Well, this was disappointing. ‘Flaming June’ is one of the most important and famous works by Frederic, Lord Leighton (1830 to 1896) President of the Royal Academy from 1878 to 1896. It was originally exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1895. However, due to the vagaries of the art market it has for some time been owned by the Museo de Arte de Ponce, in Puerto Rico of all places.
Now, for a whole year, it is on an extended loan back to the Academy where it was first exhibited, by one of its most famous luminaries, almost 128 years ago. Here she is, flaming away:
Flaming June by Frederic Leighton (1895) Museo de Arte de Ponce. Luis A. Ferré Foundation, Inc.
The curators promise that ‘Flaming June’ is being shown alongside other popular works from the RA Collection, including:
- other works by Leighton
- works by his contemporaries
- works which inspired him (including Michaelangelo’s Taddei Tondo)
- works which he in turn influenced
Which fired me up to expect an orgy of masterpieces, not least by Leighton’s fellow Olympians who specialised in diaphanously dressed Roman and Greek ladies draped over marble benches playing ancient lyres or scattered with rose petals. Critics often describe it as late-Victorian soft porn.
Well, apart from June herself, there’s absolutely none of that here and the display is a big disappointment.
Confusing
For a start it’s been put on in the Collections Gallery, which already hosts a couple of absolutely vast Renaissance murals and some hefty Renaissance statues which dwarf the Leighton and confused me about where the Leighton display ended and the works on permanent display started. Off to one side, on the way to the small temporary exhibition room, was Michelangelo’s ‘Taddei Tondo’. This is the only carving by Michelangelo in the UK and was part of the RA Collection during Leighton’s presidency so… is it part of this display or not?
No good paintings
Second, there are none of the large sensual depictions of the ancient world I was looking forward to, none. Instead there are only two other paintings:
1. A crappy portrait of Leighton by G.F. Watt which has none of the lightness and wonder of June.
2. A less well-known work by fellow Olympian, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, ‘The Way to the Temple‘ (1882) which – bizarrely and perversely given that the whole point of ‘Flaming June’ is the combination of shimmering sea and Mediterranean light and female sensuality – is a picture of a woman hiding in the shadows of ancient buildings while, in a narrow sliver, you can see a few people in some ancient procession marching by in the sunlight. Yes the redness of her pre-Raphaelite hair and shawl, yes the detail of the bronze brazier, the architectural reliefs in the background and so on – but really, could they possibly have selected a less appropriate work to compare June with? The wall label make the most tenuous connection imaginable by pointing out that the female figure in this painting is holding…what? Can you see what she’s holding? It’s a votive statue – so the curators are able to shoehorn this inappropriate work into their overarching theme of sculpture and painting and sculpture in painting.
So the ‘paintings by contemporaries’ turn out to be a bit rubbish.
Sculpture versus painting
Instead, all there really is to look at is some pretty technical, art school stuff about the contrast between sculpture and painting, illustrated with drab, black-and-white preparatory sketches.
The first wall label tells us that the debate about which art form was superior goes back to Leonardo and Michelangelo. It then goes on to explain Leighton’s process, which was to make sketches on paper with squares on, trying out this or that composition, until he had it right and was then able to transfer the small (A4 size) sketch up to the much larger scale of the finished painting (in Flaming June’s case, 47 inches by 47 inches).
There’s a sketch and a model made to model the figures in his painting The Garden of the Hesperides. As you can see, the figure on the left is wearing pretty much the same colour dress as June and is also sculpted to have a great haunch of thigh.
There are some small dark sketches he made in preparation for his painting Perseus and Andromeda (1891), these are the ones on squared paper. God if only they’d been able to include the finished paintings of Hesperides and Perseus what a different feel the display would have had!
The Sluggard
Oh yes, on the way in to the Collections Room they’ve placed an impressive sculpture by Leighton, The Sluggard, dominating the entrance and, I suppose, announcing the curator’s theme of ‘sculpture versus painting’ or ‘how Leighton incorporated sculpture into painting’. I’d say this was worth going to see except that it belongs just a mile or two up the road at Tate where it’s regularly on public display, so not much of a treat either.
The Sluggard by Leighton
There’s another sculpture, the ‘reduced’ i.e. preliminary version of ‘Athlete struggling with a python.’ I think we can safely say that this lacks the scale and finish of the final version and so contributes, somehow, to the second-hand, shabby feel of the whole display, as if they couldn’t afford the real thing. A Tescos exhibition.
Academic
Frankly, this would all have been better in an academic textbook where it could have been more fully explained with more examples and more discussion. Instead: June herself, two inferior paintings from the period, a good Leighton sculpture, half a dozen sketches, some preparatory masques, and that’s your lot.
Some learnings
Well, at least there’s a bench to plonk yourself down on in front of ‘Flaming June’ and give it a damn good looking at. Some points emerge:
The sea Fool that I am, I hadn’t, from the hundreds of reproductions I’ve seen, quite realised that the horizontal band just above her head is a view over the shimmering sea, with the vast sun just out of sight.
The foot For some reason I’d never really noticed the model’s left foot poking out at you from under her right knee; it’s there in all the reproductions but somehow, in the flesh, appeared more prominent.
The body This foot had the effect of transforming the image which I had previously considered as an almost abstract design – with the line of the neck and head almost aligned with that of the enormous slab-like thigh to create a sort of abstract pattern – anyway the foot brought out the reality of the human model more than reproductions do, and I began to connect up all her limbs, the right hand hooked into the left arm etc.
Happy accident Now, given how the curators go on about Leighton’s worship of Michelangelo and the entire display makes a big deal of sculpture I was expecting the model’s striking pose to be the result of detailed study of the arcana of Michelangelo’s sketches or sculpture etc etc; instead, the wall label informs us that the entire pose, in all its famous combination of hugeness and sensual abandonment, was completely accidental – according to Leighton the model curled up and went to sleep in that pose and he thought Eureka!
Sculpture and painting The point of including The Sluggard is to demonstrate Leighton’s terrific fluency with both painting and sculpture and how experiments with posing the human body in one medium influenced the other. The rather more obvious point is that, like June, it’s an image of tremendous sensuality, caught in a moment of relaxed intimacy and quite unlike the heroic Greek and Roman statues it derives from. The ‘expressive dynamism’ of figures like this led Leighton and friends to be labelled as the New Sculpture Movement.
Michelangelo The one useful thing the curators say about Michelangelo is pointing out that the great sculptor became fascinated with seeing how much he could convey in very compacted compositions and cite the compact, almost circular composition of Leda and the Swan as an example. As soon as you see this, you realise its influence on Leighton’s composition of June. And go on to realise that the composition is the opposite of The Sluggard. Whereas The Sluggard is thin and vertical, is long, is about height and stretch – June is all about monumental compaction and compression.
Embarrassing
If I was the head of the Puerto Rican gallery which loaned ‘Flaming June’, the Museo de Arte de Ponce, and flew over with my assistants to see what the world famous Royal Academy had done with their priceless painting, I’d have been furious. And seen from this perspective, I think this shabby, half-arsed display is an embarrassment.
Related links
- Flaming June continues at the Royal Academy continues until 12 January 2025
- Why is Flaming June iconic? by Rosalind Jana
- Frederic, Lord Leighton PRA biography
Books & Boots 