
by Frederic Leighton, 1895
Working in oil on canvas, Frederic Leighton painted this iconic sleeping figure in 1895, the final year of his life. A woman in a brilliant orange dress curls on a marble terrace, her pose loosely modeled on Michelangelo's statue of Night in the Medici Tombs. Leighton originally conceived her as decoration for a marble bath in another painting but became so attached to the design he made it a work of its own.
Leighton was Victorian Britain's most eminent artist: painter, sculptor, president of the Royal Academy, and the only British artist ever ennobled. Critics at the 1895 Royal Academy exhibition called Flaming June one of his finest works. The Graphic magazine bought it, creating a high-quality reproduction as a Christmas gift that year. When Leighton died in January 1896, they displayed it in their office window as his funeral procession passed.
The painting vanished for three decades until 1962, when it reappeared in south London. Andrew Lloyd Webber saw it in a shop on Kings Road but couldn't afford the £50 asking price. In 1963, Puerto Rican collector Luis Ferré bought it for the Museo de Arte de Ponce, where it remains the collection's signature work.
Other masterpieces from the Academic Art movement

William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1873
Clark Art Institute, Williamstown

Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1866
Clark Art Institute, Williamstown

Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 1888
Private Collection, Unknown

Rosa Bonheur, 1853
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1879
Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Alexandre Cabanel, 1863
Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 1909
Tate Britain, London

Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1872
Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix
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