In style and subject, Leonard's greatest debt is to Edgar Degas's paintings and pastels of bathers--prostitutes sponge bathing in the privacy of their Parisian bedrooms and boudoirs. Degas's cropped and angled compositions suggest the presence of an unnoticed voyeur, relishing what he has caught in his gaze. Leonard, too, visually invites us to join him in private encounters with male beauty, restating Degas' theme in contemporary gender terms.

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In scenes where Leonard gives his male nude an attribute of skull or mirror, as in the painting Vanitas of 1991, he places his figure in a time-honored tradition. The nude or clothed woman--goddess, saint, or mere mortal--posed before a mirror or holding a skull was a trope for moralizing statements on life's pleasures and brevity. Leonard draws his nudes into this convention, allowing the viewer to ponder in sensual male terms those universals formerly expressed by the female nude.

The supine and drowsily sleeping nude in Vanitas places one arm, supported by the other, over his face to half conceal it. A skull that is nestled in the crook of the model's arm is also half-covered by an article of clothing thrown askew on the bed. Leonard further develops a parallel theme of sacrifice made by the bearded young man's reclining figure, seen in steep perspective from knee to head and recalling Andrea Mantegna's Dead Christ, a famous early Renaissance painting dating to the late fifteenth century.

Very few of Leonard's paintings address homosexual identity directly, but those like Vanitas are, in part, the artist's empathetic response to the AIDS crisis. Couched in traditional symbolism and in terms of the Western nude, Vanitas hauntingly alludes to spent sexual desire and the inevitability of death.

If Leonard's nudes betray a sharp awareness of art historical tradition even as he extends and modifies those traditions, so too do his portraits. In a series of portrait drawings entitled "Drawn to the Past," he deliberately portrays contemporary likenesses in the manner of earlier artists, attempting thereby to "throw a new and intriguing light on the character of a face and incidentally provide my sitters with some surprising ancestors."

Leonard has said of his work that "My pictures marry observed reality with abstract values and are often enriched with personal subtexts or echoes of the work of great artists I admire. They are above all celebrations, and I hope to continue making them for as long as I am able. For me there is no occupation more fulfilling."

The artist resides in London.

Contemporary Art, which designates new currents in art since 1970, is identified with postmodernism; during this period an art addressing gay and lesbian identity emerged.

A large number of significant twentieth-century European artists focused on gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender themes, making such concerns crucial to the understanding of twentieth-century European art.

Throughout much of history, the nude male figure was virtually the only subject that could be used to articulate homoerotic desire in publicly displayed works of art, as well as those works of art intended for private "consumption."

American painter Paul Cadmus is best known for the satiric innocence of his frequently censored paintings of burly men in skin-tight clothes, but he also created works that celebrate same-sex domesticity.

New Orleans artist George Dureau is best known for his male figure studies and narrative paintings in oil and charcoal and for his black-and-white photographs, which often feature street youths, dwarfs, and amputees.

Although his personal sexual orientation is uncertain, American painter, photographer, and teacher Thomas Eakins is solidly aligned in the history of art with a homophile sensibility, as expressed particularly in his celebration of the male form.

American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe's controversial images typically combine rigorously formal composition and design with extreme subject matter.