Word: leigh
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...picture is painted that matters," says Painter William Robinson Leigh, "it is what you paint." Tall, lean and full of such old-fashioned convictions, Artist Leigh, at 86, knows just what he likes to paint. Says he: "Never in the whole of human history at any time or anywhere has there been a terrain more suitable for the making of pictures and telling of stories than our own West." On display this week in a Manhattan gallery is a retrospective show of Leigh's Wild West pictures, which prove him a first-rate practitioner of the Western school made...
Like Remington and Russell, Leigh is crazy over horses. And he has a true Westerner's bias in favor of the working breed. "As for those tired old nags at the rodeo," says he, "they don't know the first thing about bucking." No one could say that about Leigh's recently painted range horse (opposite). "Like a bolt of lightning," as Leigh himself describes it, "the wily equine flies into the air with a volcanic suddenness-with a fantastic violence and rabid spleen that defy description...
Starting with Sky. Born in West Virginia, Leigh studied art for twelve years in Munich under a succession of adept nature painters named Rauff, Gsis, Loeftz and Lindenschmidt. They taught him to make a detailed charcoal sketch on canvas and paint over it, starting with the sky ("If there are no clouds, the sky may take no more than a day") and working toward the foreground, finishing each part separately. Such grandiose subjects as sunsets and stampedes, he learned, may take up to six months to finish. But for Leigh, the finished result, an almost photographic naturalism, is well worth...
...until 1906, when he was 40, did Artist Leigh go West. He did it then by persuading the Santa Fe Railroad to give him a free ticket in return for a painting of the Grand Canyon. The company ordered five more Grand Canyon pictures on the strength of the first, and between his Can yon commissions, Leigh roamed the vast, raw, neighboring country on horseback, sketching as he went...
...London airport, a crowd of expectant reporters and photographers and a group of doctors awaited the arrival of a transatlantic plane from New York. The object of their vigil: Actor Sir Laurence Olivier, who was bringing his sick and troubled wife Vivien Leigh home from Hollywood, where she collapsed with a nervous breakdown a fortnight...