An Athlete Wrestling with a Python

The original full-size bronze was acquired for the nation using funds from the Chantrey Bequest, and is displayed at Tate Britain in London.

The sculpture depicts a dramatic scene of life and death, with a classically proportioned male nude wrestling with a large snake.

The exaggerated spiral composition confounds any singular view of the statue, and its form exceeds that of its predecessors' use of the figura serpentinata.

Jules Dalou, a French sculptor who was in exile in London after the Paris Commune, encouraged Leighton to scale it up and to have it cast as a life-size bronze.

The work was scaled up and modelled in plaster at Brock's studio in Boscobel Place, Westminster, and then cast in bronze by Cox & Son, whose foundry in Thames Ditton was later taken over by A.B.

It was the first full-size nude adult male sculpture with no fig leaf to conceal its genitals to be made in Britain in decades.

In this, it is comparable to the contemporary sculpture by Auguste Rodin, The Age of Bronze (1876), and the slightly later 'Standing Man' (1884) by Adolf von Hildebrand.

Leighton's Athlete, along with these contemporary statues, pushed the Classical tradition to its limits and helped to open the discourse of modernity in sculpture in Europe.

A plaster cast of the clay study, 25.1 by 15.6 by 13.0 centimetres (9.9 in × 6.1 in × 5.1 in), is held by Tate Britain, made c.1877 and presented by Alphonse Legros 1897, and a further version in bronze is in the Ashmolean Museum, in Oxford.

Leighton counselled against the reproduction, as the marble is less able to hold its own weight, but eventually acquiesced and adapted the composition, adding supports for the legs.

Brock assisted Leighton with a second full-size male nude sculpture, his The Sluggard (1885), sometimes titled An Athlete Awakening from Sleep.

Leighton's third and last bronze sculpture was a much smaller statuette of a female nude, Needless Alarms (1886), depicting a girl frightened by a toad.