of the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours. Otherwise his loyalty to the RA seems to have been absolute. He certainly never supported the Grosvenor or New Galleries, which represented a seemingly more advanced and liberal alternative.

Given his loyalty, it is curious that the Academy failed to make Blair Leighton an associate, let alone a full member. As early as 1900 the Art Journal was hinting that it was only a matter of time before these honours materialised, but they never did. The contrast with Dicksee, who was already an ARA by 1881 and ended his career as President, is striking. It is true that parallel cases of neglect exist. The somewhat younger academic history painter Herbert Draper was likewise never welcomed into the RA fold. But at least Draper had a picture bought for the Chantrey Bequest, the well-known Lament for Icarus of 1898 (Tate Gallery). Blair Leighton failed to receive this accolade, even though, from today's perspective, his work seems almost the embodiment of Chantrey taste.

Perhaps he was simply uninterested in scaling the academic heights. Certainly he chose not to live in one of the enclaves of RA painters, such as Holland Park or St John's Wood, preferring the more radical and easygoing neighbourhood of Bedford Park. This garden suburb between Chiswick and Acton had sprung up in the late 1870s, largely to designs by Norman Shaw. A revolutionary concept in domestic architecture and suburban planning, it epitomised the so-called 'Queen Anne' taste, and was a showcase for the artistic, moral and social priorities of the Aesthetic movement. As Mark Girouard, its historian, has written, 'light gushed out of it, its sweetness was almost overpowering... A 'Queen Anne' church, a 'Queen Anne' art-school, shop, club and inn, and nearly five-hundred 'Queen Anne' houses were set amid green fields and along tree-lined avenues. Almost every house was equipped with a suitably progressive or artistic family. Children in Kate Greenaway clothes bowled their hoops along the street on their way to co-educational school. Fashionable ladies rode out from the West End to stare at all these odd people; parties of architectural students came on pilgrimages...' (Sweetness and Light; The Queen Anne Movement: 1860-1900, London, 1977, p. 160).

Blair Leighton was among the first settlers, and lived to be one of the area's most senior inhabitants. Having bought 20 Queen Anne's Grove (the name, of course, is significant) in 1881, he moved to 7 Priory Road in 1889, and finally, in 1902, to 14 Priory Road, where he died twenty years later. In 1885 he married Katharine Nash; they had two children, a son, J.E. Blair Leighton, who also became an artist, and a daughter. Whether these were among the hoop-bowling infants who attended the local co-educational school, it is clear from photographs of Blair Leighton's house and studio that the family's domestic surroundings were conventionally 'aesthetic', cluttered with what the author of the 1900 article described as 'quite a collection of old furniture, arms, metal-work, pottery, and other unique relics of the past.'

Blair Leighton took sufficient pride in his collection to mention it in his Who's Who entry. Formed partly as an aid to his elaborate reconstructions of historical events, it was no doubt larger than most. Yet interiors crowded with picturesque bric-à-brac were not unusual in the homes of Bedford Park's 'artistic', 'progressive', or sometimes just 'odd', inhabitants. Blair Leighton's neighbours included T.M. Rooke, Burne-Jones's studio assitant and a protégé of Ruskin; W.B. Yeats and his family, both his father and brother being artists; the Arts and Crafts architect C.F.A. Voysey; the dramatist Arthur Pinero and the actor William Terriss; Frederick York Powell, socialist, Icelandic scholar, and Professor of Modern History at Oxford; Sydney Cockerell, secretary to William Morris's Kelmscott Press and later a distinguished director of the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge; the 'advanced' American clergyman Moncure Conway; Canon J.W. Horsley, the chaplain of Clerkenwell prison, who devoted himself to the reclamation of burglars; C.S. Loch, secretary to the Charity Organisation Society; the Fenian revolutionary John O'Leary; and the Russian anarchist Sergius Stepniac, who was killed by a train in 1895 when he absentmindedly strayed onto a level-crossing.

