Andromache" (1888); "The Bath of Psyche" (1890), a delicate piece of fancy in his happiest manner; "Perseus and Andromeda" and "The Return of Persephone," in 1891; "The Garden of the Hesperides" (1892); "Hit" (1893); "Summer Slumber" (1894); "'Twixt Hope and Fear," and that wonderful study of glowing colour, "Flaming June," in 1895; and the "Clytie," which was at Burlington House after his death, are worthy of praise as generous and unhesitating as can be given to anything he showed before. "The Bath of Psyche" and the "Clytie" are, in fact, pictures which have few rivals among his other works, the first because of its inimitable purity of feeling and classic refinement, the other because of its convincing force and dramatic passion. In this last effort of a dying man it is easy to find a kind of symbolical meaning: there is a pathetic significance in the attitude of the nymph who loved the light, as she kneels with arms outstretched towards the setting sun. Such a conception, and such a treatment of the subject, typify so exactly the sadness of an artist who was working actually under the shadow of death, and with full consciousness that his days were nearly numbered, that it is difficult not to look upon the "Clytie" as Leighton's farewell to the world in which he had found so much beauty and so much brightness. The sun was setting for him, and though he was too brave a man to despair or rail at fate, his yearning for a little longer spell of sunshine was not to be repressed.

His death, which released him from sufferings that had towards the end become scarcely endurable, was the more pathetic because an honour had just been bestowed upon him which showed in a most significant fashion how highly his claims to special recognition were approved. In 1886 he had been created a baronet, and a bare month before he died he was advanced by Queen Victoria to be a peer of the United Kingdom, with the title of Baron Leighton of Stretton. It is sad, indeed, that he should not have lived to enjoy a distinction which he had so amply earned, and to use his splendid mental gifts in the wider sphere of activity which was opened up to him by accession to the peerage. There was so much he might have done, so much he would have wished to do, to help on those artistic movements which were always first in his thoughts, that to have lost him then, just as greater opportunities of usefulness were promised than had ever before been offered to him, was an irreparable disaster for British art. As he died his last words were, "Give my love to the Academy," that institution with which he had been associated for more than thirty years, and in the service of which nearly half his life had been spent.

To most people it would seem incredible that such a career could be spoken of as anything but a success, or that an artist so respected and so honoured should not be counted among the very few to whom fate has been consistently kind. And yet to say that Leighton died a disappointed man would not be untrue. He had been a great figure socially, he had played his part in public as an official with brilliancy and distinction, he had enjoyed the friendship of the greatest of his contemporaries, but no one knew better than he did that the popular homage was offered to his personality rather than to his art. He was conscious that he had failed to convey to the people among whom he lived that æsthetic message which was to him so vital and so urgent, and that the purpose and principle for which he always laboured remained to the end unintelligible to the world. He felt that the public attitude towards him was exactly summed up in that cynical saying with which Whistler has been credited: "Oh yes, a marvellous man! He is a great speaker, a master of many languages, a fine musician, a leader of society; and they tell me he paints too." That which was to him the one thing worth living for seemed to every one else the last and least of his accomplishments! It is small wonder that he can be spoken of as disappointed; he had given so much for art, and in return he was recognised as nothing more than an amazingly clever man of the world, who painted pictures in his spare moments.

Yet it can be freely admitted that his work was not of the kind which was likely to appeal as a matter of course to ordinary men. It was, as has been already said, the outcome of his own temperament, and had from the first a specific character which was too personal to be wholly intelligible to people accustomed to look only at the surface of things. It must be remembered that he had naturally a very remarkable mind, and that he received an education which was quite unlike that usually given to men who adopt the artist's profession. He had a sound basis of book-knowledge, and was taught especially to study and understand the classics, but to this was added, by his prolonged residence abroad, an intimate insight into many things which never come within the view of the majority of men, or at best are only dealt with in later life when the receptivity of youth has become dulled. He was encouraged partly by his father's precepts, partly by circumstances, to analyse and investigate, to compare this and that phase of thought and form of expression, to seek for the reasons why there should be such marked differences between the methods of workers who all professed to be advocating the same principles. Superficial information could not, and did not, satisfy him; he had to get down to the foundation and to find out the causes for the results which were presented to him.

But of course when he came to build a system of art practice upon his early experiences, and to shape it by the aid of his analytical habit, he evolved something which most men could scarcely appraise at its full value. Therefore, his artistic purpose was persistently misunderstood and, it may be added, habitually misrepresented. His art was over the heads of his contemporaries because their tastes and sympathies had never been cultivated to his level, because their grosser preferences failed to find satisfaction in the purity of his idealism. He was absorbed always in the pursuit of beauty, which he had sought and found in many lands, and it was his earnest desire to give to his representations of this beauty a kind of unhuman perfection, passionless, perhaps, and cold, but exquisite always in its studied refinement. No hint of coarseness or sensuality ever crept into his pictures; it would be a strangely constituted mind indeed that could find in his work any suggestiveness, or anything to gratify the baser instincts of humanity. He kept aloof from the common things of existence, and lived in a self-created paradise to which the rest of mankind could hardly hope to gain admission.

PLATE VIII.—PORTRAIT OF SIR RICHARD BURTON

(At the National Portrait Gallery, London)

It would be no exaggeration to describe this painting of the famous explorer as one of the more notable of modern portraits, so strong is it in characterisation and so masterly in manner. The artist was fortunate in having a sitter with such a striking personality, and the sitter in being painted by a man of Leighton's deep insight and great executive power.