Usable according to the Creative Commons License Attribution Non-commercial Share-alike.
Our editorial method is informed by social-text editing principles. By “text” we mean verbal and visual printed material, including non-referential physical elements such as bindings, page layouts, and ornaments. We view any text as the outcome of collaborative processes that have specific manifestations at precise historical moments. The Yellow Nineties Online publishes facsimile editions of a select collection of fin-de- siècle aesthetic periodicals, together with paratexts of production and reception such as cover designs, advertising materials, and reviews. This historical material is enhanced by two kinds of peer-reviewed scholarly commentary: biographies of the periodicals’ contributors and associates; and critical introductions to each title and volume by experts in the field. All scholarly material on the site is vetted by the editor(s) and peer- reviewed by them and/or an international board of advisors. The site as a whole is peer- reviewed by NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship). Contributors to the site retain personal copyright in their material. The site is licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license. Both primary and secondary materials, including all visual images, are marked up in TEI- (Textual-Encoding Initiative) compliant XML (Extensible Markup Language). To ensure maximum flexibility for users, magazines are available on the site as virtual objects (facsimiles) in FlipBook form; in HTML for online reading; in PDF for downloading and collecting; and in XML for those who wish to review and/or adapt our tag sets. In order to make ornamental devices, such as initial letters, head- and tail- pieces, searchable, we have developed a Database of Ornament in OMEKA, and linked it to the relevant pages of each magazine edition. As a dynamic structure, a scholarly website is always in process; Phase One of The Yellow Nineties Online (2010-2015) is completed and Phase Two (2016-2021) is underway.
Frederic Leighton contributed only two figure studies to
Throughout his 40-year career as painter, sculptor, illustrator and Royal Academician, Frederic Leighton frequently took a mediating position between establishment and avant-garde, tradition and modernity. His status as President of the Royal Academy did not prevent him from supporting such sexually daring artists as Alfred Gilbert (1854-1934) and Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898). While firmly rooted in Continental neo-classical and neo-renaissance traditions, he was also keenly promoting developments in art education and criticism tending towards modernism. His sexual orientation and the eroticism conveyed in his art have frequently been commented upon as ambiguous: effeminate male figures and masculine women people his canvases alongside feminine women and depictions of muscular masculinity. Many of them reveal considerable erotic engagement, as do indeed his depictions of children. As a consequence, the nature of Leighton’s sexuality has been the subject of much commentary and few conclusions, from his own time till the present.
Leighton was one of the most international of Victorian artists. Born in 1830 to
English parents in Scarborough, he had his artistic training on the Continent.
His travels with his family through Italy, France, and Germany in the 1840s and
1850s allowed him to study at such institutions as the Academy of Art in Berlin
(1842), the Accademia di Belle Arti, Florence (1845) and the Städelsches
Kunstinstitut in Frankfurt (1846-1848), where his encounter with the historicism
of Edward von Steinle had a formative influence. His first important painting,
In 1858 Leighton moved to London and established contact with the
Pre-Raphaelites. His illustrations to George Eliot’s
The main genres in which Leighton excelled were paintings—of biblical,
classical, and historical scenes—together with portraiture, paintings of
male and female nudes, and more informal landscape sketches. His election as an
Associate of the Royal Academy in 1864 was followed by the full status as Royal
Academician in 1868 and President from 1878 until his death. Leighton was deeply
involved with transforming art education in England, first through major reforms
of the Royal Academy schools in the 1870s, and subsequently with teaching at the
state-funded South Kensington art schools, mainly aimed at working-class
students. Leighton gave his first Academy Address to the students at the Royal
Academy in 1879 and would continue these addresses every second year until his
death. He introduced a professorship in sculpture at the Royal Academy schools
and promoted several of the young sculptors, such as Alfred Gilbert and Hamo
Thornycroft, who would be celebrated as defining Edmund Gosse’s “New Sculpture”
in his 1894 articles in
As artist and aesthete, Leighton kept a careful balance between his Royal Academy
affiliation and avant-garde venues. Thus he exhibited at the opening of the
Grosvenor Gallery in 1877, and moved with great ease in the circles of Lawrence
Alma-Tadema, Edward Burne-Jones, John Everett Millais, Albert Moore, Edward
Poynter, Val Prinsep, G.F. Watts and J.A.M. Whistler.
His extraordinary artistic professionalism enabled him to rise above the
polarization that characterized the Victorian art world. A careful manipulator
of his own public image through celebrity interviews, Leighton was also a
popular target for parody and caricature. Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881) parodied
him as Mr. Phoebus in his novel
Leighton’s friendship with the Keeper of Antiquities at the British Museum, Charles Thomas Newton (1816-1894), reflected his keen interest in classics and modern archaeology. A Fellow of the Society of Dilettanti and a founding member of the Hellenic Society, Leighton moved in the circles of collectors, classicists and archaeologists and was in touch with the latest developments in the field. He became unofficial advisor to the British Museum in the 1870s, Trustee there from 1881 and member of multiple committees. The masterly painted draperies in Leighton’s art reveal what a profound source of inspiration he found in Greek sculpture, but it is important to bear in mind the creative rather than reconstructive aspect of Leighton’s dialogue with Antiquity. Leighton’s aestheticizing archaeology bears little resemblance to the recreation of Antiquity one finds in Lawrence Alma-Tadema, although both painters showed a similar interest in aesthetic interior design.
In 1866, Leighton moved into Leighton House in Holland Park, designed for him by George Aitchison. With its Moorish tiles and combination of Orientalism and Classicism, Leighton House became the purpose-built framework for Leighton’s cult of the artist as educated aesthete. An eclectic edifice, Leighton House contained the artist’s studio and art collection, opening its doors to friends and acquaintances with studio days and musical soirées. The latter included performances by international friends and leading musicians— such as the singer Adelaide Sartoris, the violinist Joseph Joachim, the composer Charles Stanford, and the pianists Charles Hallé and Clara Schumann. The synaesthetic universe of Leighton’s paintings, where music features prominently, was recreated regularly in Leighton House, erasing the boundaries between creation and appreciation.
© 2010, Lene Østermark-Johansen
Lene Østermark-Johansen is Reader in English at the University of Copenhagen. She
is the author of