Paintings by Frederic, Lord Leighton Notecard Folio

By the age of twenty-six, the Victorian painter and sculptor Frederic Leighton (English, 1830-1896) had already studied art for more than fifteen years in several different European countries and had sold one of his paintings--Cimabue’s Celebrated Madonna Is Carried in Procession Through the Streets of Florence (1853-1855)--to Queen Victoria herself. His well-received work in the classical genre displayed consummate draftsmanship and earned him great prestige, along with membership in, then presidency of, the Royal Academy. In January 1896 he became the first English painter to receive the title of baron, but it was a short-lived honor; he died the following day.

Today Lord Leighton’s former mansion in London is the Leighton House Museum, holding some eighty oil paintings, twenty-seven watercolors, seven hundred drawings, and fifty-four prints by the artist, as well as a collection of his sketchbooks and personal items. The museum also owns many works by Leighton’s contemporaries, among them the Pre-Raphaelite painters Edward Burne-Jones and John Everett Millais.