Flaming June, 1895

The print

Printed by theprintspace, the East London fine-art lab trusted by artists, galleries and museums. Each print is made to order on Hahnemühle Photo Rag, a heavyweight 308gsm paper made from 100% cotton, with a soft matte surface and a natural white tone, using archival pigment inks made to last for generations.

Photo Rag suits this painting especially well. Leighton’s surface is smooth and almost glassy, and smooth cotton adds no texture of its own, so the fine weave of his canvas and the shift of the orange from flame to shadow come through exactly as they are.

Sizes available:

50×50cm, 20×20″, fine art print, open edition
70×70cm, 28×28″, fine art print, open edition
100×100cm, 39×39″, fine art print, open edition

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The story

Frederic Leighton (1830–1896) was the grandest figure in Victorian art. He was President of the Royal Academy for eighteen years, was knighted and then made a baronet, and in January 1896 became the first painter raised to the peerage. He died the next day.

Flaming June was shown at the Royal Academy in 1895. Leighton turned a tired model’s pose into a sinuous curl under sheer orange drapery, a figure of summer heat; critics called the pose impossible. Victorian painting soon fell out of fashion. The picture spent fifteen years on loan to the Ashmolean in Oxford, passed through dealers, and in 1963 was bought for the Museo de Arte de Ponce in Puerto Rico, which still owns it. The canvas is about 120 cm square, so even our largest print is a little smaller than the real thing.