Frederic Leighton’s only known painting of moon over water to go on show after being lost for a century

He was the most distinguished artist of the late 19th century – a grandee who entertained Queen Victoria at his home in Holland Park and was president of the Royal Academy for nearly two decades.

Frederic Leighton was feted for his portraits of women, especially his stunning Flaming June, currently the centrepiece of an exhibition at the Royal Academy. But he actually preferred painting landscapes and very occasional seascapes, one of which, Bay of Cadiz, Moonlight, he adored.

But this alluring view of a full moon and its shadow over the sea had been lost since the early 20th century. Despite Leighton House Museum, his former west London home, trying to find it over the past 100 years, it is only now that it has resurfaced.

“We know he loved Bay of Cadiz, Moonlight, because he referred to it in letters to his father and friends when abroad in places like Damascus and on the Nile,” says Daniel Robbins, senior curator of Leighton House Museum.

“He also wrote to Valentine Prinsep, a pre-Raphaelite artist who was staying in Venice, of “envy” that he was in the Italian city for a full moon. And, in yet another letter, Leighton tells of his own joy of once seeing it in its glory in Capri.

“He clearly loved the moon and the effect of its light,” says Robbins. And yet Bay of Cadiz, Moonlight, created on a trip to southern Spain in 1866, is his only known painting of the moon over water, though he also did a handful of nocturnal landscapes.

Born to wealthy parents, Leighton took regular trips to southern Europe, north Africa and the Middle East to paint. However, shortly after his death his 100 or so landscapes, which had been kept in his house, were sold by his two sisters. Four, including the Cadiz painting, were bought by the wealthy solicitor and art collector Wickham Flower.

“We know that Flower then lent these four to Leighton’s old home after a local painter, Emilie Barrington, took out a lease to run the Holland Park house as a venue for the arts. The painting was still there in the early 20th century, but had mysteriously been catalogued as Bay of Naples, Moonlight.”

However by 1926, when Barrington handed over the house to the borough of Kensington and Chelsea, there was no sign of the painting.

Fast forward a century, and the auctioneers Christie’s tipped off Leighton House that a private owner was selling the painting, but with no information about its whereabouts over the past 100 years. In June, the museum bought it for £32,000 with financial help from the Arts Council, the V&A and Friends of Leighton House.

Now, experts looking at Bay of Cadiz, Moonlight, are drawing links between Leighton’s dark sky over water with James Whistler’s Nocturnes, his beautiful paintings of the night, particularly over the Thames.

“Records here show that Whistler, who lived close by, had dinner with Leighton on at least one occasion in the late 1860s,” says Robbins. “And, as Leighton displayed his landscapes on the walls of his rooms as well as propped up on furniture for guests to look at, Whistler could have seen the Cadiz picture.”

Both Robbins and Hannah Lund, co-curator of Leighton House’s land and seascape exhibition opening in November, which will include the Cadiz work, also believe that Whistler was quite or even very likely to have been inspired by this lunar painting. “It has so much of the atmosphere and aesthetic of Whistler’s Nocturnes,” says Lund. Whistler began his series in the early 1870s, not long after his visit to Leighton’s house.

Leighton remains the only artist to have been elevated to the House of Lords, but is also the holder of the shortest peerage as he died in January 1896, just one day after his appointment was gazetted.