Blair Leighton seems to have played his part in this lively community. According to the 1913 Art Annual, he was 'an authority on [the area's] history, ancient and modern', and when his funeral took place at Bedford Park church, St Michael and All Angels, on 4 September 1922, it was attended by at least three other artists who lived locally: J.C. Dollman, who, like Blair Leighton himself, specialised in historical genre and showed regularly at the RA, the popular landscape painter Harry Sutton Palmer, and James Clark. Frank Dicksee was also among the mourners, and the RA sent a wreath.

Blair Leighton never abandoned the pictorial territory he had staked out at the beginning of his career. This was more remarkable than it might seem since historical and literary subjects, so popular during the middle decades of the century, became increasingly less fashionable as impressionism and other forms of French realism strengthened their hold on British taste in the 1880s and '90s. Burne-Jones, who died in 1898, was vividly aware of this development, observing stoically in his declining years that 'the rage for me is over'; and many younger artists who had begun their careers in the same tradition turned to portraiture and other more profitable areas in later life. J.W. Waterhouse and Frank Dicksee are typical examples.

Blair Leighton may not have followed this course, but he did tailor his historical subjects to popular taste. Like Alma-Tadema, whose figures are sometimes characterised as 'Victorians in togas,' he tended to choose sentimental and anecdotal subjects in which his audience could see a reflection of their own everyday hopes, fears, woes and aspirations. As the author of the Art Annual put it, 'as often as not he has painted contemporary life, but it has always been under the guise of the past.' The most familiar of these costume pieces are those set in the late eighteenth century or the Regency period - The Question (1892). Next-Door Neighbours (1894), In 1816 (1895), A Summer Shower (1896), A Favour (1898), and many more. They are comparable to the work of Marcus Stone, the leading exponent of star-crossed Regency lovers, although the 'Queen Anne' ethos of Bedford Park is also relevant.

But there was more to Blair Leighton than this. He explored many other historical periods, and his work sometimes has an intensity which may surprise those who only know his essays in easy viewing. The two early legal subjects, each rather sombre in mood, have already been noted. They were followed two years later by The Dying Copernicus, and in 1884 by a possibly harrowing Roman subject, The Gladiator's Wife, and an account of one of the most famous and ill-fated medieval love-stories, Abelard and his pupil Heloise. The Secret and The Confessional (1885-6) were historical psychodramas in the manner of John Pettie or Seymour Lucas. Romola (1887) illustrated George Eliot's novel set in Renaissance Florence, and To Arms! (1888), in which a youth leaving a church with his bride on his arm is confronted by an armed knight demanding that he immediately enlist, is set in Lutheran Germany. Lady Godiva (1892) examined the famous legend from a new angle, focusing not on the heroine riding naked through the streets of Coventry but the tense encounter between her and her husband which led to her noble action. Melodrama pure and simple was the object of In Nomine Christi (1896). A group of nuns give refuge to an elderly Jew while the mother superior repels his pursuers by brandishing a cross.

A King and a Beggar Maid is an important example of yet another aspect of Blair Leighton's work, a group of poetical and even symbolist subjects which he attempted around the turn of the nineteenth century. Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1898, the picture looks again at a theme that had long since been popularised by Tennyson and Burne-Jones. Its literary source is a traditional English ballad that is mentioned twice by Shakespeare, in Romeo and Juliet and Love's Labour's Lost. The ballad relates how an African king, Cophetua, hitherto restitant to female charms, falls in love with a beggar maid whom he sees as she passes his tent, or, in another version, from his palace window. Swearing that he will make her his wife, he woos and wins her, and they live happily ever after.

