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Flaming June is a painting by Sir Frederic Leighton, produced in 1895. Painted with oil paints on a 47-by-47-inch (1,200 mm × 1,200 mm) square canvas, it is widely considered to be Leighton's magnum opus, showing his classicist nature. It is thought that the woman portrayed alludes to the figures of sleeping nymphs and naiads the Greeks often sculpted.

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-started with the death of Queen Victoria's uncle and the beginning of her rule
-ended when she Queen Victoria died 63 years later

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The Lady of Shalott, 1888 - John William Waterhouse - WikiArt.org

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'The Lady of Shalott' was created in 1888 by John William Waterhouse in Romanticism style. Find more prominent pieces at Wikiart.org - best visual art database.

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-Invention of the Telegraph at the beginning of the Era, revolutionizing the communication system in the country and across the globe.
-At the tale end of the Era, The Boer War broke out in Britain's South African colony, symbolizing the common theme of imperialism during the Victorian Era
-August 1st, 1834 slavery was abolished. Plantation owners received 20 million pounds in compensation while newly freed slaves got nothing

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-Queen Victoria was sitting on the throne during all of the Victorian period
-People cared more about class and gender than religion, region, race, and occupation
-They believed women and men were meant for a different thing, in their eyes men were physically strong while men were weak,
-Men were meant for sex, and women were meant for reproduction
-  Men were supposed to be in public while women were supposed to be in the house and private.
-Class was both economic and cultural and encompassed income, occupation, education, family structure, sexual behavior, politics, and leisure activities.
-The upper class was separated from the lower classes making them seem social superior
-The upper class was a very small percentage of the population and they had titles, wealth, land, or all three, owned most of the land in Britain; and controlled local, national, and imperial politics.

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-Led the way for incoming realism and carried on romanticism
-writing reflected struggles with realistic and relatable problems

Victorian Poetry
-poetry often written for pleasuring readers, going in depth into the human psyche
-Common for poets to create characters instead of writing about themselves
-loved stories of heroic knights and chivalry

Victorian Novels
-often made characters with difficult lives where in the end, love triumphs all

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Alfred Tennyson
-Communicated with audience through understanding complex human experiences
"The Lady of Shallot"
"In Memorian"
"The Charge of the Light Brigade"

Robert Browning
-Strongly and optimistically believed in true love and often wrote about it
"Andrea del Sarto"
"Caliban Upon Setebos"

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Flesch, William. “Victorian Poetry.” The Facts On File Companion to British Poetry, 19th Century, Facts On File, 2009. Bloom's Literature, online.infobase.com/Auth/Index?aid=17320&itemid=WE54&articleId=11615. Accessed 20 Sept. 2021.

Burt, Daniel S. “Tennyson, Alfred, Lord.” The Literary 100, Revised Edition, Facts On File, 2008. Bloom's Literature, online.infobase.com/Auth/Index?aid=17320&itemid=WE54&articleId=45981. Accessed 20 Sept. 2021.

Karbiener, Karen, and George Stade. “Browning, Robert.” Encyclopedia of British Writers, 1800 to the Present, Third Edition, Facts On File, 2013. Bloom's Literature, online.infobase.com/Auth/Index?aid=17320&itemid=WE54&articleId=30743. Accessed 20 Sept. 2021.

"Characteristics of Victorian Era Literature, Novels, and Poetry." Victorian Era. http://victorian-era.org/victorian-era-literature-characteristics.html Accessed 21 Sept. 2021.

What Happened During the Victorian Era? https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/what-happened-during-victorian-era. Accessed 21 Sept. 2021.

“The National Archives: Exhibitions: 1901 Census: Events.” The National Archives | Exhibitions | 1901 Census | Events, www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/census/events/britain5.htm. Accessed 21 Sept. 2021

Steinbach, Susie. "Victorian era". Encyclopedia Britannica, 12 Mar. 2021, https://www.britannica.com/event/Victorian-era. Accessed 21 September 2021.

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As is quite evident from the title the kind of literature that evolved during the reign of Queen Victoria is famously known as the Victorian era literature.

