, year by year, is closed. A few pictures seem to have
escaped the honours of exhibition. One,[8] _A Noble Lady of Venice_, in
possession of Lord Armstrong, does not appear to have been
exhibited. It is probably the picture which was sold at Christie's in
1875 for 950 guineas. A _Lady with Pomegranates_, which sold for 765
guineas at the sale of Baron Grant's pictures in 1877, does not appear
in our list of exhibited works; nor, it may be, are all the early
pictures included therein. But the official catalogues of the Royal
Academy May Exhibitions, and of the special Winter Exhibition devoted to
the artist's works, have been freely drawn upon for description, and to
the list of his life's work, as it appeared in the first edition of this
work, many additions have been made.

[Illustration: RIZPAH (1893)]

[Illustration: THE BRACELET (1894)
_By permission of Messrs. T. Agnew and Sons_]

[Illustration: FATIDICA (1894)
_By permission of Messrs. T Agnew and Sons_]

CHAPTER VI

HIS METHOD OF PAINTING

For particulars of the wonderfully thorough "method," which Leighton
used in preparing his pictures, we cannot do better than quote the
following admirable account by Mr. M. H. Spielmann (published during the
painter's life), which he has allowed us to reprint here.[9]

"I have said that the sense of line in composition, in figure and
drapery, is one of the chief qualities of the artist; and the conviction
that the method in which he places them upon canvas with such unerring
success--for it may be said that the President rarely, if ever, produces
an ugly form in a picture--would be both interesting and instructive,
prompted me to learn in what manner his effects are produced. This I
have done, having special regard to one of his Academy pictures, _The
Sibyl_, which, being a single figure, simplifies greatly the explanation
of the mode of procedure. This explanation holds good in every case, be
the composition great or small, elaborate or simple; the _modus
operandi_ is always the same.

[Illustration: A BACCHANTE (1896)
_By permission of Messrs. Henry Graves and Co._]

[Illustration: "HIT" (1893)
_By permission of "The Art Journal"_]

"Having by good fortune observed in a model an extraordinarily fine and
'Michelangelesque' formation of the hand and wrist--an articulation as
rare to find as it is anatomically beautiful and desirable--h