Organized by Susan Grace Galassi, the Frick’s senior curator, “Leighton’s ‘Flaming June’ “ includes one other piece — a lovely, 4-inch-by-4-inch painted study for the final work.

Pablo Pérez d’Ors, associate curator of European art at the Museo de Arte de Ponce, in Ponce, P.R., the painting’s permanent residence, notes in his catalog essay that the beautiful woman asleep in some archaic past was a recurrent motif in Victorian art. He speculatively connects that with fantasies about opium dens popularized in stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, among others, which “paved the way for the appearance of symbolic allusions to the unconscious and to death.” Along these lines, he points out that the red flowers in the scene’s upper-right corner are oleanders, which were known to be poisonous. This makes the woman a femme fatale, a dangerously alluring figure who would seduce the unwary into oblivion.

Because she’s asleep and possibly dreaming, and because the image itself is like a dream, it’s hard to resist some psychoanalysis, the method that Freud was inventing around the same time that Leighton was working on his picture, the last and most famous of his career. Two elements are conspicuous: the weirdly oversized, unmistakably phallic thigh and the fluttering drapery all around the figure, which makes her appear to be “enfolded in a field of energy,” as Ms. Galassi puts it in her catalog essay. What else can this be, a Freudian might rhetorically ask, but an image of what the French call “la petite mort”? But the broader context of European history and its accelerating second Industrial Revolution is worth considering, too. The figure of the languid woman is more than just an object of erotic desire. She’s the opposite of the rationalist, ever-striving, murderously competitive spirit — once conventionally thought of as distinctively masculine. She embodies a yearning to relax, to retire from the fray and take pleasure in just being alive. As a shape-shifting archetype, she turns up repeatedly in Modernist art: in paintings by Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani, and countless other, usually male, artists. She’s the countercultural soul of modernity.

Leighton himself was no rebel. Born into a wealthy family and trained in Frankfurt, Paris and Rome, he was for many years president of the Royal Academy. But the 20th century wasn’t kind to his memory. Until the 1970s, Victorian art in general was regarded by sophisticates as stale, morally stultifying, formulaic kitsch. Then the tide turned. With their complex narratives, poetic metaphors, references to times past, the Victorians appealed to a Postmodernist sensibility. That new enthusiasm precipitated an avalanche of art books in which “Flaming June” was frequently reproduced. Now it belongs as much popular as to high culture. You can even buy “Flaming June” jewelry: earrings and pendants featuring miniature reproductions of the picture.