Lot Essay
This is almost certainly the original painting exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy in 1929 of which a replica belongs to the University of St. Andrews. The latter, commissioned by Sir David Russell, was included in the John Duncan exhibition organised by the City of Edinburgh Art Centre and the Dundee Art Gallery in 1986 (no. 16), and was seen again in The Queen's Image, an exhibition devoted to Mary Queen of Scots and her legend held at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery a year later.
Duncan pictures Mary during the final phase of her captivity in Fotheringhay Castle, near Peterborough, where she was executed on 8 February 1587. With her are the two attendants, Elizabeth Curle and Jane Kennedy, who remained with her to the end. As Duncan wrote to Sir David Russell when he was working on the replica, 'In Fotheringhay the Queen was closely confined, was allowed no communication with the outer world, and was even denied the services of her confessor. She stood in hourly dread of private assassination. No definite term to her sufferings was accorded her. Any stir in the castle, the clatter of hooves in the courtyard, at once suggests that the time has come'. Jane Kennedy responds to these nerve-racking circumstances by giving way to grief, while Elizabeth Curle looks behind the areas with a mixture of anxiety and anger. Mary herself has attained the composure which she was to betray so markedly on the scaffold, although her clenched left hand betrays an underlying tension.
Duncan felt an 'imperative duty to get at the real Mary and then present her as sympathetically as I could'. He studied contemporary likenesses such as the portrait of her in white mourning, after Clouet, in the Royal Collection, and the 'Sheffield' type portrait, a posthumous full-length possibly by Rowland Lockey, in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. This had been acquired from the Earl of Darnley as recently as 1925, perhaps helping in a more general sense to inspire Duncan's picture. As for the motto En ma fin est mon commencement (in my end is my beginning), this was, to quote The Queen's Image catalogue, the device which Lord Burghley's agent Nicholas White noted in a letter to his employer, reporting on his visit to Mary in captivity at Tutbury in 1569. "In looking upon her cloth of estate, I noted this sentence embroidered, En ma fin est mon commencement, which is a riddle I understand not". It was the forcible removal of this same canopy, the symbol of sovereignty placed over the royal chair, which caused such distress when Sir Amyas Paulet assumed custody of the queen in 1585. Mary Stewart's personal fascination with embroidered emblems is well attested. Writing in 1614 to Ben Jonson, the poet William Drummond of Hawthornden described the same device on one of the embroidered panels which are now commonly known as the Oxburgh hangings: "An Impresa of Mary of Lorrain, her Mother, a Phoenix in Flames, the Word en ma fin git mon commencement ... the Workmanship is curiously done, and above all value ..."'.
However, as the leading exponent of Symbolism in Scotland, Duncan was also anxious to probe beyond reality and reveal deeper layers of meaning. Jane Kennedy is dressed in 'green for grief', the purple dress of Elizabeth Curle was intended to strike 'a deep and tragic note', and the stylised gestures of both women express the overwhelming emotions released by the impending tragedy in terms of ritual. Emotional conflict is symbolised, too, by the battle-scene depicted on the tapestry, which may also refer to the struggle between Catholics and Protestants to which the fate of Mary Queen of Scots was so closely linked. But the chief vehicle for Duncan's symbolist approach is the motto which, as the Queen's Image cataloguers put it, he uses to suggest 'the double apotheosis which his subject is about to undergo. The queen's motto becomes her epitaph and all the complexity of its meaning is brought into play. She herself is waiting for death and, having reached the end of one spiritual journey, she is poised at the outset of another. On the Oxburgh hangings the embroidered emblem was associated by Mary with the phoenix, that mythical bird which renewed its life through self-desctruction, and which came to signify in a Christian context the triumph of eternal life over death and, more specifically, the Resurrection of Christ. Both prior to and at her execution Mary cast herself with conviction and political acumen in the role of martyr for the Faith. The Elizabeth poet Robert Southwell meditated on this transfiguration:
"Alive a Queene, now dead I am a Sainte;
Once Mary calld, my name Nowe Martyr is;
From earthly raigne debarred by restraint,
In lieuw whereof I raigne in heavenly blisse."
Mary's second apotheosis began during her lifetime and was heightened by the circumstances of her death. The propaganda campaign during her captivity, in which she became the symbol of the intense struggle between the representatives of Catholicism and Protestantism for the domination of Western Europe, helped to ensure her secular immortalisation in literature, historical writing and the visual arts'.
