Flaming June by Frederic Leighton

Flaming June by Frederic Leighton

Asleep in orange

A woman sleeps curled on a marble seat, her head resting on her arm, her knees drawn up and one bare foot showing at the hem. The dress is so fine that the shape of her body shows through it, and Leighton painted its folds in every shade from pale apricot to deep red, against the brown drapery beneath her. Behind the parapet the sea lies flat and glittering in the late sun, with a headland on the horizon. At the top right hangs a branch of oleander, which is poisonous, often taken as a quiet hint of how close sleep and death lie together.

A difficult pose

The figure gave Leighton a good deal of trouble. He worked out the pose through a series of drawings, most of them from the nude, and had particular difficulty making the angle of the arm look natural. The folded, twisting figure is often compared with Michelangelo’s marble Night on the Medici tombs in Florence. He showed Flaming June at the Royal Academy in 1895 and died the following January. Later, when Victorian painting had fallen out of fashion, it dropped from view for decades, and in the 1960s it failed to sell at auction.

Where it hangs

The painting belongs to the Museo de Arte de Ponce in Puerto Rico; Luis A. Ferré bought it for the museum in 1963. It is a square canvas, 119.1 centimetres on each side.

About this print

Made from a 9,000-pixel photograph of the original, enough to print sharply at up to about 60 inches on its longest side.

Sources: Museo de Arte de Ponce, Ponce · Wikidata Q846213 · Wikimedia Commons