Keren Rosa Hammerschlag

Victorian Studies, Volume 56, Number 3, Spring 2014, pp. 442-457 (Article)

DOI: 10.1353/vic.2014.0062

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VICTORIAN STUDIES / VOLUME 56, NO. 3

Excavating Evidence from Frederic Leighton’s Paintings of the Female Nude

Keren Rosa Hammerschlag

In his official Self-Portrait (1880), Frederic, Lord Leighton, presi-dent of the Royal Academy, appears decked out in the regalia of academic achievement, poised in front of the Parthenon Frieze

(fig. 1). The Frieze, which Leighton would have encountered at the British Museum and, closer to home, as a plaster-cast replica in his studio, was a broken antique fragment. Yet in his Self-Portrait, it is cropped but not fragmented, and there are no indications of fractures in the stone, giving the impression that it continues infinitely beyond the borders of the canvas. The Self-Portrait testifies to the fact that Leighton drew inspiration from ancient Greek sculpture, while at the same time seeking to better it by restoring its unearthed fragments to a new and perfected whole. My aim in this paper is to read the frag-mented bodies of classical statuary back into Leighton’s neoclassicism. I do so by examining his paintings of the female nude and their rela-tionship to the classical Venuses of antiquity upon which they were based. In the larger project from which this paper is drawn, I offer a focus on those aspects of Leighton’s oeuvre that disturbed viewers—especially his painted figures’ apparent lack of liveliness and the prolif-eration of folds in their drapery—in order to show that Leighton’s academic neoclassicism was not so far removed from the competing styles of realism and naturalism, or even Gothicism, as has been gener-ally assumed.

ABSTRACT: Victorian critics repeatedly accused Frederic Leighton’s painted figures of appearing as if they were made of intermediate substances between marble and flesh, especially wax. In this essay, I take this charge seriously. I argue that in his paintings of the female nude Leighton sought to elevate the naked bodies of his life models to the exalted status of the marble Venuses of Greek antiquity. Yet this transformation remains incomplete, his female nudes continuing to bear evidence of the artist’s encounter with the fragmented bodies of antique Venuses and the naked working-class bodies of his life models.

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Leighton was living in Paris when he painted his first female nude (fig. 2). Venus and Cupid (1856) reveals the impact of French academic painting, especially the work of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, on Leighton’s art. In English art-school training, preference was still given to studying from the antique, whereas in the French ateliers the majority of time was spent studying from life. Similarly, while the walls of the Royal Academy had, during the first half of the nineteenth century, remained mostly nude-free, the Paris Salon had maintained a strong tradition of exhibiting the nude. From Paris, Leighton wrote to his sister: “I have further made the acquaintance of Ingres, who, though sometimes bearish beyond measure, was by a piece of luck exceedingly courteous the day I was presented to him. He has just finished a beau-tiful figure of Nymph, which I was able to admire loudly and sincerely” (qtd. in Barrington 1: 245). The “beautiful figure of Nymph” that Leighton admired was likely the nude in The Source of 1856 (fig. 3), who, in the raising of her right arm above her head and in the curvature of her waist produced by contrapposto, may very well have inspired Leigh-ton’s female nude of the same year. In Leighton’s treatment, the curva-ture in Venus’s hips and thighs is reiterated in the meandering, organic design on the pillar behind her, which relates to the natural forms of plants, animals, and flowers in the background, seen against a twilit sky. Venus’s bodily contours are further emphasized by the diaphanous

Fig. 1. Frederic Leighton, Self-Portrait, 1880, oil on canvas, 76.5 ! 64 cm, Gal-leria degli Uffizi, Florence. Courtesy Bridgeman Images.

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fabric that flows from her wrists to her ankles. The fabric on the right runs across her thigh and along the inside of her leg, leading the viewer’s eye to the small winged figure of Cupid, who sits at Venus’s feet tying a golden, serpentine bracelet around her ankle.

It comes as no surprise that Venus and Cupid and its companion piece Pan (1856) proved too improper for British and American audi-ences. When shown at the Manchester International Exhibition in 1856 on the initiative of George Frederick Watts, Henry Greville, a close friend of Leighton’s, wrote to the artist: “It makes me so sick, all that cant about impropriety, but there is so much of it as to make the sale of ‘nude figures’ very improbable, and therefore I hope you will turn your thoughts

Fig. 2. Frederic Leighton, Venus and Cupid, 1856, oil on canvas, 14.74 ! 47.6, private collection. Courtesy Bridgeman Images.

