Nausicaa

Nausicaa is an oil painting by Frederic Leighton, first shown in 1878 at the Royal Academy of Arts, where it hung alongside three other works by the artist. It presents a full-length young woman in green and creamy-white drapery, leaning against a column in her father's palace on Ithaca and gazing intently toward the sea, watching for the return of Odysseus. That wistful, yearning expression was a recurring preoccupation for Leighton, and here it settles into the gesture of one hand supporting a flushed cheek. The composition relies on a single figure with no other characters, which draws the eye to the outline of the body and its emotional quality. The treatment of the feet stands out: one, slipping off the step, seems almost alive. Contemporary commentators regarded it as one of the painter's finest single-figure pictures, admired for its grace and its tender pathos.

Painter

Frederic Leighton

Date

1878

Medium

oil paint, canvas

Dimensions

57 × 26 cm

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