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#BOTD Frederic Leighton (1830-1896). As well as a painter and sculptor, President @royalacademy and doyen of Victorian London, Leighton was a prolific traveller - most notably visiting large parts of the Near East, Spain and North Africa across four decades. #travelhistory
His first trip was to Algiers in 1857. At the time, Algeria was a French colony and Leighton had recently been training in Paris. Steeped in these French colonial contexts, it’s no surprise one of his first Orientalist paintings (1862) took on the archetypal Odalisque theme.
Leighton travelled to Egypt in 1868, a year before the opening of the Suez Canal. These landscapes from his two-month tour of the Nile show his interest in the interplay between colour and light - an early sign of the artist’s burgeoning Aestheticism.
He described the landscape as "soft, variant, fawn-coloured brown, than which nothing could take more gratefully the warm glow of sunlight or the cool purple mystery of shadow” Like other European travellers, he deliberately excised Egyptian people from his artistic vision.
However, if you look closely at this small riverscape ‘On the Nile’ @FitzMuseum_UK, you can see crew members from Leighton’s ship disembarking on the far side of the bank.
Leighton’s most famous Orientalist creation is the Arab Hall @LeightonHouse. He collected the tiles for the hall on several trips across the Ottoman Empire in the 1860s and 1870s. Next door, in the dining room he displayed his blue-and-white collection on an enormous sideboard.
One such collecting trip was to Damascus in 1873. There, Leighton lovingly painted the house where his close friend, the explorer Richard Burton and his wife, Isabel had once lived. You can feel their absence in the eerily quiet street. @Orleanshg
In an interesting bit of biographical symmetry, Leighton’s final trip was also to Algiers in 1895 just months before his death. As modern art historians, it’s tempting to read these paintings of dark doorways as premonitions and reflections on mortality.
