CURATOR'S COLUMN: The Triumphant Return of Flaming June, Leighton House Museum
Flaming June, the most celebrated work by Pre-Raphaelite master Sir Frederic Leighton, has returned to Leighton House Museum, the artist’s former home and studio.
Flaming June: The Making of an Icon reunites the masterpiece with five other works that came to be Leighton’s final submission to the Royal Academy, made only months before his death in January 1896. The exhibition will explore the making of this work and Leighton’s legacy.
Daniel Robbins, Senior Curator of Leighton House Museum, writes about the return, exclusively for After Nyne
In 1895, Sir Frederic Leighton sent six pictures to the Royal Academy Exhibition, more than his usual number. He did not know it, but these works, each depicting a single female figure, would be his final Academy submission. Neither could he know that over time, one of them, Flaming June, would emerge from the twilight of his career to become his most celebrated and recognised painting, an icon of nineteenth-century British art that is endlessly reproduced and disseminated around the world.
Certainly there was nothing in the reaction of contemporary critics to suggest that Flaming June would achieve its current status. Leighton had never enjoyed universal critical acclaim and in 1895, reviewers saw little that was exceptional in his submission. Opinion was even divided over which was the most significant work, some favouring Listener representing a rosy-cheeked little girl seated on the floor. Others highlighted The Maid with the Golden Hair for its relative spontaneity and ‘English’ subject in relation to the more studied perfection of the classical works, Flaming June, ‘Twixt Hope and Fear and Lachrymae.
Leighton himself was not in London to read these reviews. On his return in June, the sale of Flaming June was negotiated, not to a prestigious private collector, but to William Luson Thomas, the proprietor of The Graphic the popular art publication which had done much to promote the work of Leighton and his contemporaries since its foundation in 1869. The Graphic emphasised the quality of its reproductions of paintings and was becoming interested too in the possibilities of colour reproduction. Thomas must have identified Flaming June’s potential as a striking single-figure design with bold colouring and invested to secure the picture and accompanying reproduction rights.
The Graphic saw their moment to use it in December 1896. Leighton was now dead and The Graphic promoted its Christmas number with the offer of a colour ‘Presentation Plate’ of Leighton’s ‘Last Finished Picture’, although this last claim was in fact incorrect. Readers were also given the option of buying a framed version for 10 shillings. The marketability of the image was therefore established early in its history, but The Graphic did not hold on to the work for long. By 1906 it had been acquired by Blanche Watney, the widow of James Watney of the successful brewing family who already owned several works by Leighton. On her death it passed to her son, Vernon, who in 1915 wrote to Charles Bell, the Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum offering Flaming June on loan. The offer was accepted and the picture remained at the Ashmolean until 1930. Vernon Watney died in 1928 and Flaming June was now owned by his daughter the Hon. Rosalind Lyell. In 1930 she lent it to an exhibition marking the centenary of Leighton’s birth and this provides the last known ‘sighting’ of the picture before its disappearance for more than thirty years.
The circumstances of its reappearance have become part of the Flaming June mythology. In 1962, builders working on the renovation of a house on Clapham Common carried the picture into a framing shop on Battersea Rise. Apparently uncovered behind panelling over a fireplace it was acquired for £60 and put on display in the shop window. Time and distance make this account impossible to verify and nothing is known of how the picture came to be in Clapham, if indeed this is where it was found. Lord Lloyd Webber has repeated his account that as a teenager he saw the picture for sale at this time and unable to afford it, asked his grandmother for a loan. She refused on the grounds that she would ‘not have that Victorian junk in my flat’.
By 1963 Flaming June was with the dealer Jeremy Maas who had done much to re-ignite interest in Victorian painting, but despite his best efforts, no public museum or gallery in the UK showed an interest in acquiring the work. It was therefore available when the businessman Luis Ferré, together with his advisors, was in London assembling the significant art collection now housed in the Ponce Art Museum. Ferré acquired Flaming June in June 1963 for £2,000 and from its island home, the status of the picture - ‘the Mona Lisa of the southern hemisphere’ - has risen inexorably. Exhibited as a picture in focus at the Frick Collection, New York in 2015, Flaming June comes to Leighton House to be reunited with the other works that were first exhibited with it in 1895 – a homecoming that allows us to reflect on the extraordinary changes in fortune that accompanied its progression through the twentieth century.
FLAMING JUNE: THE MAKING OF AN ICON
LEIGHTON HOUSE MUSEUM, LONDON
UNTIL 2 APRIL 2017
