Indolent, seductive, and mysterious, “Flaming June” is the embodiment of summer. Painted by Lord Frederick Leighton and praised by art critics as his finest submission for the show at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1895, this work had a complicated history. Early in the twentieth century, “Flaming June” went out of fashion and was subsequently forgotten, neglected, and lost, having been eclipsed by other artistic styles and art movements of the twentieth century. It was later recovered purely by chance and then sold in 1963 to the Ponce museum in Puerto Rico for a poultry sum of £2,000 as an addition to the collection of art left by the city’s former governor, Luis A. Ferré. Henceforward, it became a treasured masterpiece in the museum collection, proclaimed to be “The Mona Lisa of the Southern Hemisphere." Each year it attracts millions of visitors to the collection of the Museo de Arte de Ponce.

In the early twentieth century, Samuel Courtauld, the wealthy business tycoon, collector, and founder of the Courtauld Institute, called ”Flaming June” “the most wonderful painting in existence—a gorgeous piece of flamboyance.”. Prior to that, in the early 1900s, the painting had been displayed on loan at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford but then vanished without a trace for decades before being rediscovered in the early 1960s, boxed in over a chimney in a house in Clapham. As was written in the article published in “The Epoch Times," ‘[The painting] ‘… disappeared for decades, until it was mysteriously rediscovered and resuscitated at a most unlikely time, in 1962, when Andy Warhol was painting Campbell soup cans, when Victorian art was stigmatized for being prudish and sentimental.’

What is usually rarely mentioned, is that there had been a chance for the artwork to remain in the UK, but, alas, this never came to be. The sale to the Ponce museum had been preceded by an attempt by young Andrew Lloyd Webber, the future composer, to buy out this artwork from a London art dealer in King’s Road, Chelsea. However, still young, he was short of cash and had to approach his grandmother in an attempt to borrow £50, so that he could purchase the painting. To his disappointment, he heard a categorical refusal: “I will not have Victorian junk in my flat.” Alas, his granny was an uncompromising modernist in her tastes. So, sadly, the decision of this elderly lady meant that “Flaming June” would leave the UK for good and her grandson would miss the opportunity to add another rare gem to his prised collection of nineteenth-century Pre-Raphaelite art. No wonder, Lloyd Webber still cannot forgive his grandmother for having missed the opportunity of a lifetime.

This year, due to the closure of the Ponce museum from devastating earthquakes that took place in 2020, the painting has made its temporary comeback to the UK, to the galleries of the Royal Academy of Arts, where it had been first exhibited.

Looking at the artwork, many visitors feel intrigued and curious about the artist’s personality and work. Lord Frederick Leighton (1830–1896) was one of the most celebrated British painters of his generation. A child prodigy, a cosmopolitan, a polyglot, a dandy, a celebrity, and a virtuosic artist, who later in his career launched a new movement in British sculpture, Leighton became famous in his early twenties. When he was only twenty-four, his first work, Cimabue’s Celebrated Madonna is Carried in Procession through the Streets of Florence, now on display at the National Gallery in London, was accepted for exhibition at the Royal Academy and then instantly bought by Queen Victoria for Buckingham Palace. He became a celebrity practically overnight. The Queen Victoria mentioned the painting in her diary: "[T]here was a very big picture by a man called Leighton. It is a beautiful painting, quite reminding one of a Paul Veronese, so bright and full of light. Albert was enchanted with it - so much so that he made me buy it."

Urbane, handsome, refined, elegant, and accomplished in many ways, Leighton was the centre of attention and the epitome of a society man, admired by men and women alike. James Tissot (1836–1902), a French artist close to the Impressionist circles, who launched his successful career in the UK during the Franco-Prussian war, caricatured Leighton as a dandy and aesthete in “Vanity Fair” in 1872. In 1878, at the age of forty-eight, Leighton became President of the Royal Academy of Arts, Britain’s premier art establishment. Admired and envied by contemporaries and fellow artists alike, he was soon nicknamed “Jupiter Olympus," both for his status in society and in the art world, and for his passion for Greek and Roman antiquity. The recipient of many honours during his lifetime, he is the only British artist to have been ennobled, becoming Lord Leighton, Baron of Stretton, in the year of his death, 1896. Sadly, he did not live to enjoy his newly-acquired status, as his heart disease was progressing; his was the shortest-lived peerage in history that became extinct after only one day.

