Farewell

Farewell (1922) is one of Edmund Blair Leighton's final exhibited works, painted when he was seventy-one years old. By 1922 the Edwardian art world had been transformed by the First World War and the ascendancy of modernism, and the kind of romantic medievalism that Leighton practiced had become deeply unfashionable. The war itself — which had devastated the young men of Britain — had given farewell scenes a new and bitter dimension that Leighton's sweetly romantic treatment could not entirely accommodate. Nonetheless, Leighton continued to exhibit at the Royal Academy and maintained a loyal audience among collectors who valued pictorial craftsmanship and narrative clarity over avant-garde experiment. The Williamson Art Gallery and Museum in Birkenhead holds this late work, which demonstrates that Leighton maintained his technical standards into old age. Farewell belongs to the long series of leave-taking and departure scenes he had painted throughout his career, from Un Gage d'Amour onward. The continuity of subject and treatment in his late work reflects both artistic conviction and commercial pragmatism: Leighton knew his market and continued to serve it with consistent quality.

Leighton's late technique is remarkably consistent with his earlier work: the smooth Academic surface, careful drapery rendering, and precise figure modelling that characterised his best period are maintained. Any loosening of execution that age might produce is restrained by his lifelong disciplined practice. The late medieval costumes are as carefully researched and rendered as in his early career work.