Byzantine Well-head by Frederic Lord Leighton

Byzantine Well-head

Frederic Lord Leighton, P. R. A. (1830-1896)

Signed with initials, dated 1852 and inscribed "Venezia"

Pencil

10 x 7 1/2 inches

[See commentary below]

The Maas Gallery, London has most generously given its permission to use in the Victorian Web information, images, and text from its catalogues. The copyright on text and images from their catalogues remains, of course, with the Maas Gallery. Readers should consult the gallery website to obtain information about recent exhibitions and to order their catalogues. [GPL]

Commentary by Rupert Maas

In the early 1850s Leighton followed Ruskinian principles with an impressive zeal, in the wake of his acquaintance with the disciplined, linear style of the Nazarenes he had encountered in Germany. In a letter to his mother the year of this drawing he wrote: "I long to find myself again face to face with Nature, to follow it, to watch it, and to copy it, closely, faithfully, ingenuously — as Ruskin suggests, 'choosing nothing and selecting nothing'".

According to Leonee and Richard Ormond,

his drawing... is an extraordinary testament to that passionate, inquiring vision typical of Leighton's generation. It combines the calligraphic elegance of a medieval manuscript border with extreme definition. A comparison with the well-head itself, one of very few such survivals in Venice, proves how exactly Leighton drew what was before him. [p. 15]

The well-head is, or was, in the courtyard of the Palazzo Olivetti, off the Salizzada San Samuele. Ruskin owned, probably from 1845, a daguerrotype of it, taken from a slightly different angle. When Ruskin saw this drawing, he asked whether he could borrow it as an example of exact draughtsmanship for his Slade lectures in Oxford in 1883.

References

The Maas Gallery. Exhibition catalogue. London, 2007. Catalogue no. 77.

Ormond, Leonée and Richard. Lord Leighton. New Haven: Yale UP, 1975.

Last modified 30 June 2007