artemlegere

[artemlegere]

Perdita

Artist: Frederick Sandys (British, 1829–1904)

Date: ca. 1866

Medium: Oil painting

Collection: Unknown

Description

Perdita was painted by Frederick Sandys with Mary Emma Jones as the model. Also known by her stage name Miss Clive, Mary Emma Jones appears in several of Sandys’ works. They never married, but the couple did have ten children together

In Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, Perdita is the daughter of Leontes (King of Sicilia) and Hermione. Unfortunately, Leontes wrongly believes that Hermione has been unfaithful with Polixenes (King of Bohemia) and that they have conceived a child. He imprisons his wife and Perdita, who actually is his daughter, is born in captivity. She is later abandoned on a seashore where she is discovered and raised by a shepherd.

In the second half of the play, Perdita has grown into a sixteen-year-old beauty. She has fallen in love with Florizel, son of Polixenes. Polixenes strongly objects to this relationship, not realizing that Perdita isn’t actually a shepherd’s daughter but the daughter of Hermione and Leontes. Eventually, as in all Shakespearean identity conundrums, Perdita learns who she truly is and is reunited with Hermione.

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King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid

Artist: Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones (English, 1833–1898)

Date: 1884

Medium: Oil paint on canvas

Collection: Tate Britain, London, United Kingdom

Description

This work is based on Alfred Tennyson’s poem ‘The Beggar Maid’. King Cophetua of Ethiopia falls in love with Penelophon, a young woman he sees begging for money. They marry, and she becomes Queen. At the time, art critics praised this work for its technical skill and for the message that love is more important than wealth and power. Through this painting and its reproduction as a print, Edward Burne-Jones became seen in Europe as the most important symbolist painter of his generation.

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Le Petit Gilles (The Little Confectioner)

Artist: Thomas Couture (French, 1815-1879)

Date: ca. 1879

Medium: Oil on canvas

Collection: Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia, United States

Description

Here Thomas Couture’s servant boy wears the white cap and smock of Pierrot, sometimes known as Gilles, an unlucky clown who is a recurring character in European street theater. He carries a tray bearing three glasses, two containing silver spoons and a sugary red liquid. Street performers in Paris often sent boys dressed in costume to sell sweets to passersby and lure them into the audience: hence the painting’s secondary title, The Little Confectioner. Couture often portrayed contemporary Parisians in the costumes of well-known stage characters to satirize modern French life.

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Dido

Artist: Henry Fuseli (Swiss, 1741–1825)

Date: 1781

Medium: Oil on canvas

Collection: Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, United States

Description

Dido was the legendary founder and first queen of Carthage (modern-day Tunisia). Her passionate love for the Trojan hero Aeneas, who was shipwrecked on the Carthaginian coast, is told in Virgil’s Aeneid. When Aeneas abandoned her to pursue his destiny, Dido built a funeral pyre from the couple’s bed and the belongings Aeneas left behind. At the sight of the Trojan ships leaving, Dido climbed onto the pyre and stabbed herself with Aeneas’s sword. The goddess Juno, protectress of Carthage, sent her messenger Iris to cut a lock of Dido’s hair to release her soul. For Fuseli, Dido’s violent suicide from a broken heart epitomized in his words, “supreme beauty in the jaws of death.” Fuseli, a Swiss émigré, exhibited this painting at the Royal Academy in 1781, just two years after settling in Britain.

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Daphnis and Chloe

Artist: François Gérard (French, 1770-1837)

Date: ca. 1824

Medium: Oil on canvas

Collection: Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, Michigan, United States

Description

Daphnis and Chloe is a Greek pastoral novel written during the Roman Empire, the only known work of second-century Hellenistic romance writer Longus. It is set on the Greek isle of Lesbos, where scholars assume the author to have lived. Its style is rhetorical and pastoral; its shepherds and shepherdesses are wholly conventional, but the author imparts human interest to this idealized world.

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The Bride of Abydos (Selim and Zuleika)

Artist: Eugène Delacroix (French, 1798–1863)

Date: 1857

Medium: Oil on canvas

Collection: Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, United States

Description

The Bride of Abydos is a poem written by Lord Byron in 1813. One of his earlier works, The Bride of Abydos is considered to be one of his "Heroic Poems", along with The Giaour, Lara, The Siege of Corinth, The Corsair and Parisina. These poems contributed to his poetic fame at the time in England.

Set in the Dardanelles of Turkey, Byron’s poem relates the tragic fate of Zuleika, the daughter of the Pasha Giaffir, and her lover, the pirate Selim. In order to avoid a loveless marriage arranged by her father, Zuleika escapes at night from the harem tower in which she has been held. In the scene shown in Delacroix’s painting the lovers await rescue in a grotto by the sea, pursued by Giaffir and his men, armed and bearing torches. When Selim fires his pistol to summon the aid of his comrades, who are waiting offshore, the shot signals their position to Giaffir. Sensing the approach of her pursuers, Zuleika tries to restrain Selim. In the tragic climax of the tale, Selim is shot dead by Giaffir, and his body washed out to sea. Zuleika dies of grief.

