4587. Frederic Leighton to RB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 27, 156–157.
2 Orme Square, Bayswater,
January 29, ’60.
Dear Browning, —It is not till the other day that I at last received from Cartwright your Rome address, or I should have written to you some time ago; before it was too late to wish you a merry Xmas and health, happiness, and all prosperity for yourself and Mrs. Browning in the present year. I don’t know that I have anything worth telling you to write about, for all the little incidents which have their importance for the space of a day, all appear too trivial to write about after a lapse of a week or two. Still I write to assure you I keep up my most affectionate remembrance of you, and to beg that you won’t entirely forget me. I received your kind letter [1] at the beginning of the winter, and was truly concerned to hear that Mrs. Browning had been so alarmingly unwell; I trust that the air of Rome, which once before was so beneficial to her, will have strengthened and recruited her again this time. Dear old Rome! how I wish I could fly over and spend a week or so with you all in my old haunts. I suppose I shall never be entirely weaned of that yearning affection I entertain for Italy, and particularly for Rome and the “Comarea.” [2] You must have it all to yourselves this year. What a delight it must be to see neither Brown, Jones, nor Robinson.
I suppose Cartwright, Pantaleone, and Odo Russell are the staple of your convivial circle; and, by-the-bye, how much more freely Mrs. Browning must breathe this winter without certain daily visitations which I remember last year. I wonder whether you will write to me and tell me what you are doing, socially and artistically; everything about you will interest me.
As for myself, you would not believe it, in spite of my old habits of continental life and sunshine, I take very kindly to England; it agrees with me capitally, really better than Rome. I am fattening [à] vue d’œil. [3] The light is certainly not irreproachable, still I can work, and don’t find that my ideas get particularly rusty. On the contrary, for colour, certainly my sense seems to be sharpened in this atmosphere.
I am soldiering too. I drill three times a week, and make as bad a soldier as anybody else. [4] The Sartoris, you know, are no longer in London [5] —a great loss to all their friends—but I go pretty often to see them in the country, and have spent many a happy day there in the course of the winter. By-the-bye, do you hear or know anything of those two drawings I did of you and Mrs. Browning? [6] If so, will you give the one of you to Hookes [7] that he may send with other things he has? And now, dear Browning, “vi levero l’incomodo,” [8] and will bring this very tedious epistle to a close. Remember me most kindly to Mrs. Browning, to Cartwright and his wife, to Odo Russell, B_____, [9] Pantaleone with better half, Storeys, and last, but not least, dear little Hatty! Love to Peninni; tell me about him. Good-bye.
Believe me, very affectionately yours,
Fred Leighton.
I am hand-and-glove with all my enemies the pre-Raphaelites. Woolner sends his affectionate remembrances.
Text: Emilie I. Barrington, The Life, Letters and Work of Frederic Leighton (London, 1906), II, 51–52.
2. Sic, for Comarca, a province in the environs of Rome, which includes “the districts of Tivoli, Albano, and Subiaco” (The English Cyclopædia, 1855, 4, 311).
3. “Visibly.”
4. As a volunteer rifleman (see letter 4417, note 18).
5. The Sartorises’ country residence at this time was Westbury House, located between East Meon and West Meon, Hampshire, southwest of London. Leighton’s portrait of their daughter, May, was painted at Westbury in the early 1860’s.
6. These portraits of the Brownings were drawn the previous spring (see letter 4370, note 22, and letter 4383, note 12).
7. Sic, for Hooker; see letter 4291, note 12.
8. “I’ll take my leave”; or “I’ll stop bothering you.”
9. Possibly, Felix Bovet (1824–1903), Swiss-born writer and traveller who was an occasional guest at dinners given by W.C. Cartwright in Rome. In a journal entry of 13 January 1860, Cartwright describes Bovet as “the correspondent of the ‘Debats’”; that is, the French newspaper Le Journal des Debats (ms at Northamptonshire).
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