The literature of the Victorian age (1837-1901) entered a new period after the romantic revival. The literature of this era was preceded by romanticism and was followed by modernism or realism.

Hence, it can also be called a fusion of romantic and realist style of writing. Though the Victorian Age produced two great poets Alfred Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning, the age is also remarkable for the excellence of its prose.

Characteristics of Victorian novels

Victorian novels tend to be idealized portraits of difficult lives in which hard work, perseverance, love and luck win out in the end. They were usually inclined towards being of improving nature with a central moral lesson at heart. While this formula was the basis for much of earlier Victorian fiction, the situation became more complex as the century progressed.

Characteristics of Victorian poetry

Victorian Poetry was also indifferent from the already stated style. Much of the work of the time is seen as a bridge between the romantic era and the modernist poetry of the next century.

Alfred Lord Tennyson held the poet laureateship for over forty years. The husband and wife poetry team of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning conducted their love affair through verse and produced many tender and passionate poems.

The reclaiming of the past was a major part of Victorian literature and was to be found in both classical literature and also the medieval literature of England. The Victorians loved the heroic, chivalrous stories of knights of old and they hoped to regain some of that noble, courtly behaviour and impress it upon the people both at home and in the wider empire.

In dramatic, farces, musical burlesques, extravaganzas, and comic operas competed with Shakespeare productions and serious drama by the likes of James Planche' and Thomas William Robertson.

The discoveries of science seem to reflect considerable and particular effects upon the literature of the age. The Victorians had a mission to describe and classify the entire natural world. Much of this writing was not regarded as literature but one book, in particular, Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, remains famous.

The theory of evolution contained within the work shook many of the ideas the Victorians had about themselves. Although it took a long time to be widely accepted, completely changed following thoughts and literature.

The old Gothic tales that came out of the late 19th century are the first examples of the genre of fantastic fiction. These tales often centred on larger-than-life characters such as Sherlock Holmes, the famous detective of the times, Barry Lee, big time gang leader, Sexton Blake, Phileas Fogg, and other fictional characters of the era, such as Dracula, Edward Hyde.

Common themes in Victorian Literature

If one studies possibly, all the great writers of this period, you will mark three general characteristics, Firstly, literature in the Victorian age tended to come face to face with realism.

This reflected more on practical problems and interests. It becomes a powerful instrument for human progress. Secondly, the Victorian literature seems to deviate from the strict principle of "art for art's sake" and asserts its moral purpose.

Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning - all were the teachers of England with the faith in their moral message to instruct the world. Thirdly, this was more like the age of pessimism and confusion. The influence of science was strongly felt here.

Alfred Lord Tennyson's some immature works seem to hold doubtful and despairing stains but his In Memoriam comes out as a hope after despair. Although characterized as practical and materialistic, the literature of the Victorian age portrays a completely ideal life. It was an idealistic age where the great ideals like truth, justice, love, brotherhood were emphasized by poets, essayists and novelists of the age.

Influence of Victorian Literature

The persistent popular embrace of Victorian literature has had a profound influence on modern literature and media. Writers such as Charles Dickens and the Bronte sisters still sell robustly on most book resellers' lists and are frequently adapted into films and television productions, both directly and in modernized retellings.

In addition, many modern novels such as A Great and Terrible Beauty demonstrate that the intricate cultural mores of the Victorian era find a home in the modern cultural psyche.

Famous Victorian novelists and poets

Significant Victorian novelists and poets include: Matthew Arnold,

the Bronte sisters,

Christina Rossetti,

Joseph Conrad,

Robert Browning,

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,

Elizabeth Barrett Browning,

Edward Bulwer-Lytton,

Wilkie Collins,

Charles Dickens,

Benjamin Disraeli,

George Eliot,

George Meredith,

Elizabeth Gaskell,

George Gissing,

Richard Jefferies,

Thomas Hardy,

Rudyard Kipling,

Robert Louis Stevenson,

Bram Stoker,

Algernon Charles Swinburne,

Philip Meadows Taylor,

Alfred Lord Tennyson biography,

William Thackeray,

Anthony Trollope,

George MacDonald,

Oscar Wilde,

Lewis Carroll.

