domingo, 1 de mayo de 2011

1190. THE EVE OF ST. AGNES. (A. Hughes.)



The Royal Academy Exhibition 1856

A noble picture, apparently too hastily finished, and very wrongly put into this room. It looks too blue; but remember it is entirely a night piece, admitting moonlight into the chambers; and if a piece of real moonlight were seen, instead of the picture, through the walls of the room, it would look just as strangely blue: the fault which the eye catches is chiefly that the blue glass casts a white light, and the colours in the left hand subject are confused in relation. The ivy on the tree trunk has clearly been done without a natural model, and is not creditable to the painter of the ivy in No. 578. The half-entranced, half startled, face of the awaking Madeline is exquisite ; but the lover's in both the centre and right-hand subjects very far from satisfactory. If, however, the reader knows the poem, he will be grateful for the picture; and there is promise in it of high excellence.(1)

(1)[A reproduction of this picture ―an illustration of Keats' poem in three compartments― will be found at p. 182 of Letters of Dante Gabriel Kossetti to William Allinghum. ''Hughes' ‘Eve of St. Agnes’" wrote Rossetti, "will make his fortune, I feel sure."]

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