Colour Sketch for 'The Triumph of Music'

This colour sketch relates to Leighton's early major exhibition painting The Triumph of Music, through which Orpheus charms the underworld with his playing. The finished work was part of Leighton's attempt to establish himself as a painter of classical myth on the grand scale, following the enormous success of his debut Cimabue's Madonna of 1855. Music was a subject of personal significance to Leighton, himself an accomplished cellist and singer, and the Orpheus myth — in which music literally overcomes death — carried emotional weight for him beyond its function as a pictorial subject. Colour sketches like this served to resolve the most demanding aspects of the composition before the large canvas was committed: the arrangement of the underworld setting, the distribution of figures in shadow and light, and the choice of colour temperature for a scene of supernatural illumination. Held at Leighton House, the sketch represents the earliest phase of his mature mythological ambition.

The sketch works through the central compositional and lighting challenge: how to represent the supernatural illumination of the underworld as Orpheus plays. Leighton uses warm, concentrated light around the musician figure contrasting with cooler, darker surrounding forms. The paint is applied with urgency, capturing colour relationships rather than resolving surfaces.