John William Godward, R.B.A. (London 1861-1922)

Painted at the height of Godward's career, A Classical Beauty is a testament to the artist's skill at rendering texture, surface, harmonies of color and a feminine ideal. Godward presents his favored subject, a pink-cheeked young maiden, in profile here against a polished marble wall. Contrasting with the cold smoothness of this stone, the woman's flushed cheeks appear warm, soft and palpable. The furry pelt of a leopard just visible at the bottom left and right of the composition adds a further note of supple texture to this study in tactility. Vern Swanson suggests that the lovely model dressed in diaphanous classical robes represents a young bacchante whose symbol is the leopard skin (V. Swanson, John William Godward: The Eclipse of Classicism, London, 1997, p. 223). Throughout his life, Godward remained dedicated to his own style of Neoclassicism that pictured idealized beauties, like the one featured in the present painting, in mythic, halcyon settings.