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Characteristics of Victorian era literature, novels and poetry

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As is quite evident from the title the kind of literature that evolved during the reign of Queen Victoria is famously known as the Victorian era literature. The literature of the Victorian age (1837-1901) entered a new period after the romantic revival. The literature of this era was preceded by romanticism and was followed by modernism or realism.

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An Athlete Wrestling with a Python was the first of three bronze sculptures produced by the British artist Frederic Leighton. Completed in 1877, the sculpture was a departure for Leighton, and heralded the advent of a new movement, New Sculpture, taking realistic approach to classical models. It has been described as a "sculptural masterpiece" and as "possibly Leighton's greatest contribution to British art". Despite its indebtedness to the Classical tradition, it can be understood as one of the first stirrings of modern sculpture in Britain as well as in Europe. The Athlete was arguably the most influential piece of English sculpture of the 19th century.

The sculpture was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1877 under the title An Athlete Wrestling with a Python but it is sometimes also known as An Athlete Strangling a Python or An Athlete Struggling with a Python. The original full-size bronze was acquired for the nation using funds from the Chantrey Bequest, and is displayed at Tate Britain in London.

The sculpture depicts a dramatic scene of life and death, with a classically proportioned male nude wrestling with a large snake. Leighton conceived the composition while working on sculptural modellos for the figures in his 1873-76 processional painting of the Daphnephoria. It may have been inspired by the story of Apollo slaying the Python of Delphi. There are obvious parallels with the classical sculpture of Laocoön and His Sons, and the work also owes a debt to works of Michelangelo.

The male, a muscular athlete crowned with a wreath, is standing with his legs apart, holding the python's head away with his right hand, while grasping its body with his left hand behind his back. The python has thrown two coils around the athlete's left thigh and its body curves around the athlete's back, but its mouth gapes wide in the throes of death as it is being throttled. The work depicts the musculature of the figures and the scales of the serpent realistically, with contrasting textures. The work was designed in a spiral, so it must be viewed in the round from a variety of angles. The exaggerated spiral composition confounds any singular view of the statue, and its form exceeds that of its predecessors' use of the figura serpentinata. With it, Leighton developed the Athlete as a statement about the properties of sculpture as distinct from those of painting, and the composition encourages a temporal and circumambulatory experience of the work as a means of highlighting sculpture's physicality and three-dimensionality.

The model for the athlete was an Italian professional, Angelo Colorossi (father of the Angelo Colarossi who was the model for Alfred Gilbert's 1891 sculpture of ). The work was originally modelled a small-scale clay figure, a plaster cast of which was later given to George Frederic Watts. Jules Dalou, a French sculptor who was in exile in London after the Paris Commune, encouraged Leighton to scale it up and to have it cast as a life-size bronze.

Leighton was assisted by Thomas Brock, and comparisons can be made to Brock's 1869 work of Hercules Strangling Antaeus, and a similar sculpture of 1814 by François Joseph Bosio, Hercule combattant Achéloüs métamorphosé en serpent (not cast in bronze until 1824; in the Louvre). There is a similar wrestling figure in Leighton's painting of Hercules wrestling with Death for the Body of Alcestis (at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut).

The work was scaled up and modelled in plaster at Brock's studio in Boscobel Place, Westminster, and then cast in bronze by Cox & Son, whose foundry in Thames Ditton was later taken over by A.B. Burton. The original life-size bronze measures 1.746 by 0.984 by 1.099 metres (68.7 in × 38.7 in × 43.3 in) and weighs 290 kilograms (640 lb). It was the first full-size nude adult male sculpture with no fig leaf to conceal its genitals to be made in Britain in decades. It is also one of the first modern life-size statues in Europe to eschew a clearly identifiable mythological, religious or classical source. In this, it is comparable to the contemporary sculpture by Auguste Rodin, The Age of Bronze (1876), and the slightly later 'Standing Man' (1884) by Adolf von Hildebrand. Leighton's Athlete, along with these contemporary statues, pushed the Classical tradition to its limits and helped to open the discourse of modernity in sculpture in Europe.

