Colour study for 'Cymon and Iphigenia'

A colour study in oils for the finished painting which also hangs in this room. The artist would already have made several preparatory drawings for the figures. But a particular preoccupation with this painting was to capture the effect of this particular time of day: ‘the most mysteriously beautiful in the whole twenty-four hours, when the merest lip of the moon has risen from behind the sea horizon’, as Leighton himself described it.