As an artist, Leighton was a traditionalist who adhered to classical ideals of beauty. Nevertheless, his works combine academic classicism with the avant-garde approach of his time. While in Paris, where he lived between 1855 and 1859, he became increasingly drawn to colour, tending to prefer it over line, although he excelled in both. His insistence on the leading role of composition, design, and the harmony of colour over subject matter were the avant-garde characteristics of his art. His virtuoso technique, complex preparatory process, intellectual allusions drawn from literary sources, and poetic associations hidden in his paintings, are more traditional characteristics of his art. Therefore, these features made Leighton’s paintings at odds with the growing influence and practice of Impressionism, with its directness of execution. And yet, Leighton’s works anticipate Symbolist and Decadent currents in the art of his time.

When Leighton completed Flaming June, he was at the pinnacle of his artistic powers. He had a well-developed technique and planned the work in his mind over many years. He finally presented the work alongside his other five submissions to the Royal Academy in his studio on 7 April 1895. These were his last submissions to the annual Royal Academy exhibition. His health was quickly deteriorating, he was too ill to attend the annual dinner. He even had to ask his fellow artist, John Everett Millais, to deliver his speech on his behalf.

Though primarily remembered as a painter, Leighton is also credited with having inspired the development of New Sculpture, a movement that emerged from the circle around French sculptor Jules Dalou in 1870s London. The style was put into limelight by the display of Leighton's first sculpture, An Athlete Wrestling with a Python in 1877, considered to bring a new physical dynamism and naturalism to the old medium.

Late Leighton’s work has been celebrated for its vivid depictions of male beauty. The cast of The Sluggard(1885), opening the show at the RA, has major characteristics of the Renaissance sculpture in the age of Michelangelo, and yet presents the male body as seductive, sensual, and languorous, rather than heroic. A century later, this work inspired Robert Mapplethorpe to create a whole series of homoerotic nudes.

Flaming June has a certain seductive aura about it as well. With her red hair and fiery sun-like diaphanous dress, the woman in the composition is slumbering on a marble seat. Her pose exudes the contrasting characteristics of tension and relaxation for which Leighton’s human figures are famous. Even while sleeping, the model is balancing upon the toe of her foot! The dominance of red, yellow, and golden shades almost seems to set the figure aflame as she lies curled up, orb-like. She may stand in for the invisible sun that shines on the almost white horizon, where sea and sky meet above her head. The woman here appears as bright and inescapable as the blazing summer sun. Above her head, in the top right corner, one can spot green leaves of the plant that the art historian Kenneth Bendiner has identified as oleander, the symbol of romance and charm in Greek mythology. Another interpretation reads that these poisonous oleander blossoms may prefigure the arrival of imminent death that will be as peaceful, poised and graceful, quietly lulling one into an eternal sleep, as this image of a sleeping woman.

Leighton may be considered one of the last representatives of the great academic tradition in which the human body was viewed through the lens of classical art. Flaming June was inspired by Michelangelo’s "Night,” made for the Medici chapel in Florence (1526-1531). Some scholars also find in Leighton’s painting the echoes of Charles Baudelaire’s poem “L’Idéal,” inspired by the same original work of Michelangelo.

L’Idéal (The Ideal)

Or you, great Night, daughter of Michelangelo,
Who calmly contort, reclining in a strange pose
Your charms molded by the mouths of Titans!

Night, which you see sleeping in such sweet attitudes
Was carved in this stone by an angel.
And because she sleeps, she has life.
Wake her, if you don’t believe it, and she will speak to you.

