Flaming June
SIR FREDERIC LEIGHTON
SIR FREDERIC LEIGHTON, 1895
Flaming June is a work of painterly deception. The work is so striking, so classically beautiful, conforming to aesthetic ideals and sacred geometry of the golden ratio that it’s real tricks are hidden from us. Leighton was a classicist, a holdover from a generation before him and even while revered in his time, he was out of fashion before he reached old age. Yet hiding in this classical work is something profoundly modern because this is not a portrait of a sleeping woman so much as an investigation of form and colour. The model is contorted in an impossible shape, she becomes a circle. The elongated thigh, brings her body sweepy into geometry, housed in a perfectly squared canvas. This work exists across planes. You are drawn in by an exquisite, delicate rendering of a lazy spring day, and it is only your subconscious that sees the natural, minimal forms of the work.