The Frick’s Whistlers have a hot visitor from Puerto Rico this summer. The pride and joy of a bizarrely Anglo-centric Museo de Arte de Ponce, Flaming June is the late and much-loved masterpiece of the eminent Victorian Frederic Lord Leighton, the first British artist to be raised to the peerage. His evocation of summer in her clinging, scorching orange frock occupies the opposite end of the painterly thermometer to James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s obstinately chilly pinks and grays; its square format within a templed gold frame, not to mention its classicism and sensuous Mediterranean setting, all contrast with the American’s society ladies standing erect within his vertical petri dish slices of modern life. What these brother aesthetes share is an almost abstracting emphasis on the symphonic effect of color. But while Whistler feels so modern next to the “Colonel of the Royal Academy” (as he dubbed Leighton) he is equally and somehow seamlessly connected to Rembrandt and Van Dyck in the adjoining gallery in a way that leaves the 19th-century Leighton a remote period piece. Victorian aesthetic values fell from grace rapidly and (it seemed) irredeemably until a 1960s proto-postmodern revival of interest in English academicism. Just then the Puerto Rican statesman and philanthropist Luis Ferré was pulling together an art museum for his native Ponce. The recently rediscovered painting could be picked up for a fraction of the price of an Impressionist in a daring departure from safe taste. Flaming June is the centerpiece of a collection of Victoriana considered one of the finest outside of the UK. DAVID COHEN
On view, together with an oil sketch of the same composition from a private collection, June 9 to September 6, 2015 at 1 East 70th Street, between Madison and Fifth Avenues.
Frederic Leighton, Flaming June, 1895. Oil on canvas, 47 x 47 inches. Museo de Arte de Ponce
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