In 1883, _Memories_, though not one of the most typical of Leighton's pictures, decidedly pleased the general public. It shows the half-length figure of a blonde, in a black and gold dress. More interesting artistically was a decorative frieze, _The Dance_, for a drawing-room, the design for which we reproduce, and which may, in so far, answer for itself. Other pictures of 1883 are _Kittens_, a full-length figure of a fair-haired child in purple and embroidered drapery, seated on a bench covered with a leopard skin, holding a rose in hand and looking down at a kitten sitting beside her; and the _Vestal_, a bust of a girl with her head and shoulders swathed with white gold-embroidered draperies. To this year also belongs a _Portrait of Miss Nina Joachim_, a child in a blue frock with crimson sash. [Illustration: _Cymon and Iphigenia._ _By permission of the Fine Art Society._ _F. Leighton. pinxt._ _Swan Electric Engraving Co. Sc._] [Illustration: STUDIES FOR TWO FRIEZES "MUSIC" AND "THE DANCE"] The next year, 1884, brought _Letty_, that most delightful of English maidens, _A Nap_, _Sun Gleams_, and the imaginative and admirably romantic _Cymon and Iphigenia_. _Letty_ was one of Leighton's pictures which particularly excited Mr. Ruskin's admiration. It shows a simply pretty child, with soft brown hair under a black hat, a saffron kerchief about her neck. The _Letty_ and the _Cymon and Iphigenia_, with a few other notable pictures, did much to leave a pleasant recollection of the exceptional Academy of 1884. "A more original effect of light and colour, used in the broad, true, and ideal treatment of lovely forms," said a French critic, "we do not remember to have seen at the Academy, than that produced by the _Cymon and Iphigenia_." Engravings and other reproductions of the picture have made its design, at any rate, almost as familiar now as Boccaccio's tale itself. There are some divergences, however, in the two versions. Boccaccio's tale is a tale of spring; Sir Frederic, the better to carry out his conception of the drowsy desuetude of sleep, and of that sense of pleasant but absolute weariness which one associates with the season of hot days and short nights, has changed the spring into that riper summer-time which is on the verge of autumn; and that hour of late sunset which is on the verge of night. Under its rich glow lies the sleeping Iphigenia, draped in folds upon folds of white, and her attendants; while Cymon, who is as unlike the boor of tradition as Spenser's Colin Clout is unlike an ordinary Cumbrian herdsman, stands hard-by, wondering, pensively wrapt in so exquisite a vision. Altogether, a great presentment of an immortal idyll; so treated, indeed, that it becomes much more than a mere reading of Boccaccio, and gives an ideal picture of Sleep itself,--that Sleep which so many artists and poets have tried at one time or another to render.