My prior Art posts can be found HERE.
How do we move away from being a civilization that produces art that causes comments like, “my five year old could make this,” back to being one that creates beauty and inspires deep questions? We must reject modernity and embrace tradition. To embrace tradition, we must first learn about it..
Let’s study art history together.
Miranda
| Artist | John William Waterhouse |
|---|---|
| Year | 1875 |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Movement | Romanticism |
| Dimensions | 76 cm × 101.5 cm (30 in × 40.0 in) |
| Condition | Very good condition with minimal intervention in the past. |
| Owner | Private collection |
| Artist | John William Waterhouse |
|---|---|
| Year | 1916 |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Movement | Romanticism |
| Dimensions | 100.4 cm in height and 137.8 cm in width |
| Owner | Private collection |
These paintings are beautiful in their own right. Each depicts a young woman, pensively perched on some rocks, staring out at the sea. In each, the sky is gray and her hair is windblown. You might say she’s just at the onset of a Tempest.
There are some notable difference between the two. In the first painting, earlier in the life of Waterhouse, the subject and the scene seem calm and brighter. She is wearing non-period appropriate Greek attire. It feels as though a storm is approaching, but it has not quite arrived yet. In the latter painting, near the end of Waterhouse’s life, the woman is standing, the storm is much closer – as made evident by the larger waves – and she is in darker colors. The effect of the color difference is that the second is both more gloomy and tense.
The title of the paintings gives you a clue about Waterhouse’s real intention. Miranda is a character form the Shakespeare play, “The Tempest.” The paintings are not a scene from the play – though in the play Miranda witnesses the sinking of a ship in Act 1 of the play. Waterhouse assumed his audience could put two and two together. Of course, they did.
If by your art, my dearest father, you have
Put the wild waters in this roar, allay them.
The sky, it seems, would pour down stinking pitch,
But that the sea, mounting to th’ welkin’s cheek,
Dashes the fire out. Oh! I have suffered
With those that I saw suffer: a brave vessel,
Who had, no doubt, some noble creatures in her,
Dash’d all to pieces. Oh! The cry did knock
Against my very heart. Poor souls, they perish’d.
Had I been any god of power, I would
Have sunk the sea within the earth, or e’er
It should the good ship so have swallow’d and (…)William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 1, Scene 2.
Whether you know the background or not, though, there’s something that resonates in seeing someone staring out at the ocean. It’s one of humanity’s favorite pastimes.
I am fascinated by the fact that Waterhouse returned to this subject, forty years after his first effort. Perhaps the things that stir our hearts when we are young, continue to do so in some cases. Does he view himself as one of the men in the play’s ship? If so, then perhaps Miranda represents a lifetime of hope or longing.
(more on the earlier version, via wiki)
Miranda by John William Waterhouse was painted in 1875 and depicts the character Miranda from William Shakespeare‘s The Tempest. Waterhouse also painted Miranda later in his career, both in 1916. According to Sotheby’s, the painting is currently in very good condition.
Miranda was only Waterhouse’s second exhibit at the Royal Academy, in 1875. It was seemingly lost for 131 years until it was found in 2004 in a private collection in Scotland, then auctioned by Bonhams on 4 November 2004. From 2009 to 2010, it went on an exhibition tour:
- The Groninger Museum (December 13, 2008 – May 3, 2009)
- The Royal Academy of Arts in London (J.W. Waterhouse – The Modern Pre-Raphaelite ) (June 27 – September 13, 2009)
- The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (October 1, 2009 – February 7, 2010)
The painting does not depict a scene from the play, but instead is an invention of Waterhouse, who depicts the fifteen-year-old Miranda seated on a rock at the seashore, watching a ship in the far distance. Despite the era the play was written in, Miranda is depicted wearing clothing from classical antiquity, a white chiton and tainia; her clothing and the scene evokes the mythical heroine Ariadne at the time when she was abandoned by Theseus on the island of Naxos. During Act I of The Tempest, Miranda will witness this ship, which carries her eventual lover Ferdinand, destroyed by the magic of her father, Prospero — this is the more popularly depicted scene, but Waterhouse chose to paint a pensive Miranda instead.
In The Magazine of Art (1886), Blaikie compares Miranda to another of Waterhouse’s works, Sleep and His Half-Brother Death, to both critique and compliment the artist:
There is no suggestion of the imaginative insight and exhaustive idealisation that are notable of the vision of Sleep and Death, though a satisfying potency of colour and a finely graduated brilliance of illumination give admirable force and relief to the figure.
For a great (very brief) review of the second Miranda, I direct you to the following:
