Lot Essay
Despite the inscription on the frame, the title is not taken from A Midsummer-Night's Dream but from As You Like It, Act III, Scene 4. Corin, a shepherd, is speaking to the two heroines, Rosalind and Celia, about his fellow shepherd, Silvius, who loves the shepherdess Phebe in vain. He offers to show them a love-passage between the couple:
If you will see a pageant truly play'd,
Between the pale complexion of true love
And the red glow of scorn and proud disdain,
Go hence a little, and I shall conduct you,
If you will mark it.
The picture was painted when the artist was twenty-seven and was one of her first works to appear at the Royal Academy, where she had started to exhibit in 1896. Although she is already a committed adherent of the Pre-Raphaelite tradition, the picture has a freshness of vision, a breadth of scale, and a freedom in the handling of the oil medium which make it a very different kind of performance to her later and more familiar watercolours. Indeed it is something of an early masterpiece, and one of the most arresting examples of her work to appear on the market for years. She has not of course kept closely to Shakespeare's text, taking his dramatic situation but reinterpreting it in terms of a well-to-do couple, a middle aged and none too good looking suitor and a young woman who has cynically taken a necklace as a gift but does not return her lover's feelings. At the same time Shakespeare's phrase 'the red glow of scorn and proud disdain' seems to have suggested the girl's dramatic red dress. Such a use of a red dress to express strong emotion is reminiscent of the way Munch conveys the mental state of the man in his well-known painting Jealousy, executed only two or three years before.
If you will see a pageant truly play'd,
Between the pale complexion of true love
And the red glow of scorn and proud disdain,
Go hence a little, and I shall conduct you,
If you will mark it.
The picture was painted when the artist was twenty-seven and was one of her first works to appear at the Royal Academy, where she had started to exhibit in 1896. Although she is already a committed adherent of the Pre-Raphaelite tradition, the picture has a freshness of vision, a breadth of scale, and a freedom in the handling of the oil medium which make it a very different kind of performance to her later and more familiar watercolours. Indeed it is something of an early masterpiece, and one of the most arresting examples of her work to appear on the market for years. She has not of course kept closely to Shakespeare's text, taking his dramatic situation but reinterpreting it in terms of a well-to-do couple, a middle aged and none too good looking suitor and a young woman who has cynically taken a necklace as a gift but does not return her lover's feelings. At the same time Shakespeare's phrase 'the red glow of scorn and proud disdain' seems to have suggested the girl's dramatic red dress. Such a use of a red dress to express strong emotion is reminiscent of the way Munch conveys the mental state of the man in his well-known painting Jealousy, executed only two or three years before.