Frederic, Lord Leighton, 'The Villa Malta, Rome', 1860s

The Villa Malta in Rome was once owned by the religious order of the Knights of Malta, but in the 1860s it was owned by the Bavarian royal family. Romantic notions of medieval knights or King Ludwig I of Bavaria, or indeed the writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe who visited the villa, may have inspired the British artist Frederic, Lord Leighton, in his choice of the villa as a subject for an oil sketch. However, it has also been suggested that it may have been an exercise in free, spontaneous but structurally rigorous oil sketching in the manner of the French landscape painter Camille Corot.

From his youth Leighton travelled widely throughout Europe and North Africa. He had met Corot in Paris in the mid-1850s. Leighton seems to have been strongly influenced by the French painter’s approach to capturing the fleeting effects of the Mediterranean light. He would come to own a number of works by Corot, including the remarkably freely painted Four Times of Day now in the National Gallery Collection. In the winter of 1858–9 he was in Rome, painting a portrait of a Roman model nicknamed La Nanna. This may have been inspired by Corot’s paintings of Italian models. Leighton’s earliest datable sketches are from a trip to Capri in 1859, at a time when he was influenced by Corot’s oil sketches. Therefore, The Villa Malta may have been painted after 1859.

Unlike most open-air oil sketches, those by Leighton do not appear to have been made as studies for more worked-up oil paintings. Artists producing oil sketches from the early eighteenth century onwards did so as the first stage of the process of creating larger oils and not as works in themselves. For Leighton, however, they seem to have been more personal. Perhaps they were intended to be mementos of specific places and visits. Leighton framed many of his sketches in simple gold frames and displayed them around his studio. This sketch is visible in a photograph of Leighton’s studio in Kensington, London, taken in 1896. After his death, the contents of his studio were sold at auction, including this work.

Here, Leighton focused on the mid-ground, only blocking in the foreground. The composition is carefully constructed. The strong verticals of the cypresses mirror the verticality of the tower of the villa, positioned slightly off from the centre of the work. The thick, dense application of paint on the buildings conveys their solidity and texture. For the deep-green foliage, Leighton dabbed his brush on the canvas to give a sense of volume.