Lucia

Lucia

Reverse, showing stencil of Charles Roberson

Lucia

Artist:Frederic, Lord Leighton (British, Scarborough 1830–1896 London)
Date:possibly late 1870s
Medium:Oil on canvas
Dimensions:14 7/8 x 10 in. (37.8 x 25.4 cm)
Classification:Paintings
Credit Line:Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Collection, Bequest of Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, 1887

Catalogue Entry
Leighton painted many head-and-shoulders studies of this approximate size and type, and in 1881 A. B. Stewart sold, in addition to Lucia, two others, called Teresa (whereabouts unknown) and Lily (Richard Green Gallery, London). Lucia and Lily have frames of the same style, and originally the three works may have been installed as a group. While Lucia must be the original title of the present work, there is not enough evidence to assume that the young woman who sat for the picture was Italian, that Lucia was really her name, or that, as the Ormonds (1975) have suggested, she was painted in 1874. Titles of this kind could also be construed simply as romantic or could have been intended to suggest that the young women were models, not portrait sitters.
A similar half-length figure, in the same pose as Lucia and with the same sort of costume, was exhibited under the title Rubinella at the Grosvenor Gallery, London, in 1880 (sold, Sotheby's, London, November 26, 1985, no. 36). The pose was one of the artist’s favorites, and he used it when Dorothy Dene modeled in the early 1880s for Antigone (private collection). Lucia may date from the late 1870s, and A. B. Stewart was probably its original owner.
The stencil on the reverse (see fig. 1 above) indicates that Leighton bought the prepared, stretched canvas from the supplier Roberson. Two pieces of commercially primed canvas were fixed to the stretcher with the primed surfaces facing out, which, it was thought, would offer protection from industrial pollution.
[2012; adapted from Baetjer 2009]

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