estion, the
father being anxious about the boy's possibilities, said, "He may become
as eminent as he pleases."

Few art students of our time appear to have encountered more fortunate
conditions, on the whole, than did Frederic Leighton in the years
immediately following. The Florentine school of fifty years ago,
however, was not the best for a beginner. It was full of mannerisms,
which a boy of that age was sure to pick up, and exaggerate on his own
account. At that time Bezzuoli and Servolini were the great lights and
directors of the Academy of the Fine Arts, and they delighted,
naturally, in so able and so apt a pupil; that he found it hard to shake
off their teaching becomes evident later.

Those who had the good fortune at any time to have heard Lord Leighton
describe his early wanderings in Europe, must have been struck by the
warmth of his tribute to Johann Eduard Steinle, the Frankfort master,
who did more than any other to correct his style, and to decide the
whole future bent of his art.

Steinle, whose name is barely known to us in England, was one of that
remarkable school of painters, called familiarly "the Nazarenes,"
because of their religious range of subjects, who were inspired
originally by Overbeck and Pfuehler. Leighton in recent years described
him as "an intensely fervent Catholic;" a man of most striking
personality, and of most courtly manners, whose influence upon younger
men was fairly magnetic. In the case of this particular pupil,
certainly, his intervention was of most powerful effect. Religious in
his methods, as well as in his sentiment of art, the florid
insincerities and mannerisms of the Florentine Academy, as they were
still to be seen in the young Leighton's work, found in him an admirable
chastener, but it took many years of painfully hard work, lasting until
1852, to undo the evil wrought by decadent Florence.

Prior to this fortunate intercourse with Steinle, the student had an old
acquaintance with Frankfort, which, like Florence, seemed destined to
play a great part in his history. Before going to Florence, and deciding
on his artistic career, in 1844, he had been sent to school in
Frankfort. He returned there from Florence to resume his general
education, and on leaving at seventeen, went for a year to the
Staedtelsches Institut.

[Illustration: TWO EARLY PENCIL STUDIES]

In 1848 he went to Brussels, and worked there for a time without any
master, painting the first