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Painting poetry: Alfred, Lord Tennyson
The most painted of the poems of Alfred, Lord Tennyson are those of his Arthurian narrative Idylls of the King, that I have recently incorporated into my long series on paintings of Arthurian legends. Among those The Lady of Shalott remains the most popularly depicted. Several other poems of Tennyson have featured in notable paintings.
The Sleeping Beauty is a ‘fairy’ story widespread through most of Europe, best known from the version of the brothers Grimm, and retold by Tennyson initially in his 1830 poem of the same name, expanded into The Day-Dream of 1842.
The central story tells of a princess, who has seven good fairies as her godmothers. An eighth and evil fairy was overlooked, and seeks a way to get revenge. She puts a curse on the princess that she will prick her hand on the spindle of a spinning wheel and die. One good fairy tries to reverse this, changing the spell so that it will put her into a deep sleep for a century, and can only be awakened by a kiss from a prince.
Royal edict then forbids all spinning throughout the kingdom, but when the princess is a young woman, she discovers an old woman spinning, and pricks her finger on the spindle. She then falls asleep. The king summons the good fairy to try to address the problem. Her solution is to put everyone in the castle to sleep, and to summon a forest with brambles and thorns around the castle, to prevent anyone from entering.
A prince later hears the story of the Sleeping Beauty, and rises to the challenge to penetrate the trees and bramble thickets around the castle. He discovers the sleeping princess, kisses her, and she and the rest of the castle wake up. The prince and princess marry, and they all live happily ever after.
A pupil of the Pre-Raphaelites working long after most of the them had died, John Collier chooses part of the story before the climax, in his Sleeping Beauty of 1921. Here the princess and her two companions are shown asleep, with the dense woodland and brambles seen through the window.
The same year that his first version of The Sleeping Beauty was published, Tennyson wrote a poem drawn from William Shakespeare’s comedy Measure for Measure, and the character of Mariana.
Set in Vienna, the play relates the events which take place when the Duke of Vienna makes it known that he is going away on a diplomatic mission. His deputy, Angelo, assumes control, although the Duke doesn’t actually go away at all, but remains in disguise to observe Angelo’s behaviour in his feigned absence.
Angelo has been betrothed to Mariana, but her dowry was lost at sea, so he has refused to marry her, leaving her isolated and in perpetual sadness, with no promise of any solution. During the Duke’s feigned absence, it becomes clear that Angelo lusts after another, Isabella, a novice nun who is the sister of Claudio, who Angelo has engineered to become sentenced to death for fornication. Angelo offers Isabella a deal to spare her brother’s life, in which she lets him deflower her.
The disguised Duke arranges a ‘bed trick’ in which it is actually Mariana who Angelo has sex with, which could be construed as consummation of their frozen marriage. Angelo then has sex with Mariana, believing her to be Isabella, but reneges on the deal to spare Claudio. The Duke arranges for a similar head to be sent to Angelo to ‘prove’ Claudio’s execution, in the ‘head trick’.
The Duke then ‘returns’ to Vienna, and is petitioned by Isabella and Mariana, for their claims against Angelo. Angelo attempts to lay blame against the Duke when he was disguised as a friar, so the Duke reveals his role, and proposes that Angelo be executed. Eventually it’s agreed that Angelo is made to marry Mariana, and revealed that Claudio was not executed.
Tennyson’s Mariana focusses solely on her ‘despondent isolation’ before most of the events of Shakespeare’s play. Its 84 lines end with the summary
Then, said she, “I am very dreary,
He will not come,” she said;
She wept, “I am aweary, aweary,
O God, that I were dead!”
A couple of years later, Tennyson rewrote the poem and published his new version under the title Mariana in the South in 1832. That follows more closely the tragic circumstances of The Lady of Shalott, ending in Mariana’s death. This leaves us with a choice of two or even three different Mariana narratives, and a fourth if we include Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel Ruth, published in 1853, which was apparently inspired by Millais’ painting below.
Some of John Everett Millais’ sketches for his major painting of Mariana have survived, and show how from early on in its development, the figure’s posture and location had been decided.
The final version of Mariana (1851) was first shown at the Royal Academy in 1851, together with lines 9-12 of Tennyson’s original Mariana:
She only said, “My life is dreary,
He cometh not,” she said;
She said, “I am aweary, aweary;
I would that I were dead!”
