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Flaming June – Lord Frederic Leighton

Flaming June, is widely considered to be Frederic Lord Freigton’s magnum opus today and vividly portrays the artist’s classicist nature. The painting starkly recalls one of Michelangelo’s “Night” in the Medici chapel in Florence. However, according to Leighton the set up was not intentionally designed; it came about naturally when his exhausted model Dorothy Dene was resting.

Dorothy Dene who was chosen by Leighton as the one woman“whose face and figure most closely tallied with his ideal” was also an English actress, and modeled for many of Leighton’s works. Dene was also was known as the most beautiful woman in England in the 1890s. Rumors implied that Leighton was in love with Dene before he died, but the artist and the model could never be married because of the long gap in their years – Leighton was seventy and Dene was only twenty-eight!

Flaming June was auctioned in the 1960s, during a period of time known to be difficult for selling Victorian era paintings, where it failed to sell for its low reserve price of $140 USD. But the painting gained immense popularity with the revival of the Victorian Era and was rescued from obscurity when it was purchased by the Ponce Museum of Art in Puerto Rico, where it currently resides.