Colour Sketch for 'Cimabue's Celebrated Madonna is Carried in Procession through the Streets of Florence', 1854

Colour Sketch for 'Cimabue's Celebrated Madonna', executed around 1854 and held at Leighton House, is a preparatory work for the painting that made Leighton famous when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1855 — purchased by Queen Victoria, it launched his career at the age of 24. The finished painting depicted the medieval Florentine painter Cimabue's Madonna carried in public procession through the streets of Florence, surrounded by an enormous crowd of historical figures. This colour sketch worked out the complex multi-figure compositional problem before the large final canvas was undertaken. The subject glorified the birth of Western art history in thirteenth-century Florence, a theme that appealed to the Victorian narrative of artistic progress culminating in Renaissance genius.

A colour sketch for a large, complex multi-figure composition serves to establish tonal organisation, colour relationships between many figures in varied costumes, and the spatial recession of a crowd moving through an urban street. The challenges are considerable: keeping all elements coherent and legible at the scale of a sketch while planning for the much larger finished work. The handling is necessarily looser than the finished canvas to allow rapid decision-making.