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entirely to well-covered limbs and paint no more Venuses for some time to come” (qtd. in Barrington 1: 264, original emphasis).

Following Greville’s advice, Leighton refrained from painting any more Venuses for over a decade. He waited until 1867 to exhibit his second female nude, Venus Disrobing for the Bath (fig. 4). In contrast to the popular rejection of Venus and Cupid, the exhibition of Venus Disrobing initiated, in the words of Alison Smith, “the renaissance of the nude” in English painting (Victorian 101). As with Venus and Cupid, in Venus Disrobing Leighton portrayed the nude in a full-length vertical format beside a marble column, standing in gentle contrapposto and looking diagonally downward. In Venus Disrobing, however, Leighton attempted to elevate the nude by establishing a stronger visual resemblance to

Fig. 3. Jean-Auguste- Dominique Ingres, The Source, 1856, 163 ! 80, oil on canvas, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Courtesy Bridgeman Images.

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classical statuary, leading the art critic J. B. Atkinson to claim that it had been painted “in the spirit of Greek art” (141). In Venus Disrobing, the nude extends a hand to cover her genitals in a pose resembling that of the Aphrodite of Knidos, a work attributed to Praxiteles and described by John Ruskin as “one of the purest and most elevated incarnations of woman conceivable” (433). (Leighton would have seen replicas of Aphrodite of Knidos in the Vatican Collection in Rome.) It was believed during the nineteenth century that Praxiteles’s Aphrodite was the first Greek statue of an undraped female figure, and that she was nude because she was taking a bath.

In nineteenth-century French art, female nudes were regularly depicted bathing, spanning from the high, such as William-Adolphe

Fig. 4. Frederic Leighton, Venus Disrobing for the Bath, 1867, oil on canvas, 200.8 ! 90.2, private col-lection. Courtesy of Sotheby’s, Inc. © 2009.

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Bouguereau’s Bather (1870), to the low, such as Edgar Degas’s drawings of prostitutes wiping themselves in Parisian brothels—the act of bathing implying a post-coital moment (Callen 73). In the case of Leighton’s bather, no bathwater is shown, only a calm ocean in the background, but a large black mass resembling dense smoke emanates from the vessel to Venus’s left, suggesting dirt and pollution and reminding us of the polluting aspects of soap’s manufacture. Drawing on the language of dirt and hygiene, in 1895 George Moore described Leighton’s painted figures as “invariably made of soap—not common yellow soap, but cream-pink, fastidiously scented toilette soap” (qtd. in Prettejohn 105).

While the nude in Venus Disrobing is identified as the Roman goddess of beauty through the symbolism of the rose plant and the doves at the painting’s base, the dark mask-like shadows across Venus’s eyes, which mirror the shape of the birds’ wings, indicate that she is not as wholly expunged of filthy associations as one might expect. Her body is distorted by a pronounced, almost violent gash across her torso. Below the gash her skin is smooth and pristine, while above it there are dark shadows, most evidently across her eyes and under her left breast. As opposed to the shadowing around her abdomen that indicates the gentle definition of muscle, the shadowing under her left breast and left arm suggest folds of skin, similar to those that marred the flesh of Leighton’s working-class life models.

For Leighton, beauty was achieved through a process of academic generalization and idealization that involved the transforma-tion of the imperfect flesh of the life model into the smooth perfection of classical statuary. But in the case of Venus Disrobing, the transforma-tion is incomplete, her body appearing as an amalgamation of different types of bodies: modern and ancient, flesh and marble, real and ideal. Critics repeatedly accused Leighton’s painted figures of appearing to have been made of intermediate substances between flesh and marble—but principally wax rather than Moore’s soap—and this was especially the case in the critical reception of Venus Disrobing. The reviewer for the Art Journal described Venus as “not as white as marble, and not so life-giving as flesh” (“Royal Academy” 141), while the reviewer for the Times said of Leighton’s rendering of the figure, “His flesh is waxy, and no live blood runs in the veins of his nymphs and swains” (“Exhibition” 12). The waxiness of Leighton’s painted figures was imagined by the writer for the Magazine of Art in relation to the miracle of Pygmalion: “There is about his work that old, same haunting

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suggestion of the romance of Pygmalion—with the miracle but half-accomplished. . . . his flesh is, as always, wax that would but cannot altogether live; his craftsmanship, for all its look of perfection, is still not perfect enough” (W. E. H. 347).

