拍品专文
This canvas is a smaller version of an oil executed in 1844 and exhibited at the Royal Academy of that year, no. 328. The painting was retouched in 1861, when Frith executed this version, and was bequeathed by John Newton Mappin to the Gallery that bears his name in Sheffield.
Frith has taken as the subject for his picture the fourth and most explosive of the interviews between John Knox, reformer of the Church of Scotland, and Mary, Queen of Scots, regarding her intended marriage to Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley. Frith took as his source Thomas McCrie's Life of John Knox, a volume of great interest in 1844 in the aftermath of the Disruption of the Church of Scotland. However, as Helen Smailes pointed out when the Academy picture was exhibited at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, The Queen's Image, no. 44, in 1987, the artist's principal interest lies less with ecclesiastical politics than with 'the conflict between Mary as the personification of sentiment and sensibility and the Knox of mythology, here cast as a killjoy decrying young love'. The political dimension to the scene is provided by the figure of Sir John Erskine of Dun, who oversaw the ministry and evangelism of the Reformed Church within the district of Angus. He is seen on his knees before the Queen in what the Art Union review of 1861 (p. 161) thought a 'a passage very liable to misconsruction'.
The subject was to have continued appeal for the artist for in 1885 he painted the sequel to this encounter where Knox, dismissed from the royal prescence, denounced the ladies of the court for their fine clothes and frivolity. Frith's longstanding interest in the contrast between asceticism and indulgence was to find most eloquent expression in what was considered his finest work, The Last Sunday of Charles II. Executed in 1857, the painting depicts the diarist John Evelyn silently reproving the 'Merry Monarch' in a manner strongly reminiscent of the present composition.
Frith has taken as the subject for his picture the fourth and most explosive of the interviews between John Knox, reformer of the Church of Scotland, and Mary, Queen of Scots, regarding her intended marriage to Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley. Frith took as his source Thomas McCrie's Life of John Knox, a volume of great interest in 1844 in the aftermath of the Disruption of the Church of Scotland. However, as Helen Smailes pointed out when the Academy picture was exhibited at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, The Queen's Image, no. 44, in 1987, the artist's principal interest lies less with ecclesiastical politics than with 'the conflict between Mary as the personification of sentiment and sensibility and the Knox of mythology, here cast as a killjoy decrying young love'. The political dimension to the scene is provided by the figure of Sir John Erskine of Dun, who oversaw the ministry and evangelism of the Reformed Church within the district of Angus. He is seen on his knees before the Queen in what the Art Union review of 1861 (p. 161) thought a 'a passage very liable to misconsruction'.
The subject was to have continued appeal for the artist for in 1885 he painted the sequel to this encounter where Knox, dismissed from the royal prescence, denounced the ladies of the court for their fine clothes and frivolity. Frith's longstanding interest in the contrast between asceticism and indulgence was to find most eloquent expression in what was considered his finest work, The Last Sunday of Charles II. Executed in 1857, the painting depicts the diarist John Evelyn silently reproving the 'Merry Monarch' in a manner strongly reminiscent of the present composition.