June 2024

If you are visiting the Royal Academy for the Summer Exhibition, you may as well enjoy Flaming June, the incandescent oil painting made by Lord Frederic Septimus Leighton in 1895. A lithe woman sleeps in a dress of gloriously vivid saffron. Her form curls in a circular pose on a draped couch, one foot rests on the floor. Her ankle length hair falls in waves over her flushed youthful face. Behind her, sun rays shimmer over the Mediterranean and perhaps the strong scent of the overhanging oleander flowers have intoxicated her. A peaceful, yet powerful radiance emanates from her relaxed figure. A peep of a nipple, a long luscious thigh and a well rounded buttock all visible though her diaphanous slip.

That Flaming June drowses under a flower known for its toxic effects is perhaps a realisation of the connection between sleep and death. In any case, it can be viewed as an example of the Victorian preoccupation with the myth of Briar Rose, and other passive Sleeping Beauties in need of awakening. Whether one ascribes erotic, imaginative, literal or visual connotations to the subject, it is certain that Lord Leighton (1830-1896) blended the best of high renaissance art to his popular muse. She is Michelangelo’s Night made for the Medici chapel in Florence and the stylised flame haired females of the Pre-Raphaelites rolled into one.

Like her creator, Flaming June has travelled far and wide. She was owned by the London Graphic magazine which put her on the cover of the 1895 Christmas edition. Then, after a ten year loan to the Ashmolean in Oxford in 1900, she disappeared for decades. She was eventually discovered concealed in a box behind a chimney in Battersea in1962 by a builder who sold her only for the value of her ornate frame. There is a rumour that when he was a young man the avid pre-Raphaelite collector, and music and theatre impresario Andrew Lloyd Webber spotted her in a Battersea junk shop for £50. But his grandmother refused to loan him the money to purchase her.

For the last 60 years Flaming June has lived at the Museo de Arte de Ponce in Puerto Rico. She is  part of the European collection made by Luis A Ferre when Pre-Raphaelite art had fallen out of favour. After the major London galleries refused to purchase her, he whisked her off to the Caribbean in 1963 for a nominal sum. Now, Flaming June has returned home, and is on loan to the Royal Academy from February 2023 where she will stay until January 2024. This is a happy homecoming for a work by Lord Leighton, the President of the Royal Academy for eighteen years from 1878.

When Flaming June was first exhibited publicly at the 1895 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition she caused a sensation. It’s fiery presence prompted Samuel Courtauld to call it, “The most wonderful painting in existence.“  It has since become one of the most reproduced images in the world. One of the preparatory studies of the head of Flaming June was discovered at West Horlsey Place, the country house of the Duchess of Roxburghe, the great aunt of Bamber Gasgoine. The former host of University Challenge unexpectedly inherited the drawing in 2015, which had been hung discretely behind a bedroom door. 

Today, most of Leighton’s drawings, paintings and sculptures are on permanent show at his studio and house museum at 12 Holland Park Road, a must visit. Leighton House in London is crammed with a lavish collection of richly coloured tiles and textiles gathered from his travels in North Africa and the Middle East. He followed the footsteps of his close friend George Frederick Watts to his Little Holland House studio on nearby Melbury Road. Leighton assembled his awe-inspiring house over many years, where he lived alone. Eight other Royal Academicians were inspired by Watts and Leighton to build studio houses in the area, an artist’s colony known as the Holland Park Circle. Only Leighton’s house remains. 

He made his first submission Cimabue to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 1855.This epic painting, five metres long and two metres high, depicts a procession of the Madonna made by Leighton in Rome. On the first day of the exhibition Queen Victoria was persuaded by Prince Albert to buy it. From that moment on Leighton was considered the great hope for British art and he took full advantage of his opportunity to promote art for art sake from within the establishment of the RA. Leighton died devoted to art and his last words expressed his love for the Academy, He lies in St Paul’s Cathedral next to the architect Sir Christopher Wren.