In choosing such a well-worn subject, Blair Leighton was inviting some formidable pictorial comparisons. Tennyson's poem 'The Beggar Maid' had been illustrated by Holman Hunt in the famous edition of the poet's works published by Moxon in 1857 (fig.1). Hunt's design was spare and minimal, a throwback to the hard, wiry style, inspired by Nazarene prints and Lasinio's engravings after early Italian frescoes, that the Pre-Raphaelites had cultivated in the earliest days of the Brotherhood's existence. It is not perhaps surprising that Tennyson himself disliked it. Twelve years later a very different solution was offered by Daniel Maclise in one of the last pictures he exhibited at the Royal Academy (fig.2). Where Hunt's design is small, hard and dry, Maclise's canvas is large, lush and theatrical. The Art Journal rightly described it as 'savouring of the stage rather than of nature', nor is this surprising since Maclise, like his friends Charles Dickens and John Forster, was a passionate devotee of the theatre.

But the definitive rendering of the subject was of course that of Burne-Jones in his monumental painting exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1884 and at the Exposition Universelle in Paris five years later (fig. 3). This interpretation was different again, a composition redolent of Mantegna or Crivelli in which the essentially light-hearted ballad is taken as the text for a portentous sermon on the capacity of beauty and poverty to abase power and wealth. The picture became one of the icons of international Symbolism, and was probably the work on which Burne-Jones's fame in his lifetime was most solidly based. Its acquisition by the Tate Gallery in 1901 continued to give it a unique prominence, even if it meant that it was a primary target for ridicule when his reputation was in eclipse.

Blair Leighton's painting appeared at the Royal Academy the year of Burne-Jone's death, and must have caused many a visitor to recall the older artist's version. Blair Leighton's approach is more academic and illustrational, but his picture is not without echoes of Burne-Jones's masterpiece. It has a somewhat similar colour scheme, a sombre harmony of reds, purples and golden browns relieved by touches of green and blue. The use made of architecture is comparable, even if Blair Leighton makes his Romanesque while Burne-Jones opts for something more timelessly barbaric. Above all, each artist sees the king as a handsome, richly dressed figure, with black hair and neartly trimmed beard, humbling himself before his lowly goddess. Comparisons with the Holman Hunt and the Maclise are much less evident, and it is quite possible that the latter at least was unknown to Blair Leighton. Yet oddly enough there is a threatricality about his picture which gives it a certain relationship to Maclise's canvas. Indeed the way in which the beggar maid stands before the enraptured king within a tent-like curtained recess brings to mind the famous scene at the end of The Winter's Tale in which a curtain is pulled back to reveal the seeming statue of Hermione to the remorseful Leontes. It is not impossible that the artist had this in mind, even at some subconscious level.

Blair Leighton returned to Tennysonian subjet matter in Elaine, a theme from the Idylls of the King which inspired a phenomenal number of Victorian painters as well as the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. He explored the Arthurial again in Tristram and Iseult (1907), this time choosing a story to which both Swinburne and Wagner had given memorable form; while Pelleas and Mélisande (1910) kept up the symbolist reference, evoking thoughts of Maeterlinck and Debussy. Ultimately, however, Blair Leighton's flirtation with symbolism was precisely what the word implies, a passing phase. Perhaps because it was not his natural territory, or perhaps because symbolism itself was losing its hold on popular imagination, he was soon returning to more literal historical themes. The Boyhood of Alfred the Great (1913), Crusaders (1918), and Evicted (1919), an imaginary scene from the suppression of the English monasteries in 1536, were all among his last exhibits at the Royal Academy.

It was left to others to maintain the Pre-Raphaelite tradition, an astonishingly durable phenomenon which lasted until the Second World War and, in one or two isolated cases, even beyond. Within this tradition the theme of King Cophetua continued to play its part. Maurice Greiffenhagen painted a version in the early 1920s (fig.4). A much more sexually explicit (not to say politically incorrect) interpretation, in which the beggar maid surrenders in quivering ecstasy to the amorous king's advances, it looks back not so much to Burne-Jones as to Rossetti's heraldic medievalism of the late 1850s. There are also two illustrations to the books of ballads that did so much to keep this tradition alive long after the artistic mainstream had flowed elsewhere. Byam Shaw treated the subject in Frank Sidgwick's Ballads and Lyrics of Love (1908) and H.M. Brock in Beverley Nichols' Book of Old Ballads (1934).