The importance which Duncan attached to the composition is reflected in the fact, previously unnoticed, that two further versions are known: a small (11 5/8 x 9½in.) tempera painting in the Gordon Bottomley bequest at the Carlisle City Art Gallery and a large black-chalk drawing in a private collection
Duncan pictures Mary during the final phase of her captivity in Fotheringhay Castle, near Peterborough, where she was executed on 8 February 1587. With her are the two attendants, Elizabeth Curle and Jane Kennedy, who remained with her to the end. As Duncan wrote to Sir David Russell when he was working on the replica, 'In Fotheringhay the Queen was closely confined, was allowed no communication with the outer world, and was even denied the services of her confessor. She stood in hourly dread of private assassination. No definite term to her sufferings was accorded her. Any stir in the castle, the clatter of hooves in the courtyard, at once suggests that the time has come'. Jane Kennedy responds to these nerve-racking circumstances by giving way to grief, while Elizabeth Curle looks behind the areas with a mixture of anxiety and anger. Mary herself has attained the composure which she was to betray so markedly on the scaffold, although her clenched left hand betrays an underlying tension.
Duncan felt an 'imperative duty to get at the real Mary and then present her as sympathetically as I could'. He studied contemporary likenesses such as the portrait of her in white mourning, after Clouet, in the Royal Collection, and the 'Sheffield' type portrait, a posthumous full-length possibly by Rowland Lockey, in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. This had been acquired from the Earl of Darnley as recently as 1925, perhaps helping in a more general sense to inspire Duncan's picture. As for the motto En ma fin est mon commencement (in my end is my beginning), this was, to quote The Queen's Image catalogue, the device which Lord Burghley's agent Nicholas White noted in a letter to his employer, reporting on his visit to Mary in captivity at Tutbury in 1569. "In looking upon her cloth of estate, I noted this sentence embroidered, En ma fin est mon commencement, which is a riddle I understand not". It was the forcible removal of this same canopy, the symbol of sovereignty placed over the royal chair, which caused such distress when Sir Amyas Paulet assumed custody of the queen in 1585. Mary Stewart's personal fascination with embroidered emblems is well attested. Writing in 1614 to Ben Jonson, the poet William Drummond of Hawthornden described the same device on one of the embroidered panels which are now commonly known as the Oxburgh hangings: "An Impresa of Mary of Lorrain, her Mother, a Phoenix in Flames, the Word en ma fin git mon commencement ... the Workmanship is curiously done, and above all value ..."'.
However, as the leading exponent of Symbolism in Scotland, Duncan was also anxious to probe beyond reality and reveal deeper layers of meaning. Jane Kennedy is dressed in 'green for grief', the purple dress of Elizabeth Curle was intended to strike 'a deep and tragic note', and the stylised gestures of both women express the overwhelming emotions released by the impending tragedy in terms of ritual. Emotional conflict is symbolised, too, by the battle-scene depicted on the tapestry, which may also refer to the struggle between Catholics and Protestants to which the fate of Mary Queen of Scots was so closely linked. But the chief vehicle for Duncan's symbolist approach is the motto which, as the Queen's Image cataloguers put it, he uses to suggest 'the double apotheosis which his subject is about to undergo. The queen's motto becomes her epitaph and all the complexity of its meaning is brought into play. She herself is waiting for death and, having reached the end of one spiritual journey, she is poised at the outset of another. On the Oxburgh hangings the embroidered emblem was associated by Mary with the phoenix, that mythical bird which renewed its life through self-desctruction, and which came to signify in a Christian context the triumph of eternal life over death and, more specifically, the Resurrection of Christ. Both prior to and at her execution Mary cast herself with conviction and political acumen in the role of martyr for the Faith. The Elizabeth poet Robert Southwell meditated on this transfiguration:
"Alive a Queene, now dead I am a Sainte;
Once Mary calld, my name Nowe Martyr is;
From earthly raigne debarred by restraint,
In lieuw whereof I raigne in heavenly blisse."
Mary's second apotheosis began during her lifetime and was heightened by the circumstances of her death. The propaganda campaign during her captivity, in which she became the symbol of the intense struggle between the representatives of Catholicism and Protestantism for the domination of Western Europe, helped to ensure her secular immortalisation in literature, historical writing and the visual arts'.
The importance which Duncan attached to the composition is reflected in the fact, previously unnoticed, that two further versions are known: a small (11 5/8 x 9½in.) tempera painting in the Gordon Bottomley bequest at the Carlisle City Art Gallery and a large black-chalk drawing in a private collection