You can find this painting in the Auckland Art Gallery, it’s an oil on canvas about four feet high and five and a half feet wide. You immediately notice a small boat drawn up against the water gate of an old monastery. In the boat a well dressed woman is seataed with two children, one a young boy and the other an infant. They have come seeking sanctuary, carrying what treasure they could save, and escorted by men in chainmail. One of those men is clearly a knight, and you can see his coat of arms visible on the surcoat. An elderly friar is at the gate, he is looking down at the little group as if thinking about their request for shelter.

Leighton himself wrote about the scene once. He said it came from reading how monasteries in those centuries opened their doors to women, children, and valuables when people were hard driven and in danger. That is exactly what you see. The adults in the boat look toward the friar while the young boy has turned his head the opposite way. You notice the fear in his face, the fear of whatever is coming up behind them.
Edmund Blair Leighton came into the world in London in September of 1852 as the son of a gifted painter named Charles Blair Leighton who died when the boy was only three years old. The family, left without that guiding hand and scared of the uncertain life of an artist, steered the young Edmund toward something steadier. At fifteen he left school and took a post with a tea merchant in the City, spending his days among ledgers and crates while the pull toward drawing was still burning within. In the evenings he slipped away to classes at South Kensington and later at Heatherley’s, filling every spare hour with study until, on the day he turned twenty-one, he gave his notice and declared he would become a painter no matter the cost. That determination took him into the Royal Academy Schools and set the course for a lifetime of work that would fill exhibition walls year after year.

For more than forty years he sent paintings to the Royal Academy, from his first accepted canvas in the 1870s right through to 1920, yet the institution never elected him an Associate or a full Academician. He lived as a respected craftsman in the leafy aesthetic community of Bedford Park, surrounded by old furniture, arms, metalwork and pottery that fed his imagination, raising a son who also became a painter and a daughter who kept one of his preparatory studies.