I stay here a fortnight longer, so that a letter written on receipt of this would still catch me; after that _Rome_ is the safest address. I shall be there from the 20th to the 28th of October.
Best love to Mamma, and believe me, your affectionate son,
In the preceding letters mention is made of the final arrangements for the building of Leighton's house in Holland Park Road. Mr. George Aitchison, R.A., his old friend, undertook to be the architect. It was begun in 1865, and first occupied by Leighton in 1866.
Referring to opinions expressed regarding Florentine Art, past and present, Leighton wrote to his younger sister: "----'s remark about ----, if I remember it, was utter bosh and pedantry. The Florentines of the end of the fifteenth century were _emphatically_ realists, though their realism was animated by a higher genius and a deeper humanity than the modern Italians exhibit, though _they_, by-the-bye, are mostly not _realists_ but mannerists. The chief characteristic of English Art is (I speak of course of the better men) originality and humanity on the one hand, and on the other, absence of acquired knowledge and guiding taste. Some day I will write you a lot more about it."
Fully launched into the English art world, deeply interested in every phase of sincere work produced by contemporary brother artists, Leighton nevertheless adhered in his own practice to the views and principles which he held from the time he became Steinle's devoted pupil. To a question which referred to his art development, asked by Mrs. Mark Pattison when she was about to write an account of his life in 1879, Leighton answered, "I can only speak of what is not a _change_ but virtually a growth, the passage from Gothicism to Classicism (for want of better words) _i.e._ a growth from multiplicity to simplicity. Artists' manners are not changed by books!" "As regards English artists," he writes in the same letter, "I can only of course speak with great reserve. Elmore treated me with marked kindness, lending me a studio. Millais, Rossetti, Hunt were most cordial and friendly, though I openly told them I was wholly opposed to their views; but, indeed, few men have more cause to speak well of their brethren."