final decision on the subject was postponed for some years longer, for they felt the need for caution lest his powers should prove to be insufficient to justify them in consenting that he should become a professional artist. But meanwhile his father, himself a man of culture and a lover of the classics, determined that the boy should receive a good general education, and that, though art teaching was not to be denied to him, it should be one only of the subjects in which he was to be trained.

So for the next four or five years his work was very judiciously varied. In 1840 he had gone with his parents to Rome, and during the two years he remained there he had regular drawing-lessons from Signor Meli. Then came a year spent partly at Dresden and partly at Berlin, which gave him further opportunities for art study, a short stay during 1843 at a school at Frankfort, and another move, in 1844, to Florence. This wandering life under his father's guidance was of no small advantage to him, for it not only offered him chances of becoming acquainted with various types of art, but enabled him to acquire that command of languages which was of so much service to him in his after career. It gave him, too, a wide experience of people and things such as comes seldom enough to a lad of his age, and had undoubtedly a very valuable influence upon his mental development.

It was in Florence that the question whether he was or was not to be an artist was finally decided. His father sought the advice of Hiram Powers, the American sculptor, to whom he showed examples of the boy's work and asked whether he should "make him an artist." When Powers declared that Nature had done that already, and, in answer to further questioning as to young Leighton's chances of success, said that he would become as eminent as he pleased, the parental doubts and hesitation came to an end. Immediate steps were taken to give him a grounding in the rudiments of the profession which opened up to him such brilliant prospects. His general education still went on, but he was allowed time for special study, and not only entered the Accademia delle Belle Arti at Florence, but also set to work to study anatomy under Zanetti at the hospital in that city; and on these lines his training was continued for some little while.

When he left Florence it was to return to his school at Frankfort, where he remained till he was nearly seventeen, and then he spent a year in the Stadtlesches Institut there. He moved next to Brussels, where he came in contact with Wiertz and Gallait, and then for a few months to Paris, to worship at the shrine of Ingres and Ary Scheffer. But during this period his art work was carried on without the systematic direction of any master, and though on his travels he had picked up much useful knowledge, and had acquired sufficient confidence in himself to attempt two or three pictures of some importance, he felt at last the need for real discipline. So at the end of 1849 he left Paris, and returned to Frankfort to put himself under the rigid rule of Steinle, a master from whom he knew that he would receive just the drilling which was necessary to bring his somewhat errant youthful fancies under proper control.

Steinle was an artist who had little sympathy with those redundancies of style which were at that time characteristic of the Florentine school. He was a believer in severity of manner, in formality and strict simplicity, and that Leighton should have chosen him as the one man from whom he desired to receive tuition is proof enough that the young artist was fully conscious of the deficiencies in his own early performance. With this consciousness to spur him on it can well be imagined that the two years he spent with Steinle were not wasted; he worked hard, and if he had to unlearn much that he had learned before, he acquired thereby a sounder judgment of the relative value of different forms of practice, and added largely to his knowledge of technical processes. He had, during his earlier wanderings from place to place, seen and studied many phases of art, and he had gathered impressions with what was, perhaps, rather dangerous facility; to bring this mass of oddly assorted information into proper shape, and to sift out from it what had real value, was a task in which he needed the assistance of a disciplinarian with high ideals and firm convictions. He had full confidence in Steinle's judgment, and though his own æsthetic creed was even then too clearly defined to be changed in essentials by the asceticism of his master, he responded readily to the suggestions of a man who could show him plainly just where the extravagances of this creed required to be curbed, and how what was best in it could most fitly be developed.

He left Frankfort in the autumn of 1852 and went to live at Rome; and soon after he had settled there he commenced the picture which was destined, on its appearance at the Royal Academy in 1855, to put him instantly among the most prominent of the artists of his time. In this picture—"Cimabue's Madonna carried in Procession through the Streets of Florence"—he not only summarised all his previous experience, but forecasted what was to be his artistic direction during the rest of his life. Though he had painted other canvases before, and exhibited them at Frankfort, it was with this one that his career as an artist of admitted distinction really began. It introduced him dramatically to the British public; it was bought by Queen Victoria—a fact which immediately advertised its importance to art lovers in this country—and it amply justified the hopes and expectations as to his future, which had been formed by his many friends abroad and by the judges who had had opportunities of estimating the value of his student work. This was the picture which Thackeray had seen in progress at Rome, and which, by the impression it made upon him, induced him to tell Millais that he had come across "a versatile young dog who will run you hard for the presidentship one day"—a much-quoted prophecy of which we have had since the complete fulfilment.

PLATE III.—GATHERING CITRONS

(In the possession of Mr. Mildmay, M.P.)

Few of Leighton's paintings of Eastern subjects illustrate better than this one the certainty and precision of his draughtsmanship and his power of dealing with architectural details. But this "Old Damascus—Jews' Quarter"—as it was called when it was first exhibited in 1874—is much more than a simple study of architecture; it sums up many of the artist's best qualities as a craftsman and a shrewd observer of Nature.

PLATE III.—GATHERING CITRONS

But in an analysis of Leighton's art this famous composition claims a place of even greater importance than in the historical summary of his life's work. That it has faults in draughtsmanship, and that in certain details its composition is open to criticism, can be frankly admitted; these defects, however, are but what might have been expected in so ambitious an effort by an artist whose years did not number more than four-and-twenty, and who necessarily lacked that comprehensive grasp of executive processes which comes only with long experience and exhaustive practice in the mechanism of painting. When the circumstances of its production are taken into account it must always rank as one of the most triumphant demonstrations of youthful genius which have ever been recorded. That its reception at the 1855 Academy was really enthusiastic can well be understood; it must have come as a welcome surprise to the people who were growing impatient of the atmosphere of mediocrity by which at that period nearly the whole of British art was pervaded.

Now,