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Attachment

Artist: Sir Edwin Henry Landseer (English, 1802–1873)

Date: 1829

Medium: Oil on canvas

Collection: Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis, Missouri, United States

Description

This painting illustrates Sir Walter Scott's poem "Helvellyn," about a faithful dog that guarded her master's body after he had fallen while mountain climbing. Though the body went undiscovered for three months, the dog stayed to ward off the ravens and foxes that might have scavenged the remains. Edwin Henry Landseer dramatizes this scene through vivid contrasts of light and shadow, and by placing the man's body at the bottom of the composition, which emphasizes the great height from which it fell.

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Ozymandias

Artist: Charles Griffith

Medium: Oil on canvas

Description

From Percy Bysshe Shelley's classic poem.

"Ozymandias" is a sonnet written by the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. It was first published in the 11 January 1818 issue of The Examiner of London. The poem was included the following year in Shelley's collection Rosalind and Helen, A Modern Eclogue; with Other Poems, and in a posthumous compilation of his poems published in 1826.

I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed: And on the pedestal these words appear: "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" No thing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.

~  Percy Shelley, "Ozymandias", 1819 edition

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A King and a Beggar Maid

Artist: Edmund Leighton (British, 1852–1922)

Date: 1898

Medium: Oil on canvas

Collection: Private Collection

The King and the Beggar Maid

The story tells of an African king who rejected the affections of all women until he saw a beautiful young beggar from the window of his palace and fell deeply in love for the first time. He vowed to win the affections of the girl, or kill himself if she rejects him. Rushing into the street, he threw golden coins before him so that the beggars gathered around and when Penelophon stepped forward, he pledged his love for her and asked her to marry him and become his queen. Cophetua and Penelephon were wed and lived a long and happy life adored by their people, eventually being laid to rest in each other’s arms in their shared tomb. The story has become symbolic of the triumph of love and also a beacon of hope for those lacking love or wealth.

Leighton depicted the moment that King Cophetua pledged his love for the beggar maid, who he has placed on the dais of his golden throne. He kneels before her in supplication to her beauty, offering his bejewelled crown to her and gazes expectantly into her eyes. She steadies herself against the throne and modestly holds her cloak across her breast as she listens to his words of betrothal.

Her arms across her breast she laid; She was more fair than words can say; Barefooted came the beggar maid Before the king Cophetua. In robe and crown the king stept down, To meet and greet her on her way; ‘It is no wonder,’ said the lords, ‘She is more beautiful than day.’

As shines the moon in clouded skies, She in her poor attire was seen; One praised her ankles, one her eyes, One her dark hair and lovesome mien. So sweet a face, such angel grace, In all that land had never been. Cophetua sware a royal oath: ‘This beggar maid shall be my queen!’ Alfred Tennyson, The Beggar Maid

‘The king with courteous comly talke This beggar doth imbrace: The beggar blusheth scarlet red, And straight again as pale as leade, But not a word at all she said, She was in such amaze.’

~ Thomas Percy in Reliques of Ancient English Poetry

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Rinaldo and Armida

Artist: Charles de La Fosse (French, 1636-1716)

Date: 1686-1691

Medium: Oil on canvas

Collection: National Trust Collections, London, United Kingdom

Description

Rinaldo, a Christian Prince or crusading knight and Armida, a Saracen sorceress, are a pair of lovers from the Italian epic poem on the subject of the Crusades, Gerusalemme Liberata (Jerusalem Delivered) (1581) by Torquato Tasso (1544-1595). The subject here is Armida and the sleeping Rinaldo when, during his search for a magical island on the River Orontes in Syria, Rinaldo falls into an enchanted sleep. Armida discovers him, meaning to kill him, but falls in love with him instead. Rinaldo is seen lying underneath some trees with his head on a cushion, his armour and a leopard skin laid to one side. He holds a spear in his left hand. Armida, with long blonde hair and blue cloak, kneels beside him. She is accompanied by two female attendants, Phenice and Sidonie. Three putti fly above the head of Rinaldo, carrying off his helmet, shield and sword. A fourth points to Rinaldo. A landscape with distant hills can be seen at the far left.

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Titania and Bottom

Artist: Henry Fuseli (Swiss, 1741–1825)

Date: c. 1790

Medium: Oil paint on canvas

Collection: Tate Britain, London, United Kingdom

Description

Fuseli was introduced to Shakespeare's plays during his student days in Zürich with the Swiss scholar Jacob Bodmer. A Midsummer Night's Dream held a special appeal for him, in that it explores the realms of the supernatural.

In the picture Fuseli illustrates a moment from Act IV scene 1, in which Oberon, in order to punish her for her pride, casts a spell on Queen Titania, as a result of which she falls in love with Bottom, whose head has been transformed into that of an ass. In the play she murmurs lovingly to the object of her affections,

Come, sit thee down upon this flowery bed, While I thy amiable cheeks do coy, And stick musk roses in thy sleek smooth head, And kiss thy fair large ears, my gentle joy.

