Lot Essay
The subject is taken from 'The Marriage of Geraint' in Tennyson's Idylls of the King, the two quotations above being respectively inscribed on the frame and quoted in the catalogue of the Whitechapel exhibition of 1905. The picture (sometimes entitled The Brave Geraint) was developed from a study for The Rift in the Lute (Carlisle City Art Gallery; Gibson, op.cit., fig.31) which Hughes exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1862 and sold to the Newcastle industrialist James Leathart. As the catalogue of the 1905 exhibition states, it was 'a first study for the "Rift in the Lute", but laid aside for a larger canvas, and later on completed, with alterations and additions.' These were probably Hughes's own words since he was on the exhibition committee.
The relationship between the two works is complex. Both illustrate the theme of love to which Hughes returned so often. Both derive from the Idylls, since The Rift in the Lute takes its title from another in the series, 'Merlin and Vivien'. Both moreover are elegiac in mood, The Rift in the Lute showing a young girl sadly contemplating the first rift with her lover and Enid and Geraint at least hinting wistfully at possible storms ahead, which certainly occur in the subject as treated by Tennyson. At the same time there is a sharp distinction in that the title of The Rift in the Lute is merely used to suggest the mood of the picture, which in no real sense is Arthurian in theme, while Enid and Geraint definitely illustrates Tennyson's poem. The difference is reflected in the purpose of the lute itself in the two works, symbolic in the Carlisle picture, anecdotal in ours.
Hughes originally intended to include a second figure in The Rift in the Lute, an older woman - 'an aged silver haired mother or grandmother' - attempting to comfort the young girl. This figure he eventually removed, only to replace her in Enid and Geraint with that of the infatuated knight. The problem he evidently had here is exactly paralleled in the development of the well-known Home from Sea (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford), which he exhibited first in 1857 with only the figure of the sailor boy lying prostrate with grief on his mother's grave, adding that of the sister before it was re-exhibited at the RA in 1863. Hughes was obsessed with the idea of basing a composition on a recumbent figure. It occurs in his work as early as 1851 and as late as the 1870s, and Robin Gibson may be right in suggesting that it was inspired by the etching which Holman Hunt contributed to the first number of the Pre-Raphaelite journal The Germ in 1848; certainly the grief-stricken man there is similar in attitude to that of the boy in Home from Sea and a study for the girl in The Rift in the Lute (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; Gibson, fig.34). But whatever the origin of the motif and its significance for Hughes, he seems to have had difficulty in resolving it pictorially. Home from Sea surely gains by the addition of the sympathetic sister, while the figure of Geraint in our picture, by adding a vertical axis, creates a triangular composition which is much more satisfactory that the unmitigated horizontals of The Rift in the Lute.
Like so many of the Pre-Raphaelites and Victorians in general, Hughes was powerfully attracted to Arthurian subject matter. His picture The Knight of the Sun (1860; private collection) is quasi-Arthurian in theme; he contributed a scene of The Death of Arthur to the Oxford Union murals (1857), and a design of The Birth of Sir Tristram to a set of stained-glass panels commissioned from Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. in 1862 (Gibson, figs. 29, 30, 35). Only in Enid and Geraint, however, he did explore the theme of romantic love which lay at the heart of his vision. The picture may not be a very truthful illustration of Tennyson's poem; as Debra Mancoff observes (loc. cit.), 'Geraint, a melancholy lover, affectionately brushing his lady's red tresses with a sprig of bluebells, betrays none of the stubborn nature or rash suspicion that troubled his character' as portrayed by Tennyson. But Hughes could hardly have been more true to himself, evoking with exquisite delicacy a mood of wistful yearning in the context of a sylvan setting that is wholly characteristic. The subject in fact is a typically Hughesian pair of lovers in medieval dress.
Enid and Geraint entered the collection of John Hamilton Trist, a Brighton wine-merchant who was to acquire some twenty of Hughes's pictures. He already owned Home from Sea, apparently his first purchase from the artist, and was soon to become the possessor of Silver and Gold (RA 1864), which was sold in these Rooms on 25 October 1991, lot 50.
We are grateful to Leonard Roberts for his help in preparing this entry.
The relationship between the two works is complex. Both illustrate the theme of love to which Hughes returned so often. Both derive from the Idylls, since The Rift in the Lute takes its title from another in the series, 'Merlin and Vivien'. Both moreover are elegiac in mood, The Rift in the Lute showing a young girl sadly contemplating the first rift with her lover and Enid and Geraint at least hinting wistfully at possible storms ahead, which certainly occur in the subject as treated by Tennyson. At the same time there is a sharp distinction in that the title of The Rift in the Lute is merely used to suggest the mood of the picture, which in no real sense is Arthurian in theme, while Enid and Geraint definitely illustrates Tennyson's poem. The difference is reflected in the purpose of the lute itself in the two works, symbolic in the Carlisle picture, anecdotal in ours.
Hughes originally intended to include a second figure in The Rift in the Lute, an older woman - 'an aged silver haired mother or grandmother' - attempting to comfort the young girl. This figure he eventually removed, only to replace her in Enid and Geraint with that of the infatuated knight. The problem he evidently had here is exactly paralleled in the development of the well-known Home from Sea (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford), which he exhibited first in 1857 with only the figure of the sailor boy lying prostrate with grief on his mother's grave, adding that of the sister before it was re-exhibited at the RA in 1863. Hughes was obsessed with the idea of basing a composition on a recumbent figure. It occurs in his work as early as 1851 and as late as the 1870s, and Robin Gibson may be right in suggesting that it was inspired by the etching which Holman Hunt contributed to the first number of the Pre-Raphaelite journal The Germ in 1848; certainly the grief-stricken man there is similar in attitude to that of the boy in Home from Sea and a study for the girl in The Rift in the Lute (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; Gibson, fig.34). But whatever the origin of the motif and its significance for Hughes, he seems to have had difficulty in resolving it pictorially. Home from Sea surely gains by the addition of the sympathetic sister, while the figure of Geraint in our picture, by adding a vertical axis, creates a triangular composition which is much more satisfactory that the unmitigated horizontals of The Rift in the Lute.
Like so many of the Pre-Raphaelites and Victorians in general, Hughes was powerfully attracted to Arthurian subject matter. His picture The Knight of the Sun (1860; private collection) is quasi-Arthurian in theme; he contributed a scene of The Death of Arthur to the Oxford Union murals (1857), and a design of The Birth of Sir Tristram to a set of stained-glass panels commissioned from Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. in 1862 (Gibson, figs. 29, 30, 35). Only in Enid and Geraint, however, he did explore the theme of romantic love which lay at the heart of his vision. The picture may not be a very truthful illustration of Tennyson's poem; as Debra Mancoff observes (loc. cit.), 'Geraint, a melancholy lover, affectionately brushing his lady's red tresses with a sprig of bluebells, betrays none of the stubborn nature or rash suspicion that troubled his character' as portrayed by Tennyson. But Hughes could hardly have been more true to himself, evoking with exquisite delicacy a mood of wistful yearning in the context of a sylvan setting that is wholly characteristic. The subject in fact is a typically Hughesian pair of lovers in medieval dress.
Enid and Geraint entered the collection of John Hamilton Trist, a Brighton wine-merchant who was to acquire some twenty of Hughes's pictures. He already owned Home from Sea, apparently his first purchase from the artist, and was soon to become the possessor of Silver and Gold (RA 1864), which was sold in these Rooms on 25 October 1991, lot 50.
We are grateful to Leonard Roberts for his help in preparing this entry.