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Interior of Tintern Abbey, J. M. W. Turner, 1794
Turner painted this watercolor at the age of nineteen, a year after Wordsworth made his first visit to the abbey (1793) and four years before the poet returned for a second visit ( 1798), as recorded in the famous "Lines . . ." pondering the changes that have taken place in both the speaker and the scene in the interim (see p.
1491). In Turner's version�as, in a different way, in Wordsworth's�the ruined symbol of religion, towering above two tiny human figures, presumably tourists, in the lower left, is in the process of being taken over (allegorically superseded) by the more powerful force of nature. VICTORIA & ALRERT MUSEUM, LONDON/ART RESOURCE, NY.
Lord Byron, by Thomas Phillips, 1835 (after an original of 1813)
Garbed theatrically in an Albanian soldier's dress that he had purchased while on his travels, Byron appears in this portrait as one of his own exotic heroes. The profits from his "Eastern" tales Lara and The Corsair in fact helped pay the painter's fees for the portrait, which Byron commissioned in 1813, choosing to be pictured not as a member of the
British Establishment but as an outsider. The archives of London's National Portrait Gallery record more than forty portraits of Byron done during his lifetime,
as well as a waxwork model from life
made by Madame Tussaud in 1816: a
statistic that suggests the poet's keen
awareness of the magnetism and mar
ketability of his image. NATIONAL POR
TRAIT GALLERY, LONDON, UK/BRIDGEMAN
ART LIHRARY.
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Madeline after Prayer, Daniel Maclise, 1868
Maclise's painting illustrates the particulars of Madeline's freeing her hair "of all its wreathed pearls" (The Eve of St. Agnes, line 227; see p. 1836) and more generally the stanzas describing the "casement high and triple-arch'd" and other furnishings of her bedroom. The pre- Raphaelite-influenced picture captures the rich colors and textures of the situation, but Keats's words actually provide many more details than the painting, including the hidden observer of this scene, Madeline's lover, Porphyro, who grows faint on seeing Madeline's appearance as a "splendid angel." THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE NATIONAL MUSEUMS AND GALLERIES ON MERSEYSIDE, WALKER ART GALLERY, LIVERPOOL, UK.
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The Nightmare, by Henry Fuseli, ca. 1783-1791
The first version of this painting created a sensation when the Swiss- born artist Fuseli exhibited it at London's Royal Acadcmy in 1781. Even Horace Walpole, who had used his own nightmare of "a gigantic hand in armour" when composing his Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, found Fuseli's trademark blend of violence, eroticism, and the irrational excessively disturbing: "shockingly mad, madder than ever; quite mad" was Walpole's verdict on the witchcraft scene that Fuseli exhibited four years later. It is no surprise to leam that during the 1920s Sigmund Freud kept an engraving of The Nightmare on display. SNARK/ART RESOURCE, NY.
Illustration of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Gustave Dore, 1 876
Coleridge's poems�especially The Ancient Mariner and "Kubla Khan," with their abundance of color, texture, and mysterious detail� have been illustrated many times. Dore's elaborate engravings, originally published in an edition of the poem in 1876, are perhaps the best known of all, "darkly brooding, richly detailed, almost symphonic in their comprehensiveness and complexity," as one critic has described them. This plate illustrates lines 59�60, "The ice was here, the ice was there, / The ice was all around" (see p. 1617). FROM THE RIME OF I HE ANCIENT MARINER, DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC.
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The Victorian Age (1830-1901)
Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dy ing�Typhoon Coming On),
J. M. W. Turner, 1840 The subject of Turner's painting�slaves thrown overboard, still in chains, as a storm approaches�is the occasion for apocalyptic use of light and color. For several years John Ruskin owned this painting, a gift from his father; but he later sold it, finding the subject "too painful to live with." While many contemporaries criticized the painting for what they saw as its extravagance, Ruskin praised iL as Turner's noblest work, in a passage from Modern Painters that is one of Ruskin's own finest passages of prose painting. BURSTEIN COLLECTION/ CORBIS.
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Ophelia, John Everett Millais, 1851-52
Millais's painting illustrates the lines from Hamlet (4.7.137-54) in which Gertrude describes Ophelia's drowning herself. Many of the individual plants and llowers�the pansies on her dress, the violets around her neck�derive from the queen's speech and Ophelia's mad scene (4.5.163�94). Like much Pre-Raphaelite art, the painting sets an erotic subject in the midst of photographically precise, symbolic detail. The model for the painting was Elizabeth Siddal (later to become Dante Gabriel Rossetti's wife), who posed for the picture in a warm bath. ERICH LESSING/ART RESOURCE, NY.
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Work, Ford Madox Brown, 1852, 1856-63
Brown's painting constructs a comprehensive picture of Victorian society through the relationships of various classes of the population to work. The excavators at the center represent work in its essential, physical form; the leisured gentry on horseback at the top of the painting have no need to work; the ragged girl in the foreground cares for her orphaned brothers and sisters. Under the trees are vagrants and distressed haymakers. Thomas Carlyle and
F. D. Maurice, "brain workers" whose social ideas influenced the painting, stand on the right. MANCHESTER CITY ART GALLERY, MANCHESTER, UK.
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The Awakening Conscience, William Holman Hunt, 1853�54
Every detail of Hunt's painting of a fallen woman, hearing the voice of conscience while in the arms of her lover, has symbolic resonance�the soiled glove on the carpet, the bird that has escaped the cat, the songs on the piano ("Oft in the Stilly Night") and on the floor ("Tears, Idle Tears"), the window through which the woman gazes, reflected in the mirror behind the couple. Like Millais's Ophelia, the painting surrounds and interprets its subject with a crowded canvas of discrete, photographically rendered objects. TATE GALLERY, LONDON/ART RESOURCE, NY.
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Soul's Beauty, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1864-70
Also titled Sibylla Palmifera (the palm-bearing sibyl), Soul's Beauty represents the
unattainable ideal that inspires the artist. Painted as a companion to the sonnet of the same name, the picture strives to represent and evoke
the erotic and aesthetic absorption the poem allegorizes.
Rossetti devoted the last fifteen years of his painting career to these looming frontal portraits with richly decorated
backgrounds, the details of which carry symbolic signifi
cance (in this painting, the
arch of life, the cupid, the poppies, the skull, the butter
flies). THE BOARD OF
TRUSTEES OF THE NATIONAL
MUSEUMS AND GALLERIES ON
MERSEYSIDE, LADY LEVER ART
GALLERY, LIVERPOOL, ENGLAND.