In this artwork, how is the Reception discussed?
The painting was an immediate success for Leighton when he presented it at the 1855 summer exhibition of the Royal Academy of Arts in London where it received near-universal acclaim. Queen Victoria purchased it on the first day of the exhibition for 600 guineas. The National Gallery notes Victoria's diary entry about the painting: "There was a very big picture by a man called Leighton. It is a beautiful painting, quite reminding one of a Paul Veronese, so bright and full of light. Albert was enchanted with it—so much so that he made me buy it." The English artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote that the work proved Leighton's "great power of rich arrangement." His brother, the art critic and writer William Rossetti, was not as enchanted: "His picture has largeness, but not greatness; style, but not intensity; design rather than thought; arrangement rather than conception: it is individual, not specially original."
Royal Academy of Arts Paul Veronese Dante Gabriel Rossetti Albert National Gallery William Rossetti Queen Victoria