In Greek mythology, Erato, one of the nine Muses, was the goddess of music, song, and dance — her name taken from eratos, meaning lovely or desired. Fittingly, Erato was part of a decorative scheme Frederic, Lord Leighton created in 1886 for the ceiling of the “Greek Parlor”, the music room of Henry Marquand, a railroad investor, banker, Wall Street broker, real estate agent, and the second president of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose vast fortune afforded an almost limitless budget for the decorations of his mansion on Madison Avenue (fig. 1). Each room was themed: an English Renaissance drawing room hung with late sixteenth-century tapestries, a Japanese room for Marquand’s collection of Asian art, and a smoking room in Moroccan style. In 1884 Marquand commissioned renowned artist and Leighton’s friend, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, to decorate his music room in a classical style, telling the artist that money was no object. Alma-Tadema designed a striking suite of twenty-nine pieces of furniture — the centerpiece being a magnificent piano (the suite was sold, New York, Sotheby Parke Bernet, 26 March 1980, lot 535, the piano now at The Clark, Williamstown, Massachusetts). The lid was inlaid with the names of Apollo and the nine Muses, and this likely dictated the choice of subject for Leighton’s ceiling, which was commissioned to be installed directly above the instrument (fig. 2).

Although Leighton’s vast decorations, painted in 1872 for the lunettes of the South Court of the South Kensington Museum, The Arts of Industry, are well-known, a handful of his domestic decorations are less famous. In the early 1800s he painted two large friezes, Music and Dance, for the drawing room at 1 South Audley Street, the London house of his patron Stewart Hodgson, as well as three panels of dancing classical figures on golden backgrounds for 52 Prince’s Gate, the home of the avant-garde collectors Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Eustace Smith (sold Christie’s, London, 7 June 1996, lots 569-71). Both of these decorations and another frieze for the boardroom of the Thames Conservancy Board at Trinity Square were part of projects by the architect George Aitchison, who also designed Leighton’s magnificent studio on Melbury Road. Alma-Tadema had presumably seen one or several of these schemes, and was confident that Leighton was the right artist for the Marquand decoration.

In August 1884 Alma-Tadema wrote to Marquand about the project:

“At last I can give you some decided news about the ceiling. Sir Frederic [sic] Leighton proposes to paint for you on a gold ground or silver if you chose, 7 life-size figures, 3 in the big panel [sic] and 2 in each of the smaller ones. The distance being small. The spectator seeing everything clearly. Those figures will have to be carefully executed as he only can do it and he will squeeze your order in for next summer. He will undertake to do it for the sum of £2,000.”¹

Leighton’s work was in such demand and his attention was so divided, that it wasn’t until January 1886 that the artist could at last report on his design for the tripartite decoration in a letter to Marquand:

² In February Alma-Tadema had the first opportunity to see the artist’s preparatory work on Marquand’s paintings, which may be those studies capturing the pose, drapery, and movement of Erato now at the Leighton House Museum (fig. 3). Leighton’s conception was further illustrated by an oil sketch (private collection) which helped design the color scheme and the painted border and wood framing that would surround it once installed.³ As the artist reportedly described to a visitor to his studio, the muses of the central panel would be in “primary colours [sic]” of red and blue while “in the side pictures light greens, yellows, and pinks prevail.” ⁴

The ceiling decorations were painted on three canvases in Leighton’s London studio, and were photographed in an incomplete state with the figures undraped (fig. 4). It was the artist’s usual practice to first paint figures nude and later to “dress” them. As the art critic Marion Henry Spielmann noted of the artist’s methods “the canvas is for the first time produced, and thereon is enlarged the design, the form of the outlines and forms already obtained— and then highly finishing the whole figure in warm monochrome from the life…. although all this careful painting is shortly to be hidden with draperies.” ⁵ With Erato, Leighton builds on early experimentation with sculptural yet fluid, semi-transparent drapery both suggesting and revealing the Muse’s body in gentle movement. Each swaying or weighted fold of fabric is perfectly executed and reveals labored study. Indeed, as Leighton told a friend, "I can paint a figure in three days, but it may take me thirty to drape it." ⁶ With Erato the swaying costume suggests the sensual movement and pleasure of the Muse responding to the plucked lyre, a joyful pendant to the wild Terpsichore and contrast to the stoic figures of the central panel. ⁷ The revealing effect of Leighton’s drapery is also seen in Nausicaa of 1878 (private collection) in which white fabric falls between the model’s legs accentuating their shape, and an Idyll of 1881 (private collection) where clinging fabric follows the form of languid figure at rest (1881, private collection). ⁸ In these works, like Erato, Leighton takes inspiration from antique sources, but did not intend them to be didactic copies of specific antique sculpture nor a narrative, character-driven exercise; instead, they revoke classical models while experimenting with painterly expression.

