Sketchbook, c. 1872–73

Brown ribbed-leather covers, remains of strap, stylus sleeve;
fifty-eight pages of prepared paper
12.3 x 7.2 cm
Friends of the Fogg Art Museum Fund
1946.35

Sir Frederic Leighton was one of the preeminent artists of Victorian England, best known for his highly polished, richly colored paintings based on classical subjects. He served as the influential president of the Royal Academy from 1878 until his death, in 1896.

This tiny book was specially manufactured to be used with a "prepared pencil" (metalpoint stylus), which was inserted into the sheath attached to the book's cover. The manufacturer promised that the metallic book would be "a great advantage to Travellers and all persons who wish to preserve their Writing," a response to complaints about the smudgy offset caused by penciled notes or drawings on adjoining pages in regular sketchbooks. The pages were prepared with a rough, opaque coating that shaved off minute bits of the metallic stylus, leaving a thin, ungradated line that did not smear. The stylus was based on the metalpoint tools used for drawing in the fifteenth century, which had returned to favor in the late nineteenth century.

Leighton used the tiny stylus—now lost—throughout the book, sometimes retouching the faint, slightly brown metalpoint marks with grayer, shinier graphite. The sketches are necessarily diminutive and unmodulated, as dictated by the small scale of the sketchbook and the constraints of the metalpoint. The book is filled with a miscellany of notes. Leighton's inscriptions, crabbed and difficult to decipher, include train schedules, expense accounts, addresses, and observations on painting techniques. There are also lists of the paintings and drawings he had seen in private collections, some of which would eventually find their way into Leighton's annual old master exhibitions at the Royal Academy. The roster of works by other artists reveals his catholic taste, and includes Cuyp, Gainsborough, Legros, Masaccio, Poussin, Raphael, Rembrandt, Reynolds, Rubens, Stubbs, Titian, Turner, Van Dyck, Velázquez, and Watteau, among others.

Some of the sketches are related to The Arts of Industry as Applied to Peace (1872–86), one of Leighton’s murals for the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum). For the first of the museum murals, The Arts of Industry as Applied to War, Leighton used a new fresco technique, but he was unsatisfied with the gravelly texture of the plaster surface and devised his own method for the Peace panel.(1)Philippa Martin, Leighton House Museum, London, and Charlotte Gere provided invaluable assistance in the cataloguing of this sketchbook. Leighton's recipe for plaster on page two of the sketchbook may relate to this project. Other studies may be associated with Captive Andromache (1888, Manchester Art Gallery), and Wedded (c. 1881–82, Art Gallery of New South Wales).

The inside back cover of the book is fitted with a pocket, into which are tucked four small photographs inscribed "Taken by Sir Fred Leighton." The photographs, probably taken in Tangiers, may date from Leighton's Middle Eastern tours in 1873 and 1877. He wrote to his father from Damascus in 1873: "I can't hope to convey to you in writing any idea of this loveliness, and it is not within the scope of sketching . . . but I am having three or four photographs made."(2)Mrs. Russell Barrington, The Life, Letters and Work of Frederic Leighton (New York, 1906) vol. 2, 208.

1. Philippa Martin, Leighton House Museum, London, and Charlotte Gere provided invaluable assistance in the cataloguing of this sketchbook.

2. Mrs. Russell Barrington, The Life, Letters and Work of Frederic Leighton (New York, 1906) vol. 2, 208.