Curator talk: Flaming June

15 Mar 2024 12-1pm

Overview

Join us for this introductory talk as Frederic Leighton’s iconic painting, Flaming June, comes home to the Royal Academy.

Frederic, Lord Leighton was a leading Victorian artist and President of the Royal Academy from 1878 to 1896. Flaming June was part of his final submission to the Summer Exhibition in 1895. The painting is a dazzling example of Leighton’s use of colour, line and composition and it quickly became one of the most recognised and reproduced images in British Art.

Our Senior Curator of Collections, Dr Hannah Higham, will discuss the importance of the painting, which is on loan from the Museo de Arte de Ponce in Puerto Rico. She will also introduce the corresponding display which will explore the dialogue between early sixteenth-century Florentine sculpture and painting in Leighton’s work and in that of his predecessors, contemporaries and successors – not least Michelangelo’s Taddei Tondo, which hangs opposite.

Dr Hannah Higham joined the Royal Academy of Arts as our new Senior Curator of Collections in April 2023, having previously worked as the Senior Curator of Collections and Research for the Henry Moore Foundation. Formerly, she has worked for Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery and the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norfolk, and the Barber Institute of Fine Arts in Birmingham. She holds an MA from the Courtauld Institute and a PhD from the University of Birmingham on early sixteenth-century Florentine Sculpture.

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