Lot Essay
The subject is taken not from the Morte d'Arthur but from 'The Boy and the Mantle'. a traditional ballad published in Bishop Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765). This describes how 'a strange and cunning boy' appeared at King Arthur's court at Carlisle one Christmas with a mantle 'of wondrous shape and hew'. No woman, he claimed, who had been unfaithful to her husband could wear it without it shrivelling and leaving her naked. Queen Guinevere (rather rashly, one feels, since her adultery with Sir Lancelot is one of the great themes of the Arthurian legend) was the first to don it, with predictable consequences:
And first came Lady Guenever,
The mantle she must trye.
This dame, she was new-fangled,
And of a roving eye.
When she had tane the mantle,
And all was with it cladde,
From top to toe it shiver'd down,
As tho' with sheers beshradde.
One while it was too long,
Another while too short,
And wrinkled on her shoulders
In most unseemly sort.
Now green, now red it seemed,
Then all of sable hue.
'Beshrew me,' quoth King Arthur,
'I think thou beest not true.'
Down she threw the mantle,
Ne longer would not stay;
But, storming like a fury,
To her chamber flung away.
She curst the whoreson weaver,
That had the mantle wrought:
And doubly curst the froward impe,
Who thither had it brought.
Born in London of Scottish parents, Isobel Lilian Gloag studied at the St. John's Wood Art School, the Slade (under Legros) and South Kensington, before completing her art education in Paris. She exhibited at the Royal Academy (1893-1916) and with the International Society, and was a member of the Royal Institute of Oil Painters and the New Watercolour Society. Her early paintings, of which ours is an outstanding example, were in the late Pre-Raphaelite tradition, and could well have been included in the Last Romantics exhibition mounted at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, in 1989. Among her other subjects at this period were Keats's Isabella, which had previously been treated by Millais (1848-9), Holman Hunt (1866-8) and J.M. Strudwick (1879), and Rapunzel, a fairy story by the brothers Grimm which William Morris had re-cast in his first volume of poetry, The Defence of Guenevere (1858).
After the turn of the century Gloag adopted a more 'modern' idiom in terms of both subject matter and style. A number of her later works are reproduced in an article by Arthur Reddie in the Studio, 67, 1916, pp.32-8. They include stylish society portraits which echo Sargent and Boldini, and paintings clearly influenced by Brangwyn and C.H. Shannon. She must have belonged to the circle of Edmund and Mary Davis, the mining magnate and his wife whose house in Lansdowne Road had rooms decorated by Brangwyn and a fine collection of pictures either by or bought with the advice of Shannon and his friend Charles Ricketts. These two artists were deeply involved with the International Society, at which Gloag exhibited, and one of her most Shannonesque works was included in the group of thirty-seven pictures by contemporary British artists which Davis gave in 1915 to the Luxembourg in Paris, where he felt that British art was poorly represented.
And first came Lady Guenever,
The mantle she must trye.
This dame, she was new-fangled,
And of a roving eye.
When she had tane the mantle,
And all was with it cladde,
From top to toe it shiver'd down,
As tho' with sheers beshradde.
One while it was too long,
Another while too short,
And wrinkled on her shoulders
In most unseemly sort.
Now green, now red it seemed,
Then all of sable hue.
'Beshrew me,' quoth King Arthur,
'I think thou beest not true.'
Down she threw the mantle,
Ne longer would not stay;
But, storming like a fury,
To her chamber flung away.
She curst the whoreson weaver,
That had the mantle wrought:
And doubly curst the froward impe,
Who thither had it brought.
Born in London of Scottish parents, Isobel Lilian Gloag studied at the St. John's Wood Art School, the Slade (under Legros) and South Kensington, before completing her art education in Paris. She exhibited at the Royal Academy (1893-1916) and with the International Society, and was a member of the Royal Institute of Oil Painters and the New Watercolour Society. Her early paintings, of which ours is an outstanding example, were in the late Pre-Raphaelite tradition, and could well have been included in the Last Romantics exhibition mounted at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, in 1989. Among her other subjects at this period were Keats's Isabella, which had previously been treated by Millais (1848-9), Holman Hunt (1866-8) and J.M. Strudwick (1879), and Rapunzel, a fairy story by the brothers Grimm which William Morris had re-cast in his first volume of poetry, The Defence of Guenevere (1858).
After the turn of the century Gloag adopted a more 'modern' idiom in terms of both subject matter and style. A number of her later works are reproduced in an article by Arthur Reddie in the Studio, 67, 1916, pp.32-8. They include stylish society portraits which echo Sargent and Boldini, and paintings clearly influenced by Brangwyn and C.H. Shannon. She must have belonged to the circle of Edmund and Mary Davis, the mining magnate and his wife whose house in Lansdowne Road had rooms decorated by Brangwyn and a fine collection of pictures either by or bought with the advice of Shannon and his friend Charles Ricketts. These two artists were deeply involved with the International Society, at which Gloag exhibited, and one of her most Shannonesque works was included in the group of thirty-seven pictures by contemporary British artists which Davis gave in 1915 to the Luxembourg in Paris, where he felt that British art was poorly represented.