From tragic muse to fridge magnet
FRIDAYBOOKS
ART FLAMING DENE by Eilat Negev and Yehuda Koren (Psychology News Press £16.99, 200pp)
One late spring afternoon in 1962, two men in overalls lugged a bulky painting into London’s Ingo Fincke Gallery. Fincke ran a disapproving eye over the painted woman reclining on a marble bench, noting the nipple peeping from her gauzy orange wrap.
The builders said they had discovered the provocative picture concealed behind a wall panel in a house they were renovating. A label on the back revealed the painting was ‘Flaming June’ by Victorian artist Lord Leighton.
As 19th-century art was out of fashion at the time, Fincke gave the men ‘a few dozen pounds’ for their find and separated the heavy gold frame from its canvas, selling the frame for £65 and the canvas for £50.
Today it is valued at £14 million. It is the only work by a British artist to appear in the world’s top ten best-selling reproductions. You can buy it as a fridge magnet for £3, a puzzle for £12 and an iPhone case for £25.
The story behind the painting proves as compelling as the work itself. It’s a tale of the complicated relationship between a wealthy, successful but anxious Lord Frederic Leighton and the intelligent, ambitious model who he would help transform into the most celebrated beauty of the age: Miss Dorothy Dene.
Urban legend has it that Dene — the stage name of Ada Alice Pullen — was a poor cockney kid, picked up and polished by Leighton like eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion. But negev and Koren say Dene was never ‘a squashed cabbage leaf, so deliciously low, so horribly dirty’, as George Bernard Shaw described his eliza.
The second child of an ingenious, upwardly-mobile steam engineer called Abraham Pullen and an ‘immensely intellectual’ former housemaid called Sarah, Dene was born in 1859.
Her parents were committed to her education and encouraged her passion for the arts, including learning Shakespeare by heart.
But Dene’s happy childhood was disrupted when Abraham lost his job in 1876. The following year Sarah was left paralysed after the difficult birth of the couple’s tenth child. Later the same year, Dene’s sister Dorothy died of measles, aged just eight.
In 1878 Abraham was declared bankrupt and fled the family home which the bedridden Sarah was forced to give up, moving her nine remaining children — aged between one and 20 — into a cramped flat in Deptford.
With no father and an invalid mother, the children could easily have lapsed into destitution and child labour. But the trauma pulled Dene and her siblings together, creating a bond that would hold them close for life.
Determined to keep the younger children in school, the
two oldest boys took jobs in engineering. Aware of her fashionable looks, 18-year-old Dene decided to offer her services as a model: the hours would permit flexibility to care for her younger siblings and the rates were good.
Within a year, she was summoned to sit for Sir Frederic Leighton, President of the Royal Academy of Art.
negev and Koren paint a vivid picture of the 19-year-old Dene rising early for her two-hour journey from Deptford to his grand house in Holland Park, waiting in the hall decorated with ancient blue and white tiles brought from Turkey and Syria, while a fountain gurgled softly in the next room. A stuffed peacock sat at the foot of a staircase that was ‘as wide as the flights in the Palaces of the Caesars’. At 48, the unmarried Leighton was still a ‘modern Adonis’ and ‘the paragon of manners in the highest society of the mind’.
He was unfailingly generous to his models and aspiring artists. But there was a detachment in his demeanour, as though, wrote one contemporary, ‘his kindnesses were mechanical, that it was the man’s voice speaking to you, not his heart’. In letters he wrote of the relief he felt in ‘unsociable solitude’.
Some biographers have speculated he was gay, or ‘passionless’. But the truth was probably more complicated. He had spent much of his youth in thrall to an older woman: the opera singer and author Adelaide Sartoris, who died in 1879.
Devoted as he was to the classical ideals of beauty, critics saw ‘waxiness’ and ‘superficiality’ in his ‘pot boilers’. But his works were selling fast and commanding high prices.
Dene offered Leighton the perfect, classical beauty. His friend Mrs Barrington described her colour as ‘a clouded pallor with a hint somewhere of a lovely shelllike pink’. Her head was crowned ‘with a glory of curls that seemed to have somehow caught a stray glint of God’s glorious sunshine in their meshes’. Her lips were ‘curved coral’ and the ‘Scandinavian blue’ of her eyes left men ‘entrapped in their depth’.
We don’t know the extent of the intimacy that developed between Leighton and Dene. Leighton’s sisters destroyed their letters. But we do know his muse became his ‘significant other’.
He encouraged and championed her as she launched a successful stage career and he supported her entire family.
Other artists — including William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti — married their models. But Oscar Wilde (in whose play A Woman Of no Importance Dene had a starring role) was cynical. ‘For an artist to marry his model is as fatal as for a gourmet to marry his cook; the one gets no sittings, and the other gets no dinners.’
PeRHAPS Leighton felt a woman he had painted nude was an unsuitable bride for a man who hobnobbed with royalty. Or perhaps their relationship was truly platonic.
To the modern eye, there is something uncomfortable about the older, powerful man’s relationship with the Dene sisters, some of whom he drew naked from childhood. They followed their elder sister into the studio, onto the stage and into the social whirl as Victorian It Girls. Two became alcoholics and died young, one lived into her 80s.
Leighton died of heart failure aged 65 in 1896. His final, unfinished portrait of Dene as Ovid’s heartbroken nymph Clytie was placed on his coffin. Dene herself died in 1899, aged just 39. She had suffered from anaemia — an explanation for that pale skin — but the cause of death, following a severe abdominal inflammation, is unknown.
But she continues to fascinate us. negev and Koren conclude: ‘What appealed to the Victorians appeals 120 years later. no less than her erotic allure, Flaming June reflects a form of escapism, a yearning for peace and tranquillity, the ultimate poster for life away from it all.’