Colour Sketch for 'Boy with Shield Holding a Vase'

Colour Sketch for 'Boy with Shield Holding a Vase', painted in oil on canvas in 1868 and held at Leighton House, is a preparatory work for a composition depicting a boy in ancient costume — likely Greek or Roman — carrying a shield and vase, a combination of objects that suggests the setting of a household or sanctuary. Leighton made numerous preparatory sketches for compositions involving single figures in classical settings, and these studies were as much explorations of the relationship between a figure and the objects around them as they were preparations for specific exhibition works. The boy as a subject offered an opportunity to depict the youthful male figure with different physical characteristics and emotional registers from the adult male ideal of his mythological subjects.

The colour sketch format for a single-figure composition with objects served to establish the spatial relationship between the figure and the held objects — shield and vase requiring different handling distances and orientations — and the tonal distribution of a composition in which human figure, reflective shield, and ceramic vase present very different surface qualities. The handling is exploratory and responsive rather than systematically finished.