Frederick Leighton was an Victorian Neoclassicism English painter and sculptor who associated himself with the Pre-Raphaelites.

He was born to a family in the import and export business. He was educated at University College School, London and then received his legal training on the European continent where he spent much of his youth travelling with his family. This cosmopolitan background was of great importance to his development as an artist.

At the age of 24, while in Florence, Leighton studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti nd painted the procession of the Cimabue Madonna through the Borgo Allegri. He lived in Paris from 1855 to 1859, where he met Auguste Ingres, Eugène Delacroix, Jean-Baptiste Corot, and Jean-François Millet.

In 1860, Leighton moved to London, where he associated with the Pre-Raphaelites. His first Royal Academy success, "Cimabue’s Celebrated Madonna Is Carried in Procession through the Streets of Florence" was painted in Rome in 1855. This huge processional work, filled with incident and detail, takes its subject from Giorgio Vasari . It was bought by Queen Victoria from the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition of 1855 and its success marked Leighton as one of the most promising artists of his generation. In 1864 he became an associate of the Royal Academy and in 1878 he became its President. His 1877 sculpture, Athlete Wrestling with a Python, was considered at its time to inaugurate a renaissance in contemporary British sculpture, referred to as the New Sculpture. His paintings represented Britain at the great 1900 Paris Exhibition.

Leighton was knighted at Windsor in 1878, and was created a baronet eight years later. He was the first painter to be given a peerage, in the New Year Honours List of 1896.

Lord Frederick Leighton never married and after his death in 1896, his house in Holland Park, London was been turned into a museum called the Leighton House Museum. It contains many of his drawings and paintings, as well as some of his sculptures including Athlete Wrestling with a Python.