More Leighton
July 15, 2011
The Music Lesson, completed in 1877, is another sensuous mother-and-child painting by Lord Frederick Leighton. (Click on the image to see it in greater detail.) Notice the pleasure of the mother in holding and teaching her child at the same time. She reaches around to tune the instrument without disrupting their embrace. The dangling bare feet extend from their luxurious clothing, emphasizing their humanity without pretense and suggesting hours of fruitful idleness. The classical column in the background and the lute joins the pair with the ancient world, further capturing what motherhood is at its highest, the transmission of a culture, the furtherance of the thoughts and habits by which a civilization strives for the perfection it will never fully realize.
By the way, Leighton, president of the Royal Academy in England for 20 years, was a bachelor and had no children of his own. Such is the mystery of masculine genuis that an unmarried man can convey motherhood in this way.
Here is an excerpt from an address by Leighton to young artists in 1893:
To the very young then, I would fain offer one or two matters for thought, if, perchance, they will hearken to one who has grown old in unwavering sympathy with their struggles and doubts. I would beg them to keep ever before their eyes the vital truth that sincerity is the well-spring of all lasting achievement, and that no good thing ever took root in untruth or self-deception. I would urge them to remember that if every excellent work is stamped with the personality of its author, no work can be enduring that is stamped with a borrowed stamp; and that, therefore, their first duty is to see that the thoughts, the emotions, the impressions they fix on he canvas are in very truth their own thoughts, their own emotions, their own spontaneous impressions, and not those of others: for work that does not spring from the heart has no roots, and will of certainty wither and perish. The other maxim also I would urge on them – that true genius knows no hurry, that patience is of its essence, and thoroughness its constant mark; and, lastly, I would ask them to believe that the gathered experience of past ages is a precious heritage and not an irksome load; and that nothing will fortify them better for the future, and free development, than the reverent and loving study of the past.
— Comments —
Alex A. writes from England:
Your remarks on The Music Lesson are thoughtful and succinct. They get to the heart of the matter.
I think the continuity of civilized standards suggested by the classical setting and the portrait of an exquisite intimacy between the mother and child, are probably even more affecting in our day than in Leighton’s time. For we know what has been lost in the interval as standards have crumbled. Note the delicacy and sympathy with which the facial expressions are painted. As you say, it is mysterious that a man, a talented man, can have the artistry and sensibility to express on canvas a mother’s love and a child’s innocence.
Leighton advises young artists that no enduring work of art can be created unless the truth is sought with patience and sincerity. This advice is in contradiction to the crass pretensions of art in age when mere anarchy has been loosed upon the world, and almost everywhere the ceremonies of innocence have been drowned.
