When the Study for Flaming June was exhibited at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2010, Richard Beresford authored the following catalogue essay: “In February 1896 the London police force was mobilized [sic] to disperse ‘with gentle firmness’ a crowd which had gathered in Fleet Street around the office of the Graphic. The crowd was making its way back from Leighton’s funeral and in the window of the Graphic was displayed his last finished painting, Flaming June. Few famous paintings have enjoyed such extremes of popularity and disfavor [sic]. By the 1960s Flaming June emerged again on the art market and was for sale, it is said, for around £50. A campaign to find a home for the picture in an English museum was unsuccessful, and it was purchased by [Don Luis Ferré, the then]… Governor of Puerto Rico, finally ending up in the Museo de Arte at Ponce. Just four weeks before his death Leighton had given the oil sketch for Flaming June to his friend, the musician George Henschel. When Henschel sold it in 1916, it entered the collection of Lord Leverhulme where it remained, unknown to scholars, until 2001. It was purchased for the Schaeffer Collection in 2009. Leighton’s idea for Flaming June— in fact the composition was originally titled Flaming summer — came to him from the ‘chance attitude of a weary model who had a particularly supple figure.’ He sketched the pose and worked up the figure, using it for a marble bas-relief in the foreground of a painting titled Slumber, slumber of c1894 [this painting is correctly titled Summer Slumber]. By this time, however, he had already conceived the notion of making the figure the main subject of a painting. The surviving drawings show him working in the first place from a nude model. At this point the figure may have been male. Leighton then progressively worked up the enveloping drapery and, in so doing, toned down the angularity of the limbs, developing the incredibly sensuous coiled pose of the final figure. Before submitting his ideas to the full-scale canvas, Leighton tested the effect of colour [sic] and atmosphere in the small oil sketch…. Here he first introduced a version of that extraordinary diaphanous orange garment, so rich in colour [sic] and yet so delicate in substance, which critics despaired of describing. In the oil sketch Leighton also introduced for the first time a sense of the atmosphere of a Mediterranean summer at midday, with the white heat of the sun reflected off the ocean and the contrasting shade provided for the resting girl by her awning. In the sketch this awning is an elaborate affair, somewhat irregular in contour, as though it might be fluttering in the breeze. Compositional studies show that Leighton originally replaced this awning with a straight-edged one that slopes down from the supporting pole on the right. In the finished painting, however, he settled on a strictly horizontal band decorated with an anthemion pattern. The outline of the original awning is still visible as a pentiment in the finished painting, showing that Leighton simplified this area only after he had started working on the final canvas. He also painted out an island on the horizon at the left that is present in the sketch but which appears in the finished painting only as a pentiment.”