Invocation

Frederic Leighton · 1889 · oil on canvas

The painting

Invocation belongs to the suite of single-figure, classically draped female studies that occupied Leighton's late career — the works most identified with him today: Flaming June (1895), The Bath of Psyche (1890), The Garden of the Hesperides (1892). It depicts a young woman in long Hellenistic robes, arms raised in a gesture of supplication or address to the heavens, set against a deep, plain background that throws the figure into sculptural relief.

The picture's appeal — and Leighton's whole programme in this period — rested on the marriage of academic discipline and decorative beauty. The figure is constructed from numerous preparatory studies (clothed and nude), the drapery refined through clay-modelled mannequins, the pose anchored on the contrapposto of fourth-century Greek statuary.

Context: Leighton at the Royal Academy

By 1889 Leighton had been President of the Royal Academy of Arts for eleven years and was the most powerful figure in British painting. Knighted in 1878 and made a baronet in 1886, he would be raised to the peerage in 1896 — the only English painter ever ennobled, and the only baron whose title lasted a single day before his death dissolved it.

His annual Royal Academy submissions were public events. Invocation, hung at the 1889 Summer Exhibition, was reviewed across the major London papers and reproduced as an engraving in The Magazine of Art. The Aesthetic Movement, which had once seemed to threaten the Academy from the outside, had by then been almost entirely absorbed into it — and Leighton was the principal architect of that synthesis.

Technique and composition

Leighton built his pictures slowly. A typical work began with figure drawings in chalk on tinted paper, often from the nude model; followed by draped studies on a posed mannequin; then a small oil sketch (bozzetto) to set the colour scheme; and finally the large canvas, worked up in successive layers over months. The drapery in Invocation — falling in deep, sculptural folds — shows the influence of his time studying classical sculpture in the British Museum and the Vatican.

The palette is restrained: warm earth tones, the cream of the drapery, the dark ground. Where the picture distinguishes itself technically is in the modelling of the face and raised arms — Leighton's brushwork in flesh is soft but precise, building form through value rather than colour, with cool grey-violet shadows characteristic of his late style.

The classical revival in late-Victorian art

Leighton's classicism was not antiquarian. He believed, with Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater, that Greek art and culture offered the highest available standard of beauty — and that contemporary art should aim to recover its formal clarity without simply imitating its subjects. The single-figure compositions of his final decade are his most concentrated statement of this position: a beautiful figure, a measured pose, no narrative.

The same year that Invocation was exhibited, Alma-Tadema and Edward Poynter were producing comparable single-figure works (A Reading from Homer, The Catapult), and a younger generation including John William Waterhouse and Herbert Draper were beginning to bring more drama to the same iconography. Leighton's late works are the calmest in the tradition.

Provenance and reproduction

The original passed through private collections in the early twentieth century. The painting has been widely reproduced in engravings and photogravures, and survives in detailed black-and-white plates from contemporary art periodicals as well as later colour reproductions. High-resolution images are accessible through the German Wikipedia article on Leighton and Wikimedia Commons.

Further reading

• Stephen Jones et al., Frederic Leighton, 1830–1896 (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1996)
• Leonée Ormond & Richard Ormond, Lord Leighton (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975)
• Christopher Newall, The Art of Lord Leighton (Oxford: Phaidon, 1990)