Frederic Leighton
(1830-1896)

[The portrait does not appear in any of the twelve volumes of the Silvy daybooks held by the National Portrait Gallery. The Victoria & Albert Museum, however, has an untrimmed, unmounted albumen print from the sitting.]

A carte-de-visite portrait of the painter, sculptor and draftsman Frederic Leighton. His paintings depicting historical, biblical and classical subjects were enormously popular (and expensive) during his lifetime, but fell out of critical favour for much of the 20th century.

He was knighted in 1878 and then six years later was created a baronet, of Holland Park Road in the parish of St Mary Abbots. He was therefore known as Sir Frederic Leighton between 1878 and 1896. In the 1896 New Year Honours he was created Baron Leighton, of Streeton in the County of Shropshire — the first British painter to be given a peerage — but he died the very next day, on 25 January 1896, as a result of angina pectoris. As he had no children, his title became extinct on his death. His was the shortest-lived title in the entire history of the British peerage.

He was buried in St Paul’s Cathedral. His coffin was carried into the cathedral past a guard of honour formed by the Artists’ Rifles, of which he had been the commanding officer from 1869 to 1883. 

‘The remains of Lord Leighton were privately removed on Saturday evening from his residence, Holland Park, to the Royal Academy, where they will remain till eleven o’clock to-day. The interment will take place at St Paul’s Cathedral at noon. The body was conveyed in a shell to Burlington House, where it was deposited in a handsome panelled coffin of fumigated oak, with massive brass fittings., which rested on a cloth draped catafalque in the middle of the octagon or central hall. Floral tributes have already arrived in considerable numbers, and the Queen, the Prince of Wales, the Duke of Saxe-Coburg, and other Royal and distinguish personages have arranged to send wreaths. […] The Queen’s wreath is being prepared at Frogmore and will be deposited on Lord Leighton’s coffin by Colonel Carington’ (The Scotsman, 3 February 1896).

[From an album compiled by Lady Augusta Frances Hoare, wife of Sir Henry Ainslie Hoare, 5th Baronet. Leighton had painted Lady Augusta in Paris in 1858. Two years later he painted her daughter Augusta Frances Anne Hoare, when she was fourteen years old.]