By and Studio of Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones (1833-1898)
Figures on a balcony
POA
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Artworks
Sir John Everett Millais (1829-1896)
A Wife - Illustration to a Poem, 1859
Pencil; monogrammed
4 x 5 ½ inches
Provenance
Briton Riviere, and thence by descent;
JS Maas and Co Ltd;
Private Collection, UK
Exhibitions
Arts Council, Millais Drawings, 1979, no 74
A finished sketch for an illustration to the poem 'A Wife' by William Allingham (signed only with the initial 'A.'), which concerns a loveless marriage. It was engraved by Swain in Once a Week, vol II, 7 January 1860, p 32. There is also a watercolour version.
‘On 6 May 1859 Millais met the editor of Once a Week, a periodical shortly to be launched by the publishers Bradbury and Evans, and on 27 June he was offered a salary of £600 per annum to contribute one illustration for each number (from letters to his wife, Pierpont Morgan Library). He undertook to make some designs, but thought 'upon the whole, as my painting necessitates an uncertainty in the time I can devote to illustration, that I had better make yr. drawings whenever an opportunity presents itself, at 8 g[uineas] a drawing, whether large or small' (undated draught of a letter in his wife's hand, Pierpont Morgan Library). Between 2 July and 31 December 1859, nine designs by Millais appeared in Once a Week. This was his tenth. The illustration refers specifically to the lines in the poem:
Face in both hands, she knelt on the carpet;
The black cloud loosen'd , the storm-rain fell:
Oh! life has so much to wilder and warp it, -
One poor heart's day what poet could tell?
The book on the table is presumably the one 'inscribed with the school-girl's name' which has stimulated poignant memories. The drawing has the same orientation as the engraving and [is] highly finished, which suggests that [it] was made immediately before the design was drawn onto the woodblock; a dating … of November-December 1859 can be inferred from the fact that the engraving had reached the proof stage by 6 December 1859. Millais wrote to the engraver Swain on this date with instructions to make the woman's dress lighter (Foundation Custodia, Paris; the letter contains a sketch of the illustration).’ The catalogue to The Drawings of John Everett Millais, 1979, p 35.
Millais's first collaboration with Allingham was in 1855, with The Music Master. He was exhorted by William Allingham in a letter to 'Be our better Hogarth'.
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