Flammender Juni

Leighton painted this in 1895, near the end of his life, at the height of the grand classical style he was famous for in Victorian London. A woman sleeps curled tight in a chair in a blaze of orange, the sea shining behind her. The idea came from a real moment. He saw a tired model dozing in a chair in an awkward, folded pose and made a quick sketch of it. What happened to the painting afterwards is the surprising part. When Victorian art fell out of fashion in the mid 20th century, it vanished. It was found again in the early 1960s bricked into a space over a fireplace in a house in London. The young Andrew Lloyd Webber spotted it in a shop and wanted to buy it, but his grandmother refused to lend him the fifty pounds, saying she would not have Victorian junk in her flat. In 1963 it was bought for about two thousand pounds and taken to the Museo de Arte de Ponce in Puerto Rico, where it is now the best-known picture in the collection.