When I first highlighted Victorian painter Edmund Blair Leighton back in 2006, resources for images of his paintings on the web were pretty thin. Since then, some new images sources have made it much more rewarding to view his work.

Leighton’s two main themes were of romanticized medieval subjects — knights in armor, chivalry, elegant royal ladies and their attendant environments — and contemporary Victorian subjects of courtship, marriage and romantic intrigue.

Leighton’s paintings almost always had a narrative element, a story either overt or implied, and he rendered them with a combination of exacting draftsmanship and muted atmospheric color punctuated with higher chroma passages.

(Edmund Blair Leighton should be distinguished from Frederick Lord Leighton, no relation, also a Victorian painter I’ve featured previously.)