Landscape painting remains the least studied branch of Leighton’s creativity – despite the fact that Leighton created several hundred landscapes in his life. This can be explained by the fact that the artist himself rarely showed his landscape works at exhibitions – in his time, the landscape was still considered a “low genre.” Many landscapes of Layton – such as, for example, “Chios Island” or “On the Nile” – were painted during the journeys that the master made almost every summer and autumn.
Some of them then became the background, decorations for his large canvases, and some remained “just landscapes.” In the 1850s, Leighton began to paint in oil in the open air – this was prompted by his acquaintance with the Barbizon school and the work of Camille Corot.
The master found great pleasure in the work in the open air, although he did not put it at the forefront – as, say, the Impressionists did. His open-air landscapes such as “Nude” are very far from academic canons and are somewhat reminiscent of the work of the famous compatriot Leighton, Constable, who also sought “to capture the atmosphere features and the resulting lighting effects.”
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