As a work combining poetic feeling, power of design, and great beauty in the arrangement of line, while at the same time expressing most explicitly Leighton's creed of creeds--namely, the ennobling and elevating influence of beauty in the lives of men and women--"Cymon and Iphigenia" is perhaps the picture he himself would have chosen as the most representative among these later works. He chose it as the one he wished sent to the Berlin Exhibition in 1885. When beginning it he described to me the moment of the day he wished to catch for the scene--"the most mysteriously beautiful in the whole twenty-four hours, when the _merest lip_ of the moon has risen from behind the sea horizon, and the air is haunted still with the flush of the after-glow from the sun already hidden in the west."[70]
The study for the group of sleeping figures reproduced here is almost identical in design with the sketch in plaster from the clay, so lamentably destroyed when Watts lent it to be cast in bronze after Leighton's death. Leighton also gave the drawing of this group to his fellow artist, so enthusiastically did Watts admire it. He, in his turn, gave it to the Leighton House Collection in the year 1897, together with the fine painting which Leighton exchanged for his own portrait, painted about 1863, and which greeted friends as they mounted the staircase in Leighton House during all the years he lived in Holland Park Road (see frontispiece to Vol. I.). The study for "Cymon and Iphigenia" is particularly valuable now as an example of Leighton's rapid sketches where every touch reflects a mine of knowledge, because it was put under glass before any of the crispness of the touch was blurred by rubbing.[71]
[Illustration: "THE SLUGGARD" From the Bronze Statuette--a direct reproduction from Lord Leighton's small sketch, 1886. Leighton House Collection]
[Illustration: "NEEDLESS ALARMS" From Bronze Statuette, 1886. Leighton House Collection]
[Illustration: "THE LAST WATCH OF HERO." 1887]
[Illustration: STUDY IN COLOUR FOR "TRAGIC POETESS." 1890 By permission of Mrs. Stewart Hodgson]
In a letter dated 1886 Watts wrote: "Leighton will carry off all the honours this year with his ceiling[72] and his two statues."