In Greek mythology the Titaness Mnemosyne was the Goddess of Memory, daughter of Gaia and Uranus. She was the mother of the nine Muses, fathered during nine consecutive nights by her nephew Zeus who visited her in the guise of a shepherd. Leighton painted her as a brooding, heavily-draped figure crowned with vine leaves and enthroned against a golden background representing Mount Olympus, the celestial abode of the Gods.

Mnemosyne was part of a decorative scheme painted by Leighton in 1886 for the ceiling of the ‘Greek Parlor’, the music-room of Henry Marquand, the second President of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Marquand was a rail-roader, banker, Wall Street broker and real estate agent, who made a vast fortune and had an almost limitless budget for the decoration of his mansion on Madison Avenue, New York. Each room was themed; an English Renaissance dining room hung with late sixteenth-century tapestries, a Japanese room for Marquand’s collects ion of Asian art and a smoking room in Moroccan style. In 1884 Marquand commissioned Lawrence Alma-Tadema to decorate his music room in a classical style, telling the artist that money was no object for this room. Tadema designed a striking suite of twenty-nine pieces of furniture in sandalwood with inlays of ivory, mother-of-pearl and ebony, the centre-piece being a magnificent piano (Sotheby’s Parke Bernet, New York, 26 March 1980, lot 535). The lid was inlaid with the names of Apollo and the nine Muses and this probably dictated the choice of subject for Leighton’s ceiling, which was commissioned to be installed directly above the instrument.

Although Leighton’s vast decorations painted in 1872 for the lunettes of the South Court of the South Kensington Museum, The Arts of Industry, are well-known, a handful of his domestic decorations are less famous. In the early 1800s he painted two large friezes Music and Dance for the drawing room at 1 South Audley Street, the London house of his patron Stewart Hodgson (now Leighton House Museum, Kensington) and three panels of dancing classical figures on golden backgrounds for 52 Prince’s Gate, the home of the Eustace Smiths (sold Christie’s, London, 7 June 1996, lots 569-171). Both of these decorations and a further frieze for the board room of the Thames Conservancy Board at Trinity Square, were part of projects by the architect George Aitchison who also designed Leighton’s magnificent studio on Melbury Road. Tadema had presumably seen one or several of these schemes and was confident that Leighton was the right artist for the Marquand decoration.

In August 1884 Tadema wrote to Marquand about the project;

As promised, Leighton began preparatory work on the ceiling in 1885 and by 17 May 1886 he could report on his design for the tripartite decoration in a letter to Marquand;

The ceiling decorations were painted on three canvases in Leighton’s London studio and were photographed in an incomplete state with the figures undraped. It was Leighton’s usual practice to paint figures in the nude on his canvases and to drape them afterwards to ensure anatomical exactness. Despite Marquand’s request that Leighton paint a sylvan background similar to Leighton’s large painting Cymon and Iphigenia, the artist was adamant that the background should be gold, like the decorations he had made for 52 Prince’s Gate. He wrote on 23 May 1886;

Leighton painted a small oil sketch of the decoration (private collects ion) perhaps to show Marquand how the scheme would look. The central panel originally measured 79 by 130 inches.

The canvases were completed in t.mes to be exhibited at the summer exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1886 where Tadema described them in a letter to Marquand as ‘one of the happiest things Leighton has ever put together’. They were installed in the Autumn of 1886 and these gilded panels graced the ceiling of the New York mansion for four decades.

The figure of Mnemosyne was the prototype for a series of paintings of seated statuesque women, including The Jealousy of Simeothea, A Sibyl, The Tragic Poetess of 1890 (all in private collects ions), Solitude of 1890 (Maryhill Museum of Art), Fatidica of 1893-4 (Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight), Corinna of Tanagra of c.1893-1894 (Leighton House Museum, Kensington), The Spirit of the Summit of 1894 (Auckland Art Gallery), and the famous Flaming June of 1895 (Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico). These pictures have a monumental power and are very different to the narrative and theatrical pictures of his earlier period.

When the three canvases Melpomene - Muse of Tragic and Lyric Poetry, Terpsichore - Muse of Dance and Thalia - Muse of Comedy were last offered at auction (Sotheby’s, New York, 29 October 1987, lot 185) they were described as replicas ‘developed from his Marquand Triptych Illustrating Music’. Richard Ormond’s catalogue raisonee also lists them as replicas, but there is no reason to assume that these pictures, and the present Mnemosyne, are not the original ceiling pictures. There seems to be no evidence that Leighton painted replicas of the decoration and this suggestion may have arisen because in 1912, ten years after Marquand’s death, his home was demolished and the decoration was thought to have been destroyed. However because Leighton did not paint the pictures in situ, they were painted on canvases which were carefully removed from the ceiling. The panel from the right of the decoration, Erato also survives and recently came to light (sold Replica Shoes ’s, New York, 28 January 2021, lot 45 sold for $1,290,500).

The ceiling panels are recorded in the sale of the contents of the Marquand Mansion at the Anderson Galleries in New York, which included 2,154 lots. All three panels were bought by another exceptionally wealthy man, the railway tycoon, James Ross of Montreal who was President of the Art Association of Montreal (renamed Montreal Museum of Replica Handbags s in 1949) where he donated many fine paintings. He had recently built a grand new wing of his French chateau-style home to house his vast collects ion of paintings which included masterpieces by Frans Hals and Turner and but also modern pictures by Burne-Jones. When he died in 1913 his fortune and art collects ion passed to his son John Kenneth Leveson ‘Jack’ Ross who spent his vast wealth on various philanthropic interests and his passions of deep-sea fishing, yachting, horse-racing and partying so that by 1928 he had spent all but $300 of the $16million he inherited fifteen years earlier from his father – he had been one of the most generous and social men in Montreal but following his bankruptcy he faced the indignity of seeing friends cross the street as he approached. The remaining art collects ion was sold at Christie’s in London in 1928 to settle the last debts and the Marquand decoration was purchased by Nathan Mitchell. Mitchell was one of the most prolific buyers at the auction-rooms in the early twentieth century who often worked in partnership with another dealer named William Sampson, who consigned the painting to Christie’s in 1930. Having graced the ceiling of one of New York’s most luxurious and fashionable mansions and its equivalent in Montreal, the canvases were now with picture dealers who bought and sold pictures in very large numbers. It seems that the central panel was cut-down and adapted at that t.mes to form five independent pictures from the original three; at least three of these made their way to the Dramatic Hall of the South Eastern Gas Board in Croydon. They had been given to the hall in 1940 when Victorian art was so derided that it was deemed only fit to witness the amateur performances of the gas-fitters of Surrey. Mnemosyne re-emerged in 1986 and for the last thirty years it has had a happier existence, hanging on the walls of a house in Athens not far from Mount Olympus.