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The Deathly Sleep of Frederic Leighton's Painted Women

Abstract In this article, the author argues that, towards the end of his life, Frederic Leighton (president of the Royal Academy from 1878 to 1896) became increasingly preoccupied with painting sleeping and entranced women as a way of simulating death. In turn, death in Leighton's art comes to look like pleasured sinking into unconsciousness accompanied by an irreversible bodily dissolution, which is registered in the multiplying of the ‘endless folds’ in the figures’ drapery. The author analyses key examples of paintings by Leighton of sleeping and sleepy women—namely, Cymon and Iphigenia (1884), The Garden of the Hesperides (1892) and Flaming June (1895)—within the context of late Victorian anxieties around sleep and its resemblance to death. In these works, Leighton twists and elongates the sleeping women's necks and limbs to make them appear dangerously serpentine, while increasing the activity of the drapery to register both the meanderings of the subconscious and the dissolution of the body. The drapery disorganizes classical form, taking on the appearance of liquid, hair and melted wax.