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Frederic, Lord Leighton

1830 - 1896

Frederic, Baron Leighton of Stretton was a great admirer of Italian Renaissance painting and showed, for his time, an advanced appreciation of the early Italian painters, including Cimabue and Giotto. He drew heavily on 15th- and 16th-century sources in working on Cimabue's celebrated Madonna. Ironically, the altarpiece shown by Leighton (now in the Uffizi) is today recognised to be by Duccio, not Cimabue.

The vivid landscape oil sketches which Leighton made during much of his career, but rarely exhibited, are less well known than his large-scale figure paintings.