For particulars of the wonderfully thorough "method," which Leighton used in preparing his pictures, we cannot do better than quote the following admirable account by Mr. M. H. Spielmann (published during the painter's life), which he has allowed us to reprint here.[9] "I have said that the sense of line in composition, in figure and drapery, is one of the chief qualities of the artist; and the conviction that the method in which he places them upon canvas with such unerring success--for it may be said that the President rarely, if ever, produces an ugly form in a picture--would be both interesting and instructive, prompted me to learn in what manner his effects are produced. This I have done, having special regard to one of his Academy pictures, _The Sibyl_, which, being a single figure, simplifies greatly the explanation of the mode of procedure. This explanation holds good in every case, be the composition great or small, elaborate or simple; the _modus operandi_ is always the same. [Illustration: A BACCHANTE (1896) _By permission of Messrs. Henry Graves and Co._] [Illustration: "HIT" (1893) _By permission of "The Art Journal"_] "Having by good fortune observed in a model an extraordinarily fine and 'Michelangelesque' formation of the hand and wrist--an articulation as rare to find as it is anatomically beautiful and desirable--he bethought him of a subject that would enable him to introduce his _trouvaille_. As but one attitude could display the special formation to advantage, the idea of a Sibyl, sitting brooding beside her oracular tripod, was soon evolved, but not so soon was its form determined and fixed. Like Mr. Watts, Sir Frederic Leighton thinks out the whole picture before he puts brush to canvas, or chalk to paper; but, unlike Mr. Watts, once he is decided upon his scheme of colour, the arrangement of line, the disposition of the folds, down to the minutest details, he seldom, if ever, alters a single line. And the reason is evident. In Sir Frederic's pictures--which are, above all, decorations in the real sense of the word--the design is a pattern in which every line has its place and its proper relation to other lines, so that the disturbing of one of them, outside of certain limits, would throw the whole out of gear. Having thus determined his picture in his mind's eye, he in the majority of cases makes a sketch in black and white chalk upon brown paper to fix it. In the first sketch, the care with which the folds have been broadly arranged will be evident, and, if it be compared with the finished picture, the very slight degree in which the general scheme has been departed from will convince the reader of the almost scientific precision of the artist's line of action. But there is a good reason for this determining of the draperies before the model is called in; and it is this. The nude model, no matter how practised he or she