In 1866 the critics had at last a work which seemed to them to follow the lines of the _Cimabue's Madonna_. This was the radiant and lovely picture of the _Syracusan Bride leading Wild Beasts in Procession to the Temple of Diana_. The composition of this remarkable painting deserves to be closely studied, for it is very characteristic of Sir Frederic Leighton's theories of art, and his conviction of the necessarily decorative effect of such works. A terrace of white marble, whose line is reflected and repeated by the line of white clouds in the sky painting above, affords the figures of the procession a delightful setting. The Syracusan bride leads a lioness, and these are followed by a train of maidens and wild beasts, the last reduced to a pictorial seemliness and decorative calm, very fortunate under the circumstances. The procession is seen approaching the door of the temple, and a statue of Diana serves as a last note in the ideal harmonies of form and colour to which the whole is attuned. As compared with the _Cimabue's Madonna_, it is a more finished piece of work, and the handling throughout is more assured. It was as much an advance, technically, upon that, as the _Daphnephoria_, which crowned the artist's third decade, was upon this. According to popular report, it was this picture of the _Syracusan Bride_ which decided his future election as a full member of the Academy; but as a matter of fact, it was in 1869 that this election took place. The picture, let us add, was suggested to the painter by a passage in the second Idyll of Theocritus: "And for her then many other wild beasts were going in procession round about, and among them a lioness." _The Painter's Honeymoon_ and a _Portrait of Mrs. James Guthrie_ were also exhibited this year; and the wall-painting of _The Wise and Foolish Virgins_, at Lyndhurst, in the New Forest, was executed during the summer. [Illustration: VENUS DISROBING FOR THE BATH (1867)] [Illustration: ELECTRA AT THE TOMB OF AGAMEMNON (1869)] In its next exhibition, that of 1867, the Academy held five pictures by the artist, including the delightful _Pastoral_, two small full-length figures standing in a landscape of a shepherd and a girl--whom he is teaching to play the pipes. This again might be considered a painter's translation from Theocritus, and the _Venus Disrobing for the Bath_, one of the most debated of all the artist's paintings of the nude. The paleness of the flesh-tint of this Venus aroused a criticism which has often been urged against his pictures--that such a hue was not in nature. In imparting an ideal effect to an ideal subject, Leighton always, however, followed his own conviction--that art has a law of its own, and a harmony of colour and form, derived and selected no doubt from natural loveliness, but not to be referred too closely to the natural, or to the average, in these things.