Pot-Pourri, 1874. Oil on canvas; 39 x 39 inches (99 x 99 cm). Private collection, ex-Sotheby's. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
Pot-Pourri was exhibited first at the Royal Academy in 1874, no. 129, and then later at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1878. The painting features two young women wearing eighteenth century style dress preparing the aromatic pot-pourri that was used in homes to disguise offensive odours. Leslie has been highly successful in rendering the textures of the women's muslin skirts with their silk overdresses. The standing woman to the left smells the mixture while the younger woman, possibly a housemaid, is seated in a chair awaiting her judgment. As Christopher Newall points out, the interior is also reminiscent of the eighteenth century and could possibly be a room in Leslie's own home. "The silver sugar shaker, the high-backed chair and the wooden table with the turned legs" are redolent of this time period, as are the "pale colour used to decorate the interior, the off-white of the Georgian-style sash windows and the skirting-board, and the plain stone flags of the floor" — all these "suggest the Queen Anne style of the 1880s as exemplified by the work of designers such as Richard Norman Shaw" (Newall 322).
This is very much an Aesthetic Movement painting based on its emphasis on refined feminine beauty and finely painted decorative accessories. Unlike the work of Aesthetic painters like Albert Moore, who used classical settings for their compositions, Leslie has chosen the eighteenth century as his preferred time period. Leslie had previously explored Aesthetic Classicism for a short period of time in works such as Nausicca and her Maids of 1871. Leslie's specialty, however, soon became domestic genre scenes in an Aesthetic mode. He was not unique in this because other Aesthetic painters, such as Thomas Armstrong, would also occasionally chose women clothed in eighteenth century dress for their compositions. Leslie's good friend Marcus Stone also chose fashionably dressed woman in eighteenth century costumes for his paintings, but these tended to be more conventional genre scenes. Basically the purpose of all the artists associated with the Aesthetic Movement was to achieve beauty for itself and the rejection of the sentiment and morality in art that featured in many of the genre pictures of the time. Even when some narrative content was retained, the emphasis was still on achieving a harmonious arrangement of form and tones, and the overall decorative effect of the work was still its predominant purpose. It is interesting that Leslie has chosen to include the more elaborate Imari porcelain for his vases and bowls rather than the blue-and-white china favoured by D. G. Rossetti and James Whistler, two of the most prominent artists associated with the Aesthetic Movement. Imari style porcelain, whether made in Japan or a European imitation, is reflective of the "Japonisme" that was fashionable at this time
When it was shown in 1874 at the Royal Academy the critic of The Times described it as "one of those graceful, old-world subjects which this painter has made his own, and which are best embodied in just such fragrant, leisurely, and summer occupations as this of making sweeter odours of the deaths of sweet roses" (12). A reviewer for The Architect found Leslie's painting poetic: "Fancy and poetic sentiment then are the objects of our search, and here we shall have to make short work, for of a truth the 'minor poets' of the Academy are not very strong. Mr. Leslie, however, is in his quiet way poetic; the spirit of summer is in his pleasant picture of two fair damsels making Pot Pourri (129) from all the scented growths of the old-fashioned garden, that basks under the sunshine outside the cool hall where they busy themselves thus daintily" (276).
The Art Journal felt this work displayed a merit of a rare kind: "Mr. Leslie's Pot-Pourri shows a return to tasks more within his means than the classic themes he has gracefully played with during the last two years. The painter understands thoroughly the sources of a certain delicate beauty proper to a refined type of English girlhood, and he has the power –genuinely artistic in its kind – to bring all the materials of the composition into accord with the dainty spirit that inspires it. A remarkable feature and attraction of this and other pictures by Mr. Leslie is the unforced impress of brightness and gladness he manages to leave upon the composition. Here, for instance, behind the figures of the two girls engaged in sorting and preparing the rose-leaves for pot-pourri, the drawn blind upon one of the windows is cleverly employed to emphasize the warm sunshine it affects to exclude. Such a bright, joyous harmony as Mr. Leslie has secured in this picture, with the rose-leaves and the space of garden behind, and the great jars of Oriental china, must be reckoned as a merit a very rare kind" (163).
F. G. Stephens in The Athenaeum felt this was Leslie's best contribution to the Royal Academy exhibition of 1874:
Pot-pourri (129) will be a centre of attraction. Two fair and plump damsels – such as Mr. Leslie loves to paint, and no one paints so well, or half so well as he, although we are not certain that the public will feel grateful for many more of the kind – are busily occupied, in a summer-lighted chamber, the effect in which is exquisitely given, in preparing rose-leaves for the vases of china, which, painted here to admiration, though lacking a little of solidity, stand before and beside the girls, with bowls and beakers of quaint devices and delicious tints. One of the operatives tests a tray full of leaves, to know if they are dry; the other lady holds a mortar, in which condiments proper to the manufacture in progress are pounded. There is a charming breadth together with extreme delicacy of tint and tone in this enjoyable picture. [602]
A critic for The Builder went so far as to say that no Royal Academy exhibition would be complete without one of Leslie's delightful visions of young womanhood:
Who would care to see any exhibition of pictures that did not contain some such delightful visions as Mr. G. D. Leslie, A., succeeds in year after year heading a list of? On no former occasions have his nice innocent-looking softly sweet-fair damsels of the last-gone century been seen to better advantage than now; occupied in the important home manufacture of delicious perfume Pot-pourri (129), in times unblessed by Rimmell, or Piesse & Lubin. They seem born for no harder labour than this, of pounding rose-leaves and lavender with cunningly selected spices, destined to help winter pass away, and to keep them just alive until summer sunshine returns, with the only atmosphere that would seem to fit them; for their world is a garden, their home a greenhouse, and their only care is for some beautiful old china that helps very much in giving variety to the agreeable colourings lent by the artist's treatment of ordinary but extraordinarily pleasant facts. [430]
While admiring the work, however, The Illustrated London News, cautioned Leslie about being too repetitive in his themes:
Mr. G. D. Leslie has two more young ladies of the last century; this time engaged at a sunny bay window (the diffused light from which in the apartment is admirably rendered) overlooking a trim garden, making Pot-pourri (129) for the china jars of the family from heaps of rose petals, lavender, orris root, and so forth. Mr. Leslie renders the sweet naïveté and innocence of pure maidenhood with a rare delicacy. He alone enjoys the entrée to an eighteenth century arcadia to which none of his rivals or followers has found the key. He reminds us of "Pamela" Richardson, only that the painter's creations are far less elaborate in details than those of the novelist. A critic of mere technicalities might nevertheless complain of the artist's pictures generally, that the contours are not faultless, the modelling merely hinted at, the colouring rather opaque and faded. Mr. Leslie may be advised against relaxing his efforts, as likewise against remaining too long in the same groove. [446]
Bibliography
"Another Look at the Royal Academy." The Builder XXXII (23 May 1874): 429-30.
Cowling, Mary. Victorian Figurative Painting: Domestic Genre and the Victorian Social Scene. London: Andreas Papadakis Publisher, 2000, 54&56.
Newall, Christopher. Victorian Pictures. London: Sotheby's (6 November 1996): 322-23.
"Paintings at the Royal Academy. –II." The Architect XI (16 May 1874): 276-77.
"The Royal Academy." The Art Journal New Series XIII (June, 1874): 161-66.
"The Royal Academy Exhibition." The Illustrated London News LXIV (9 May 1874): 446-47.
"The Royal Academy Exhibition." The Times (2 May 1874): 12.
Stephens, Frederic George. "The Royal Academy." The Athenaeum No. 2427 (2 May 1874): 599-602.
Created 9 August 2023