Millais’ superb and richly-coloured painting is full of symbols: fallen leaves to indicate the passage of time, her embroidery as a means of passing that time, the Annunciation in the stained glass contrasting her with the Virgin’s fulfilment, the motto ‘in coelo quies’ (in heaven is rest), and the snowdrop flower in the glass meaning consolation. Mariana’s posture is intended to indicate her yearning for Angelo.
Marie Spartali Stillman’s accomplished watercolour of Mariana from 1867 may have been inspired by Millais’ painting, and uses the same basic setting of Mariana gazing out of a window with yearning. However she dispenses with Millais’ complex symbols, and fills her paper with Mariana herself, relying on her facial expression and body language alone.
When first exhibited at the Dudley Gallery, it was well received, but didn’t sell. It then vanished until its re-discovery in the 1980s. It has been suggested that this painting may have been inspiration for Rossetti’s versions.
Rossetti made two quite different studies before painting his finished work of 1870, that are generally accepted as being part of his Aesthetic style rather than the earlier Pre-Raphaelite.
The Heart of the Night (Mariana in the Moated Grange) (1862) is an intriguing watercolour study quite unlike any of the other depictions of Mariana, but clearly referring to Tennyson’s first poem. The figure is obviously yearning deeply, but instead of facing a window, she inhabits the dark. Some symbols are apparent in the distance, including a spinning wheel indicating time, and there are love letters scattered in the foreground.
Rossetti’s next study of 1868 is transformed by his use of Jane Morris (wife of William Morris) as the model, and this probably developed from a study of her head alone. There is also a link to reality, in that the Morris’s marriage was going through a difficult period, and Jane and Rossetti were becoming increasingly close.
Rossetti’s finished painting of Mariana (1870) strangely reverts to that of Shakespeare’s play, and depicts the moments in Act IV scene 1 in which a boy sings to Mariana. Rossetti dresses the woman in the same blue as Millais, and uses Jane Morris as his model. Mariana now sits full of yearning, her embroidery on her lap, as she listens to the boy’s song, bringing in the art of music. There appears little in common with Stillman’s painting, though.
Philip Hermogenes Calderon’s sketchy painting is even more obviously linked to the Shakespeare play, and those same events in Act IV scene 1. The boy is not shown in song, though, as he stares at Mariana’s face, which we cannot see, as she is looking into the canvas. Her purity is confirmed by the white lily flowers.
Valentine Cameron Prinsep’s Mariana (c 1888) was intended to serve as an illustration for a printed edition of Shakespeare’s play; this version was printed by Goupil in Paris in 1896. Instead of following Rossetti and Calderon, he uses a similar composition to Stillman. Mariana is here dressed in white, symbolising her purity, and stares out of anachronistic diamond-pane windows, full of yearning.
Henrietta Rae painted her version of Mariana in 1892, and appears again to refer to Marie Spartali Stillman’s painting of 1867, with its bottle-glass windows, although her composition looks original.
Almost fifty years after Millais’ first painting, John William Waterhouse chose to use Tennyson’s later reworking of his poem, Mariana in the South.
One study has survived, showing how Waterhouse has moved closer to popular images derived from The Lady of Shalott. The moated grange is now kept in permanent darkness, shutters closed. Mariana yearns in front of a large mirror, as if dressing herself in preparation for her death.
Waterhouse’s finished Mariana in the South (c 1897) places her in a posture more closely derived from that of Millais. On the floor are some of her love letters, and there is a large red rose of love on her breast. At the left edge, on a distant mantleshelf, a candle burns its vigil for her lost betrothal, and her prayers that she will one day marry. This matches Tennyson’s words “And in the liquid mirror glowed the clear perfection of her face” from his second version of the poem.
In early 1835, Tennyson wrote a brief elegy describing his emotion of loss following the death of his close friend and fellow poet Arthur Henry Hallam in 1833, titled Break, Break, Break. It was published in 1842.
This remarkable painting by Elihu Vedder is one of the earliest symbolist images made by an American artist. Its origins are probably in sketches he made in 1866 and 1867, according to Regina Soria. The earlier of those was a response to Tennyson’s poem Break, Break, Break, pondering the memory of loved ones when contemplating the sea, as Vedder shows here.
