The Artist: Leighton was one of the most renowned artists in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century. He parlayed his innate talent and cosmopolitan education into a style of consummate refinement that marked all his undertakings: paintings, sculpture, the decoration of his magnificent home in London, and even his service as the President of the Royal Academy of Arts, a position to which he was elected in 1878. The academy was then the preeminent artistic institution in Britain, and Leighton’s ascension to the position of president crowned his status as a leading light of the Victorian art world. He held the role until the year of his death in 1896. Leighton championed the classical revival in British art, which sought inspiration in the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome as the epitome of beauty and sophistication. His work is also allied to the ideals of Aestheticism, which emphasized the purely visual appeal of a work of art over narrative or moral content.
The Marquand Ceiling Commission: This is a preparatory study for the ceiling decoration that Leighton painted about 1886 for the music room in the mansion of American magnate and art collector Henry G. Marquand (1819–1902), who was also The Met’s second president (1889–1902). The study consists of three separate canvases assembled in a single period frame, which is likely the original. Its composition and colors are very close to the final ceiling paintings, and many key details are present, indicating that the study was made at an advanced stage of the project (see figs. 1–4 above).[1]
Marquand’s mansion at 11 East 68th Street, on the northwest corner of Madison Avenue in New York, was designed by architect Richard Morris Hunt and built 1881–84. The interior, a no-expense-spared medley of historical styles ranging from a Versailles-inspired bedroom to a smoking room that evoked the architecture of Islamic Spain, attracted considerable press attention. One of the most celebrated spaces was the sumptuous Greco-Pompeiian music room, executed by a British team of artists, designers, and furniture makers under the leadership of the painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836–1912), who enlisted Leighton to paint the ceiling for two thousand pounds. The decoration of the room, including the ceiling, is extensively documented and analyzed in Goodin and Morris 2017, pp. 84–138. Several objects related to the music room are now in The Met’s collection: a settee (The Met
1975.219a) and a curtain (The Met
1996.330) designed by Alma-Tadema, and ancient Etruscan and Greek ceramics owned by Marquand, of the type displayed in the music room (see The Met
03.3.1 and
67.44.1).
The Ceiling Program: Leighton probably began work on the ceiling decoration in the summer of 1885, and the paintings, measuring approximately seven by twenty feet in total, were completed by May 1886, when the artist exhibited them at the Royal Academy in London. They were installed in the Marquand mansion by February 1887. In a letter to Marquand of January 17, 1886, Leighton described the subject: “I have thought that in a room dedicated to the performance of music the muses will [be] the proper presiding spirits in as much as with the Greeks music & poetry always went hand in hand. In the central compartment therefore I have introduced two of them: Melpomene & Thalia, the muses of sacred and of epic poetry—seated between them is Mnemosyne, the mother of the muses, above whom hover two winged genii wandering voices of melody & song; on each side of her are the Delphic emblems the tripod, the python, the laurel and at her feet the dolphin—in this compartment then we have the grave aspects of song—in the side compartments a contrast is offered—in one I represent the poetry of love by a fair maiden crowning her head with roses while a winged boy tunes the lyre by her side—in the other I show a Bacchante and a little faun dancing to pipe and tambourine—representing the Bacchic element, the element of revelry” (quoted in Kisluk-Grosheide 1994, pp. 160–61). The mythological subject of this composition, and its emphasis on creative inspiration and the dialogue among the arts, complemented the overall program of the music room.
Leighton’s identification of the attendant muses in the central section is muddled. The muse of sacred poetry is Polyhymnia, and the muse of epic poetry is Calliope. Their names appear on a sketch of the composition made on tracing paper and squared for transfer (see Notes), indicating that at a fairly late stage, the artist considered naming the figures as such. However, in a photograph of the final canvas published in the catalogue of the Marquand estate sale in 1903, the names painted in Greek next to the figures correspond to the 1886 letter: Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory; Melpomene, the muse of tragedy; and Thalia, the muse of comedy and idyllic poetry (fig. 1). The figures in the side panels are tentatively identified in the 1903 sale catalogue as Erato, muse of love poetry, on the left, and Terpsichore, muse of dance, on the right. [2] These titles are maintained in the subsequent literature on the music room commission. Newall (1990) states that the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909) was consulted about the roles of the muses, but this assertion does not appear to be securely documented.
