The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (268 page)

 
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(1837–1911).
French-born painter and engraver who settled in England in 1863 (encouraged by
Whistler
) and became a British citizen in 1881, although he never acquired fluency in English. His chief importance was as an influential teacher (particularly of etching) at the
Slade
School, where he was Professor 1876–92 in succession to
Poynter
. He encouraged a respect for the tradition of the Old Masters.

 
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(1881–1919).
German sculptor. His early work was in a fairly conservative academic manner, but when he was living in Paris from 1910 to 1914 he found a much more personal style, influenced by the formal simplifications of
Archipenko
,
Brancusi
, and
Modigliani
, although still essentially in the tradition of
Rodin
and
Maillol
. It is exemplified in the extremely attenuated forms, angular pose, and melancholic expression of his
Kneeling Woman
(MOMA, New York, 1911). On the outbreak of the First World War he returned to Germany and worked in a hospital, the suffering he witnessed being reflected in the poignancy of his last works. The war brought him to a state of acute depression and he committed suicide in 1919. Lehmbruck often worked in marble, but he was by temperament a modeller rather than a carver, working in clay over a spindly armature, and several of his works were cast in artificial stone to preserve the texture of the clay. With
Barlach
he ranks as the outstanding German
Expressionist
sculptor. Lehmbruck also did etchings and lithographs, painted, and wrote poetry. There is a museum dedicated to him in his native Duisburg.

 
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(1844–1900).
German painter, one of the leading exponents of
Realism
in his country. His meeting with
Courbet
at Munich in 1869 exercised a decisive influence on his art in both style and subject-matter, and he moved to Paris to work with him, although only briefly because of the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. Disgusted with the intrigues of the Munich art world, from 1873 Leibl withdrew to the Bavarian countryside, where he found his favourite models in the simple country folk, as in his best-known work
Three Women in Church
(Kunsthalle, Hamburg, 1878–82). This is in the hard, objective manner of his so-called ‘
Holbein
period’; later his technique became more fluid. Leibl also painted a number of portraits. His work is well represented in the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne, his birthplace.

 
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(1830–96).
(Baron Leighton )
English painter and sculptor, one of the dominant figures of late Victorian art. He travelled widely in Europe as a boy and studied art in Frankfurt, Rome, and Paris. It was not until 1859 that he settled in London, but he had earlier made his name with
Cimabue's Madonna Carried in Procession through the Streets of Florence
, exhibited at the 1855
Royal Academy
exhibition and bought by Queen Victoria (it is now on loan from the royal collection to the National Gallery, London). Thereafter Leighton was matched in worldly success perhaps only by
Millais
, his almost exact contemporary; he became President of the Royal Academy in 1878, was made a baronet in 1886, and a few days before he died was raised to the peerage, the first English artist to be so honoured. Intelligent, cultured, and of distinguished appearance, he was one of the chief adornments of London society. Leighton's varied output included portraits and book illustrations, but he is best known for his paintings of classical Greek subjects, the finest of which are distinguished by magnificently opulent colouring as well as splendid draughtsmanship (
The Garden of the Hesperides
, Lady Lever Art Gal., Port Sunlight, 1892). As a sculptor he is best known for the bronze
Athlete Struggling with a Python
(1874–7), which can be seen in Leighton House (on loan from the Tate Gallery), the sumptuously decorated house and studio he built in Holland Park Road, Kensington, now a Leighton museum.

 
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