Frederic Leighton, Lord Leighton, President of the Royal Academy from 1878 until his death in 1896, was the dominant figure in British academic painting in the second half of the nineteenth century, and his engagement with classical antiquity — primarily Greek and Roman — was the defining subject of his career. Unlike Alma-Tadema, whose classical paintings were organized around the reconstruction of material culture, or Poynter, whose Romans served moral arguments, Leighton’s classicism was organized around a single overriding concern: beauty as an end in itself, the human figure in relation to drapery and landscape, the moment of formal perfection that painting could capture and sustain.