Cymon et Iphigénie

Leighton showed this in London in 1884, when he was president of the Royal Academy and the most honoured painter in Britain. The story comes from Boccaccio: a coarse young man called Cymon, whose name means the beast, stumbles on the sleeping Iphigenia one warm afternoon in May, and the sight of her turns him from a brute into a lover of beauty. Leighton stages it at dusk, the sky deep with the last warm light, and he took the moment seriously. He is said to have spent months looking across Europe for the right face, and found it in a young London actress, Dorothy Dene, who modelled for the sleeping figure. The canvas is more than three metres wide, and the reclining pose alone went through drawing after drawing before he settled it.