It is thought that Leighton’s relationship with the model and aspiring actress Dorothy Dene (formerly Ada Alice Pullan) was the inspi-ration for George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion (1912). With Leighton’s help, Dene, a poor working-class orphan, tried to advance from the lowly position of life model to the more exalted status of stage actress. But despite Leighton’s patronage, again the miracle of Pygmalion was “but half-accomplished,” as Dene achieved only fleeting success. Nonetheless, in the words of Emilie Barrington, Leighton’s co-conspirator in the project of transforming Dene, “Her very beautiful throat . . . was repro-duced worthily in many of [Leighton’s] subject-pictures” (2: 268–69). Indeed, it was precisely her beautiful neck and throat that Leighton emphasized in the many painted figures for which she modeled— Iphigenia, Antigone, Psyche, Andromeda, Clytie, and others.

The tale of Pygmalion and Galatea offered artists the opportu-nity to explore the representational possibilities of a body that was part marble, part flesh: simultaneously dead and alive, at once idealized artwork and real woman. In his painting The Wife of Pygmalion (circa 1868), G. F. Watts depicted Galatea as both real, in the fleshiness of her exposed breast, and marble, in the white drapery that cuts across her chest. (Both Leighton’s Venus Disrobing and Watts’s Wife of Pygmalion formed part of the collection of the Northumberland shipbuilder Eustace Smith, Leighton’s work having been acquired by Smith in 1872.) In the four canvases comprising Edward Burne-Jones’s series Pygmalion and the Image (1875–78), Galatea becomes increasingly enlivened, but in the final canvas, entitled The Soul Attains, the now-living woman reverts to the contrapposto and coldness of a marble statue (Arscott 113).

As with Burne-Jones’s statuesque Galatea, Leighton’s paintings of the female nude seem to suggest a preference for marble over flesh, for lifeless statue over living woman. In 1890 Leighton painted Dene as the nude figure in The Bath of Psyche (fig. 5) in a pose resembling that of the Venus Kallipygos (discovered in the sixteenth century and moved to the National Museum in Naples in 1802, where it remained throughout the nineteenth century) (Ormond and Ormond 129). The moment pictured is when Psyche, after having been rescued by Cupid and installed in a divine golden palace, undresses for a bath. According to

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mythology, Cupid continued to pay Psyche nightly visits as her invisible lover, until Psyche contravened Cupid’s instruction not to look upon him and discovered that her love was Love itself. Whereas Cupid had appeared in the earlier Venus and Cupid (fig. 2), now only the female nude is shown, artist and viewer thereby assuming the role of Cupid as Psyche’s unseen admirer.

Fig. 5 (left). Frederic Leighton, The Bath of Psyche, 1890, oil on canvas, 189.2 ! 62.2 cm, Tate, London. © Tate, London 2014.

Fig. 6 (above). “The Pick of the Pic-tures.—No. 1. Royal Academy,” detail, from Punch 10 May 1890: 226.

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While in Venus Disrobing the female nude is caught in a transi-tional state between flesh and marble, in The Bath of Psyche the nude appears more statuesque. The writer for Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper found Psyche to be “designed with that sense of sculpturesque beauty marking the president’s work” (“Exhibition” 8). Some Victorian critics, however, recast Psyche’s statue-like appearance as evidence of her artificiality and lack of liveliness, most bitingly in a caricature published in Punch that shows Psyche as literally frozen, with the title “Ice is Cheap Today” (fig. 6). This caricature engages in a broader critique of Leighton’s academi-cism, which claimed that in transforming real bodies into idealized ones, he drained them of their life and blood, leaving them stone-cold.

As in Venus Disrobing (fig. 4), in The Bath of Psyche Leighton pictured the female nude standing beside a marble column, inviting comparison between female and architectural forms. Here the figure’s vertical stance, along with the creases in her drapery, are picked up in the vertical fluting of the columns, a feature that was satirized on the pages of Punch in an imagined conversation between two people traversing the Royal Academy Exhibition:

First Person, with an “Eye for Art” (before ‘Psyche’s Bath,’ by the President). Not bad, eh?Second Person, &c. No, I rather like it. (Feels that he is growing too lenient). He doesn’t

give you a very good idea of marble, though.First P. &c. No—that’s not marble, and he always puts too many folds in his drapery

to suit me. Second P. &c. Just what I always say. It’s not natural, you know. (“Voces Populi” 265)

In addition to Psyche’s marble-like drapery, an association among flesh, fabric, marble, and precious metals is produced in the reflection at the base of the picture. In the reflection we see drapery, columns, the golden vase, and the lower half of Psyche’s legs, all reduced to overlap-ping bits and pieces. The reflection is inaccurate; although we can see the vase on the right, the pile of yellow fabric on the left and the steps leading up to the column are not shown.

