In 1860, when Leighton, at the age of thirty, definitely settled in England, art was alive in two distinctly new directions. Ruskin was writing, the Pre-Raphaelites were painting, and Prince Albert, besides encouraging individual painters and sculptors, had, through his fine taste and the exercise of his patronage in every branch of art, developed an interest in good design as it can be carried out in manufactures and various crafts. Leighton followed the Prince Consort's initiatory lead; and, by showing the same cultured and catholic zeal in her welfare, was enabled to continue and develop Prince Albert's important work, thereby widening and elevating the whole outlook of art in England. It has at times been asserted that Leighton was greater as a President of the Royal Academy than he was as a painter. It would be truer, I think, to say that it was because he was so great as an artist in the highest, widest meaning of the word, so sincere a workman, that he stands unrivalled as a President. In a letter to a friend, dated May 1888, ten years after he had been elected President, he wrote', I am a workman first and an official afterwards', and it was, I believe, because he carried into his official duties the true artist's warmth, sincerity, and zeal for his special vocation, that his influence as an official was never deadened by theoretic red-tapeism, nor by secondary or side issues. Leighton ever flew straight to the mark, and the mark he aimed at in his presidential work was ever the highest essential point from the view he also took as an artist. His official duties, carried out with so great an amount of scrupulous conscientiousness, would have gone far to fill the entire life of an ordinary human being; yet these duties were, to the last, subordinated in his personal existence to his self-imposed duties as a painter and a sculptor.