Leighton’s aesthetic approach for the celiling decoration extended to the background. Despite Marquand’s request that the artist place his figures within a sylvan environment, Leighton was adamant that the background should be gold:

⁹ The gold background was essential to the works’ design, as Leighton explained: “if you look into it you will find it a luminous surface…. Viewing the pictures from this point you get a brilliant effect, like the brightness of day upon it; if from the other side you observe the light resolves itself into the rich, warm glow of the setting sun”. ¹⁰ The artist was so committed to the gold program that he hoped Marquand would add additional gold decoration to the ceiling rafters built to hold his paintings.

The canvases were completed in time to be exhibited at the 1886 summer exhibition at the Royal Academy, where they were titled Decoration in Painting for Ceiling and the Autumn Exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. At both venues the works were well received, as they would be hanging in Marquand’s home for decades. Following Marquand’s death in 1902 but before the home's demolition, the decorations were preserved. Thankfully, because Leighton did not paint the canvases in situ, they were able to be carefully removed from the ceiling. Marquand’s Muses were soon sold at auction among thousands of other items from the home and bought by the railway tycoon James Ross of Montreal for his French chateau-style home. Like Marquand, Ross was an important supporter of the arts of his city, serving as president of the Art Association of Montreal (now the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts) and a collector of Old Master paintings and works by Edward Burne-Jones. Upon Ross’ death his son John Kenneth “Jack” Ross inherited the family’s art and fortune, which he spent on philanthropy and such personal passions as deep-sea fishing, yachting and horse-racing. Over fifteen years Jack spent all but $300 of his $16 million inheritance and faced bankruptcy, forcing the sale of the remaining art collection in 1928, when the Marquand ceiling decorations were last seen together. They were then acquired by Nathan Mitchell, one of the most prolific auction buyers of the early twentieth century and who often worked with the dealer William Sampson. It may have been at this time that the central panel was cut down and the side panels dissociated from the campaign to create multiple, independent works. Originally the three canvases together measured 7 feet by 20 feet, impressive as ceiling decoration but somewhat unwieldy for personal collections. Some were installed in the Dramatic Hall of the South East Gas Board in Croydon, only to be sold again and joining private collections. When the three canvases Melpomene - Muse of Tragic and Lyric Poetry, Terpsichore - Muse of Dance and Thalia - Muse of Comedy were last offered at auction (sold in these rooms, 29 October 1987, lot 185), they were described as replicas “developed from his Marquand Triptych Illustrating Music.” Richard Ormond’s catalogue raisonné also lists them as replicas, but there is no reason to assume that these pictures, and Erato, are not the original ceiling pictures, particularly as there is no record of Leighton creating replicas (a practice he disliked in general) of this complex series of works. ¹¹

The collaboration of Marquand with Alma Tadema and Leighton, two of the most celebrated artists of the Victorian era, created an achievement which received international notice. Until recently Erato was the only Muse to remain untraced, last noticed in an Italian collection in the 1970s. Rescued from destruction in the early twentieth century and now rediscovered, Erato and her fellow Muses have earned new life as independent works of their own, a lasting testament to Leighton’s lifelong interest in classicism and its aesthetic inspiration.

¹ Letter from Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema to Henry Marquand, 2 March 1884, Allen Marquand Papers, Subseries 8B; Henry Gurdon Marquand, Princeton University Library, box 48, folder 3, as quoted in Morris and Goodin, p. 147.
² Letter from Leighton to Marquand, 17 January 1886, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives, as quoted in Kisluk-Grosheide 1994, pp. 160-2.
³ Morris and Goodin, pp. 157-8.
⁴ The President's Pictures, An Interview with Sir Frederick Leighton," p. 6.
⁵ As quoted in Rhys, p. 43.
⁶ J. Harlow, The Charm of Leighton, 1913, p. 38 as quoted in Richard Jenkyns, Dignity and Decadence, Victorian Art and the Classical Inheritance, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1992, p. 214.
⁷ Ormond and Ormond, p. 124.
⁸ Goodin and Morris, p. 165.
⁹ Letter from Leighton to Marquand, 23 May 1886, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives, as quoted in Kisluk-Grosheide 1994, p. 162.
¹⁰ The President's Pictures, An Interview with Sir Frederick Leighton," p. 6.
¹¹ Goodin and Morris, pp. 161 and 165.

A Gold Ground Tradition

LAUNCH SLIDESHOW