ABSTRACT
The subjects historians are interested in inevitably reflect the changing aesthetic viewpoints of their contemporaries, and nowhere is this truer than in looking at the forms and values of Victorian art. Of the Victorian giants, Lord Leighton, has suffered most; from neglect, and subsequently from misunderstanding. The PreRaphaelite Brotherhood regained critical acclaim in the 1950s, when psychedelic clothes and mysticism found an echo in the canvases of Burne-Jones and Holman Hunt. At the same time painters of the Aesthetic Movement, and the applied arts of that taste, have experienced a revival. The archaic and self-consciously medievalising taste of the Nazarenes was sympathetic with the PreRaphaelite philosophy. Leightons inexhaustible delight in new work kept him as closely in touch with new developments as did his teaching in the Royal Academy schools. Some critics have seized on Leightons Hellenism and savaged his works on the grounds that he achieved no more than a hopelessly diluted evocation of never-never-land Grecian chic.