Key Sources and Motifs: Leighton’s composition illuminates a number of sources and motifs that shaped his art in the 1880s and 1890s. Most obvious is his perennial love of classical antiquity, which guided not only his choice of subject for the ceiling, but also the style in which he executed it. As he wrote to Marquand on May 23, 1886, he envisioned the figures as “more or less isolated and very firm in outline and [with] no pictorial background . . . they should be full of rich tone on a gold ground—the effect would be rather that of the old mosaics and I think very telling” (quoted in Kisluk-Grosheide 1994). Richard and Leonée Ormond compellingly argue that the Marquand commission manifests the deep-seated impact of Leighton’s immersion in German Romanticism during his youthful training in Frankfurt over the period 1846–52. They connect the style and symbolism of the ceiling to the work of the artist’s teachers Philipp Veit (1793–1877) and Eduard von Steinle (1810–1886), and, more broadly, to German idealism, which conceived of art as a means to express profound or absolute truths. (see Ormond and Ormond 1975 and Ormond 1996, pp. 50–51). The synergy with German exemplars can be seen in the study’s overall composition, with monumental figures arrayed symmetrically in shallow depth; in the precise contours and sonorous color; and even in the gold ground, which Romantics embraced for its associations with medieval and early Renaissance art.
Leighton’s student years in Germany also inculcated in him an enduring admiration for mural painting as the paradigm of artistic achievement, which he realized in a number of commissions for public and private buildings. The 1870s and 1880s were particularly rich in this regard, with the completion of lunettes for the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the execution of painted friezes on the themes of
Music and
Dance for the home of banker (James) Stewart Hodgson (1827–1899), in addition to the Marquand commission (now in the Leighton House Museum, London; see Ormond 1996). Leighton’s interest in mural painting dovetailed with his engagement with the concepts of decoration and the decorative, which were central to Aestheticism and other progressive art movements throughout Europe in the 1880s and 1890s. It is telling that Leighton described the Marquand paintings as “emphatically not pictures but decoration,” that is, a visually harmonious ensemble, integrated into an architectural surrounding, in which the formal elements of pattern and design predominate over action and narrative (letter to Marquand, January 17, 1886, quoted in Goodin and Morris 2017, p. 159).
Provenance: The contents of the Marquand mansion, including the paintings that comprised the ceiling decoration, were sold at auction in 1903, about a year after his death, and the house was torn down after 1912. The history of the paintings is documented by Goodin and Morris (2017, pp. 139–40, 156–65), who note that at some point after 1927, the ceiling paintings were cut into smaller, single-figure works and separated (see Notes). This study is the only record of the commission in its entirety. Its first documented owner is Stewart Hodgson, who owned a number of works by Leighton in addition to
Music and
Dance, among them
Lieder ohne worte (1860–61, Tate, London) and a preparatory oil study for
The Return of Persephone (The Met
2021.10.1) which, like the present work, was bequeathed to The Met by curator James David Draper. The Museum also owns a preparatory drawing for
Music (The Met
2016.62).
Alison Hokanson 2021
[1] For a detailed description of the finished ceiling paintings, see
Illustrated Catalogue of the Art and Literary Property Collected by the Late Henry G. Marquand, sale cat., the American Art Association, Mendelssohn Hall and the American Art Galleries, January 23–30, 1903, nos. 90–92. See also the illustrations in Goodin and Morris 2017, pp. 162–64.
[2] Illustrated Catalogue 1903, nos. 91–92.
