Apollo: A fitting marriage: leighton house is the ideal location for a highly focussed exhibition on

Although of course it contains a thoroughly interesting permanent collection of works of art (including the beautiful, recently acquired portrait of Leighton by his friend and neighbour G.F. Watts), the 'offer' at Leighton House is as much about applied art and social context as it is about painting and sculpture. This being so, no more suitable venue for the museum's current exhibition can be imagined. This examines, in exhaustive but fascinating and accessible detail, every aspect of the production, reception and subsequent history of Edwin Long's entertaining but frankly second-rate painting The Babylonian marriage market. This was sold in 1882 to Thomas Holloway for 6,300 guineas (a saleroom record for a work by a living artist that stood until The monarch of the glen changed hands for 6,900 guineas ten years later), and had also been 'picture of the year' when it was first exhibited at the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition in 1875. The exhibition at Leighton House, with the excellent catalogue that accompanies it, is the fruit of a three-way collaboration between the museum, Royal Holloway, University of London (from whose collection the painting comes) and the British Museum. It is a really exemplary piece of modern museum practice.

The Babylonian marriage market represents a peculiarly Victorian combination of the edifying (based on a passage in Herodotus and scrupulous archaeological research) with the titillating, and of high-mindedness with a sharp eye for the main chance. Once a year, according to Herodotus, it was the Babylonian custom to assemble all the village girls of marriageable age and hold an auction. The prettiest girl would be first up, and all the men would bid for her, then the next prettiest, and so on. The money raised would be used to supply dowries for girls so ill favoured that they had attracted no bidders, so that they too would stand some chance of getting a husband. In Long's cleverly composed picture the first, prettiest, girl is already on the auctioneer's block with her back to us so that we can study the rapt faces of the men competing for her hand. Behind the bidders, above their heads, we can see a frieze of decorated tiles, its design of two lions after the same lioness humorously echoing the action below. In the foreground, seated with their backs to the block, facing us, the other girls wait their turn. Some appear anxious, some complacent; one weeps in mortification; some seem self-absorbed while others talk among themselves. It is a widescreen, cast of thousands, Cecil B. de Mille epic of a painting.

Long shrewdly capitalised on the vogue for all things Assyrian that followed Austen Henry Layard's Mesopotamian excavations and the publication of his bestseller Nineveh and its Remains (1849). The firm of W.A. Mansell was given permission by the British Museum to photograph all the principal monuments in the Babylonian and Assyrian galleries. Whole sets of the 600 images sold well and single photographs and lantern slides were available at half-a-crown and one-and-threepence respectively. Examples of these beautiful photographs (corresponding to details in Long's painting) are included in the exhibition, and the curators draw attention to other examples of archaeological detail taken accurately from items in the BM collections. There is a copy on show of the engraving after the painting (photogravure with etching and roulette on chine colle) published by the Fine Art Society in 1889.

The exhibition also includes a set of bookends in the shapes of the famous winged bull and winged lion, made by Copeland after 1868 in 'Parian ware' (a glistening white porcelain that looked like marble) and a set of jugs by Ridgway & Abington, brightly coloured in green, pink and yellow, decorated with the same winged bulls and lions, with serpent handles. Most beautiful, however, is the magnificent set of necklace, bracelet and earrings made from genuine ancient Assyrian cylinder seals of carnelian, chalcedony, agate and haematite, in heavy gold settings, given by Layard to his wife as a wedding present and shown here in its original leather case.

The painting's echoes in the contemporary marriage market were widely noted at the time, by Ruskin when he commented on 'the souls of our most beautiful and marvelous maidens announced annually for sale by auction in Paris and London', and more lightheartedly in Mr Punch's Pocket Book. A copy of the latter is on display open at a parody, The modern Babylonian marriage market, in which a row of modern women seeking husbands advertise themselves with signs hung round their necks bearing such legends as 'paints in watercolour', 'literary' and 'curate preferred'.

The temporary exhibition space at Leighton House is not large, but a show like this one, focussing on a single painting, allows the gallery to play to its strengths. I was glad to hear Daniel Robbins, the curator, promise more exhibitions of the same sort.

'The price of beauty: Edwin Long's Babylonian Marriage Market' opened at Leighton House, London, on 15 October 2004 and continues until 16 January. The catalogue, by Daniel Robbins (ed.), is published by the museum, ISBN 0902242210, 5 [pounds sterling].

Simon Poe is writing a book on the Victorian painter Roddam Spencer Stanhope.