The Sleeping Woman Who Vanished for Sixty Years
A masterpiece nearly sold for $140. A grandmother refused to spend £50 on it. And for decades, nobody knew where it had gone.
In 1895, Frederic Leighton painted a woman asleep in a square of golden light, her body coiled beneath a diaphanous saffron robe, a sprig of poisonous oleander glowing at the edge of the canvas. He called it Flaming June, and it would become the single image most people picture when they think of his name — reproduced on posters, calendars, and coffee mugs for a century, though almost no one knew the real painting's whereabouts for most of that time.
The work began almost by accident, as a decorative motif meant for a marble bath in another of Leighton's paintings, Summer Slumber. He grew so attached to the figure that he pulled her free and gave her a canvas of her own. Getting her right took him through at least four evolving sketches — four nude studies and one draped — because the angle of her right arm simply would not look natural. The draped version, tellingly, looked the least alive; Leighton insisted he needed a naked model before the fabric could feel true.
Art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon has traced her pose back to Michelangelo's Night in the Medici Tombs, a sculpture Leighton revered as one of the summits of Western art. Samuel Courtauld, who founded the institute that bears his name, later called Flaming June simply 'the most wonderful painting in existence' — high praise for a picture whose fate would soon turn shockingly ordinary.
The Graphic magazine bought it first, intending only to produce a fine reproduction to give away as a Christmas gift in 1895. When Leighton died the following January, the painting was hung in the magazine's office window as his funeral procession passed below. It was later lent to the Ashmolean Museum in the early 1900s — and then it simply disappeared from the historical record.
It resurfaced decades later in the most unglamorous way imaginable: boxed in above a chimney in a house in Battersea, in the early 1960s. A young Andrew Lloyd Webber spotted it soon after in a shop on the Kings Road, but his grandmother refused to put up the £50 asking price, declaring she would not have 'Victorian junk' in her flat. It was, at the time, genuinely unfashionable — Victorian painting was deeply out of favor and hard to sell.
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