One interpretation would be that this section of the painting provides a view of submerged or buried fragments, such as those that would have been exhumed and reorganized into the columns, vase, and perfected body of Psyche seen above ground. Alison Smith writes, “In the late nineteenth century the restoration of lost or damaged statues was regarded as a legitimate aim for artists, offering opportunities for both scholarly intervention and artistic interpretation” (Exposed 98). One

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of the best examples of this sort of imaginative restoration via painting is Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s A Sculptor’s Model (1878), which depicts the making of the Venus Esquilina, a statue excavated in Rome in 1874. In The Bath of Psyche (fig. 5), through the relationship established between the buried archaeological fragments and the restored statuesque body of Psyche, Leighton explicitly represents his project of reassembling the fragments of classical statuary in the formation of ideal bodies.

Yet, like excavated and restored statues, the bodies of his female nudes continued to bear fractures where they were once broken. In Venus Disrobing (fig. 4) the pronounced gash across Venus’s torso recalls the cracked torsos of the Aphrodite of Knidos in the Vatican, the Venus de Milo in the Louvre (fig. 7), and the Venus de’ Medici in the Uffizi. A rounded shadow at the bottom of her neck, cast by her head, creates a line where the disconnected heads and necks of antique Venuses were reattached to their bodies. In the figure of Psyche (fig. 5) a contrast is set up between the light tone of her body and the darker tone of her head and neck, making the figure look like a decapitated classical fragment with a head that was later tacked on, much like the Venus Kallipygos. In Venus Disrobing and The Bath of Psyche, drapery wraps

Fig. 7. Venus de Milo, circa 130–100 B.C.E., marble, Louvre Museum, Paris. Courtesy Bridgeman Images.

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around the top of the figures’ right arms at precisely the point where the arms of classical sculptures were broken; the arrangement of the drapery serves to connect arms to bodies while at the same time truncating the figures, making them look dis-armed in a sustained reference to that archetype of classical female beauty, the Venus de Milo (fig. 7).

This would become even more vivid in Leighton’s 1891 painting Perseus and Andromeda (fig. 8), for which Dene modeled. In Ovid’s telling of the rescue of Andromeda from the sea monster in the Metamorphoses, Andromeda is associated with marble statuary when Perseus notices the maiden tied by the arms to a jagged rock face and, “but for the light breeze stirring her hair and the warm tears coursing over her cheeks, he would have supposed she was merely a marble statue” (151). In Leighton’s treat-ment, the binding elements that tie Andromeda to the rock face represen-tationally divide her body, once at the top of her arm and again along the top of her thigh, around which her drapery is gathered. Her lower arm is so tightly bound behind her back that it appears to be missing, and there is

Fig. 8. Frederic Leighton, Perseus and Andromeda, 1891, oil on canvas, 235 ! 129.2 cm, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. Courtesy Bridgeman Images.

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a dark shadow around the bottom of her neck so that the bound figure of Andromeda is made to resemble the Venus de Milo and the Aphrodite Torso.

In the same year that Leighton exhibited Perseus and Andromeda, he was photographed in his studio handling a miniature of the Aphrodite Torso (fig. 9). While he handles the fragmented body of the nude female statuette, he looks at a model of his own sculpture, The Sluggard (1885), a male nude who is symbolically waking by stretching his arms. While it would have been potentially homoerotic for the male artist to be photo-graphed touching the nude male body of The Sluggard—something he of course did in its making—he is able to be photographed handling the partial and inert fragment of a classical female body. This photograph

Fig. 9. Photograph of Frederic Leighton by Ralph Winwood Robinson, 1892, platinum print, 200 x 154 mm, National Portrait Gallery, London. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

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might be interpreted as an image of displaced homoerotic desire, in which the touching of the nude male body is enacted through the handling of the fragmented female body. This reading is only enhanced by the evocative positioning of the Aphrodite Torso, a headless female body, as substitute for the artist’s phallus, the grasping of which is sugges-tive of the act of masturbation.

While Leighton may not have been able to make Dene into a successful stage actress, he could, through the act of painting, trans-form her into the Venus de Milo. But this transformation involved the enactment of violence against the female body through representa-tional dismemberment and decapitation. After all, Venus de Milo, to use Linda Nochlin’s phrase, is “a body in pieces.”