My sleep is dear to me, and more dear this being of stone,
As long as the agony and shame last.
Not to see, not to hear [or feel] is for me the best fortune.
So do not wake me! Speak softly.

Indeed, if we look closer, Leighton seems to have rotated Michelangelo’s sculpture by 90 degrees in his painting. Although the artist stated that ‘the design was not a deliberate one, but was suggested by a chance attitude of a weary model who had a peculiarly supple figure,’ the surviving sketches and studies for Flaming June show Leighton working out the pose, with slight adjustments to the legs and arms between each sketch, suggesting a rather more considered approach.

The exhibition at the Royal Academy is accompanied by some sketches of the Flaming June. It is possible to see more on display at Leighton House, the self-designed home of the artist in Holland Park. The history of some of these recently rediscovered sketches is also quite remarkable. In 2014, they were discovered at West Horsley Place after the death of the Duchess of Roxburghe. This was a stately home dating back to the 11th century and the country retreat of a glamorous aristocratic family. Legend has it that West Horsley Place was once home to Sir Walter Raleigh’s head. However, it is not the head that was found behind an old door to the room that had been shut up for decades, but a pencil and chalk drawing of a woman’s head: the central study for Flaming June that had been lost for more than a century.

In any case, no matter how deliberate or spontaneous, the Victorian critics found the pose contrived and the woman’s thigh unnaturally long. Apparently, even at the time of the exhibition it was not the most admired artwork, unlike today, when it is considered the unquestioned masterpiece.

While looking at the painting, many viewers wonder about who the artist’s model was. We do not know who she was for certain, but there are several possibilities. The first candidate is Mary Lloyd, who started posing for Leighton in the 1890s. Lloyd was the daughter of a prosperous country squire but had fallen on hard times. Modeling at that age was not considered a respectable profession, so she had to conceal how she was earning her living. In 1933, the Sunday Express interviewed her, and she publicly admitted for the first time to having posed for Leighton, Holman Hunt, Burne-Jones, and Ford Madox Brown. Unfortunately, she died in poverty and obscurity.

Another candidate is Dorothy Dene (born Ada Alice Pullen). She was an English stage actress and a Pre-Raphaelite muse. Apparently, the artist’s relationship with her was the most significant of his later life, giving rise to speculation in the press that they were to marry. She became his principal model and muse in his later years. She was the model for “Bianca” hanging on the staircase in his house, “Desdemona” in the Silk Room, and for “Clytie”, Leighton’s last work, which now hangs in his studio. A lifelong bachelor, Leighton supported Ada’s ambitions to become an actress. He paid for her elocution and drama lessons and was often seen in her company at events and exhibition openings around London. Dorothy’s beauty and fashionable gowns attracted much attention and gossip. Their relationship apparently inspired George Bernard Shaw, who knew both Leighton and Dorothy, to write his “Pygmalion.”

As he lay dying, Dorothy was one of those admitted to Leighton’s bedroom to take leave of him. She inherited £5,000 after his death and a further £5,000 was received to the Dene Trust established to support Dorothy’s siblings. A considerable sum at the time, especially for Dorothy, who had been born daughter of a bankrupt steam engineer and inventor and had to spend her early childhood years in the East End of London.

There is a possibility that it was Dene who modeled for “Flaming June.” Eight years ago, it was discovered that she modeled for yet another landmark painting of the Victorian era—"The Golden Stairs” by Edward Burne-Jones. It became possible to establish this due to the fact that previously unknown letters that identify the model were sold at Christie’s auction in 2016. So, although there is no firm evidence, it was most probably Dorothy Dene’s beauty captured in “Flaming June.”

There are still more questions than answers remaining about this dreamy masterpiece. However, its elusiveness is exactly what gives this painting its mysterious and enchanting aura.

On show until 12 January 2025 at the Collection Gallery of the Royal Academy of Art, Burlington Gardens.