Leighton's 'Flaming June' returns to London
June 20 2016
Picture: Guardian/Museo de Arte de Ponce
In The Guardian, Maev Kennedy reports that Lord Leighton's masterpiece, Flaming June, is to return on loan to the studio where it was painted in London (now the Leighton House Museum). She also recounts the picture's extraordinary history after Leighton's death in 1896:
In the early 20th century, when Victorian art was already falling out of fashion, Samuel Courtauld, the millionaire collector and founder of the Courtauld Institute, called it “the most wonderful painting in existence”.
It was on loan to the Ashmolean in Oxford in the early 1900s, but vanished for decades before being rediscovered in the early 1960s, boxed in over a chimney in a house in Battersea. The composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, whose own collecting helped revive serious interest in the art of the period, never forgave his grandmother for refusing to lend him £50 to buy it when he saw it soon afterwards in a shop on the Kings Road. “I will not have Victorian junk in my flat,” she told him.
The picture was bought by the Museo de Arte de Ponce in Puerto Rico in 1963.