Fuseli's imagination is given free reign in this fantastical scene. Titania calls on her fairies, who are wearing contemporary dress, to attend to Bottom: Pease-blossom scratches his ass's head; Mustard-seed perches on his hand in order to assist; and Cobweb kills a bee and brings him the honey-bag. A leering young woman offers him a basket of dried peas. The young woman leading a dwarf-like creature by a string symbolises the triumph of youth over old age, of the senses over the mind and of woman over man. The hooded old woman on the right is holding a changeling newly formed out of wax. Similarly, on the left of the picture, the group of children are artificial beings created by witches.

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Armida Encounters the Sleeping Rinaldo

Artist: Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (Italian, 1696–1770)

Date: 1742-1745

Medium: Oil on canvas

Collection: Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, United States

Description

This painting illustrates Torquato Tasso’s popular sixteenth-century epic romance Jerusalem Delivered, which is set in the eleventh century, during the First Crusade, when Western knights sought to take Jerusalem from the Muslims. The canvas captures the moment of Rinaldo’s seduction: the beautiful sorceress Armida has just arrived to divert the sleeping hero from his crusade. Accompanied by her attendant nymph and a cupid figure, she appears like a beautiful mirage, enthroned on a billowing cloud, her drapery and shawl wafting gently behind her. Altough Tasso’s story symbolizes the conflict between love and duty, Tiepolo’s depiction of a magical, bucolic world - enhanced by effervescent colors, luminous atmosphere, and dense, creamy paint - seems to evoke only love’s enchantment.

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Isabella and the Pot of Basil

Artist: William Holman Hunt (English, 1827-1910)

Date: 1868

Medium: Oil on canvas

Collection: Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne, England

Description

The painting depicts a scene from John Keats's poem Isabella, or the Pot of Basil. It depicts the heroine Isabella caressing the basil pot in which she had buried the severed head of her murdered lover Lorenzo.

Isabella, or the Pot of Basil (1818) is a narrative poem by John Keats adapted from a story in Boccaccio's Decameron (IV, 5). It tells the tale of a young woman whose family intend to marry her to "some high noble and his olive trees", but who falls for Lorenzo, one of her brothers' employees. When the brothers learn of this, they murder Lorenzo and bury his body. His ghost informs Isabella in a dream. She exhumes the body and buries the head in a pot of basil which she tends obsessively, while pining away.

The poem was a precursor to The Eve of Saint Agnes. Both are set in the Middle Ages and concern passionate and dangerous romances. It was published in 1820 along with the latter work and others.

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Titania, Bottom and the Fairies

Artist: Henry Fuseli (Swiss, 1741–1825)

Date: 1793-1794

Medium: Oil on canvas

Collection: Kunsthaus Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland

Description

Here is an episode from A Midsummer's Night Dream: the Fairy Queen Titania, bewitched by her jealous husband Oberon, falls in love with the donkey-headed weaver Bottom. She has flung both arms around the hybrid creature and, mad in love, has no inkling of the humiliation that awaits her. She is surrounded by her courtiers, a cloud of spirits in a variety of forms. At the top right a mischievous face peeps out of the darkness, that of Puck, the Fairy King henchman, who attends and executes his master will. His magic potion will also prove the despair of the two young women, Hermia and Helena, emerging from the forest clearing: the potion mistaken use causes their respective lovers to confuse one for the other.

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Una and the Lion

Artist: Briton Rivière (British, 1840–1920)

Date: 1880

Medium: Oil on canvas

Description

Una and the Lion is a painting based on the epic poem "The Faerie Queene" by Edmund Spenser.

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Aurora Leigh’s Dismissal of Romney (‘The Tryst’)

Artist: Arthur Hughes (English, 1832–1915)

Date: 1860

Medium: Oil paint on board

Collection: Tate Britain

Description

This painting illustrates an early scene from the poem Aurora Leigh (1856) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Aurora is an aspiring poet. Her cousin Romney has proposed marriage, asking Aurora to devote herself to his philanthropic projects. She rejects him and this role of ‘helpmate’ in order to follow her vocation as a writer. Here, she holds a book of her poems that Romney has dismissed with doubts of a woman’s ability to create meaningful art. This work was commissioned by a friend of Barrett Browning, art collector Ellen Heaton.

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The Pride of the Village

Artist: John Callcott Horsley (British, 1817–1903)

Date: 1839

Medium: Oil paint on mahogany

Collection: Tate Britain, London, United Kingdom

Description

When this picture was first exhibited at the Royal Academy it was accompanied by a quotation from Washington Irving's short story 'The Pride of the Village', which was written in 1819:

'A tear trembles in her soft blue eyes. Was she thinking of her faithless lover? Or were her thoughts wandering to that distant churchyard into whose bosom she might soon be gathered?.'

Irving's story told of an only daughter who was 'the pride of the village'. One year she was the May Queen and caught the attention of a young army officer. When his love proved to be false, the girl pined away in her parents' cottage.