If in life Leighton was Dene’s Pygmalion, raising her from model to actress, in art he was her Medusa, turning her from life model to life-less marble. Leighton painted the decapitated head of the Gorgon Medusa in one of his final paintings, Perseus on Pegasus Hastening to the Rescue of Andromeda (1896) (fig. 10). Painted as a pendant to Perseus and

Fig. 10. Frederic Leighton, Perseus on Pegasus Hastening to the Rescue of Andromeda, circa 1895–96, oil on canvas, 184.2 cm in diameter, Leicestershire Museum and Art Gallery, Leicestershire. Courtesy Bridgeman Images.

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Andromeda (fig. 8), Perseus on Pegasus features a particularly macabre depiction of the head of Medusa, her mouth open as if emitting a final scream, the blue-green hue of her skin appearing like decayed flesh, and the snakes that form her hair moving in different directions as if still alive—a reference, perhaps, to the belief that hair continued to grow after death.

There are marked similarities between Perseus and Andromeda and Perseus on Pegasus, especially in terms of Leighton’s depiction of Perseus, Pegasus, and the dramatic arched drapery, which serves to generate movement through its mirroring of the position of Perseus’s raised arm. But it is my contention that one can also draw associations between Leighton’s renderings of the figures of Andromeda and Medusa. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the fates of Andromeda and Medusa were inti-mately intertwined—one dies so that that other may live. Andromeda’s beauty is contrasted with Medusa’s ugliness, yet both are victims of rape and undue punishment. Ovid recalls how Medusa was once “the most famed for her beauty . . . nor, in the whole of her person, was any part more worthy of notice than her hair” (155). Her punishment was to have her hair turned into serpents, her most exalted feature transformed into her most horrid aspect. Medusa then suffers the ultimate violation of being decapitated in her sleep by Perseus, Andromeda’s savior.

In Leighton’s Perseus and Andromeda, the female captive is depicted with hair that flows beyond the length of her body, its orange hue reiterated in the fire breathed by the dragon. In the farthest tendril one can just about decipher the form of a serpent, which would become the snake-tendril in Leighton’s depiction of Medusa. Andromeda’s long, cascading hair thereby prefigures Medusa’s snake-tendrils, and her extended, elongated neck invites the fantasy of decapitation so vividly presented in the head of Medusa. Furthermore, the rocky outcrops at the base of Perseus and Andromeda might be seen to refer-ence those, such as Atlas, who were turned to stone by beholding Medusa’s frightful visage. They remind the viewer of the danger posed by the head, which Perseus carries, and especially the danger posed to Andromeda—not by the fire-breathing dragon, but by the Medusa-wielding Perseus.

Like the many depictions of bound women and chivalrous men that appeared on the walls of the Royal Academy during the second half of the nineteenth century, Perseus and Andromeda portrays an erotic fantasy of female bondage and male heroics—one that paralleled Leighton’s own

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fantasy of saving Dene from the lowly occupation of life modeling. Yet Perseus’s rescue of Andromeda proves as unsuccessful as Leighton’s rescue of Dene. Perseus was meant to have killed the dragon using a sword; in Leighton’s treatment, however, he deploys the less effective bow and arrow. And while the arrow is lodged in the dragon’s hide, it is also aimed at Andromeda. It is a weapon to slay the monster, but also carries with it the erotic charge of Cupid’s arrow. Cupid is thereby again invoked, recalling his appearance at the foot of Venus in Venus and Cupid and as the hidden admirer of Psyche in The Bath of Psyche. In Perseus and Andromeda, the arrow as symbolic of Perseus’s phallus is directed at Andromeda, but it has unsuccessfully lodged itself in the dragon’s hide, representing at best Perseus’s irrelevance, and at worst his sexual impotence.

In the Metamorphoses, Ovid describes how, in the process of becoming enlivened, Pygmalion’s statue was made soft and pliable like Hymettian wax. Leighton’s painted figures were repeatedly accused by Victorian critics of appearing waxy: that is, of looking as if they were made of a substance that mimics flesh, but is cold to the touch. Such descriptions speak of a process only partially completed, in contradic-tion to that other criticism regularly levelled against Leighton’s paint-ings—namely, that they were too highly finished. Leighton attempted to elevate the naked bodies of his life models to the status of marble Venuses of Greek antiquity. But, as I have sought to show, the female nudes in Venus Disrobing, The Bath of Psyche, and Perseus and Andromeda remain frozen in various transitional states between flesh and marble, real and ideal, alive and dead. It is this sense of substances in transition, along with the breakages formed by the placement of drapery, that serve as visual remnants of the artist’s encounter with the fragmented bodies of antique Venuses and the naked, working-class bodies of his life models.

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