Leighton, Hercules Wrestling with Death for the Body of Alcestis, 1871, Wadsworth Atheneum

Bosio, Hercule combattant Achéloüs ... , 1814, Louvre

Leighton had the work cast in bronze without a prior commission, a mark of his artistic confidence and his wealth. At the time, the purity of white marble was preferred for new imaginative works, but Leighton's work created renewed interest in the darker material.

The sculpture was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1877. Joseph Edgar Boehm, Queen Victoria's Sculptor in Ordinary, wrote to Leighton in 1877 that it was "superb. I think it the best statue of modern days." The art critic Edmund Gosse saw it was "something wholly new, propounded by a painter to the professional sculptors and displaying a juster and livelier sense of what their art should be than they themselves had ever dreamed of". The Athenaeum praised the work, saying Leighton had "selected a subject full of passion, and dealt with it in correspondingly energetic manner, and in a style that suited the subject, adopting a vigorous, and, to some extent, massive style".

It won the gold medal for sculpture at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1878. It was purchased for £2,000 by the Chantrey Bequest on behalf of the British nation, making it the first sculpture acquired for the national art collection in that manner. It is still held by Tate Britain.

Leighton was elected the President of the Royal Academy in 1878 and was knighted in the same year. He donated the original plaster model for the full-size sculpture to the Royal Academy in 1886, the year he was created a baronet. A plaster cast of the clay study, 25.1 by 15.6 by 13.0 centimetres (9.9 in × 6.1 in × 5.1 in), is held by Tate Britain, made c.1877 and presented by Alphonse Legros 1897, and a further version in bronze is in the Ashmolean Museum, in Oxford.

A 69 inches (1.8 m) marble replica was carved by Frederick Pomeroy for Carl Jacobsen's Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen. Leighton counselled against the reproduction, as the marble is less able to hold its own weight, but eventually acquiesced and adapted the composition, adding supports for the legs. It was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1891 before being transported to Denmark. The marble sculpture was de-accessioned by the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in 1974. After passing through several private collections, it was sold at Christie's in 2003 for £446,650. In 2017, John Schaeffer donated the marble replica to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, in Sydney, Australia.

Smaller reproductions of the bronze were cast in two sizes by Ernest Brown and Phillips at the Leicester Galleries between 1903 and 1910. A 52 centimetres (20 in) bronze was acquired by the Leighton House Museum in 2005, part funded with a grant from the Art Fund. The museum also has a plaster model of the python which Leighton presented to George Frederic Watts around 1900. An example of the 52 cm bronze was sold at Bonhams in 2017 for £106,250.

Leighton made only two other bronzes sculptures, both exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1886.

Brock assisted Leighton with a second full-size male nude sculpture, his The Sluggard (1885), sometimes titled An Athlete Awakening from Sleep. The inspiration for the piece came from his life drawing of model Giuseppe Valona. The original bronze measures 1.911 by 0.902 by 0.597 metres (75.2 in × 35.5 in × 23.5 in). It was donated to the nascent Tate Gallery by Henry Tate in 1894. Smaller casts are in several other museum collections.

Leighton's third and last bronze sculpture was a much smaller statuette of a female nude, Needless Alarms (1886), depicting a girl frightened by a toad. It measures 50.8 by 22.5 by 15.9 centimetres (20.0 in × 8.9 in × 6.3 in). A cast was acquired by John Everett Millais, and another cast was presented to the Tate Gallery in 1940 by Lady Aberconway (the wife of Henry McLaren, 2nd Baron Aberconway).

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An Athlete Wrestling with a Python - Wikipedia

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An Athlete Wrestling with a Python was the first of three bronze sculptures produced by the British artist Frederic Leighton. Completed in 1877, the sculpture was a departure for Leighton, and heralded the advent of a new movement, New Sculpture, taking realistic approach to classical models.