This painting’s air of mystery and melancholy is typical of Victorian depictions of the medieval period.
Sir John Everett Millais, Mariana, 1851, oil on wood, 59.7 x 49.5 cm (Tate Britain, London). Speakers: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker
[0:00] [music]
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:04] “She only said, ‘My life is dreary. He cometh not.’ She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary. I would that I were dead!’”
Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:13] These are lines from a poem by Tennyson, the great Victorian poet, who had recently been made Poet Laureate in England, just the year before John Everett Millais painted “Mariana” in 1851.
Dr. Harris: [0:25] In turn, Tennyson’s poem was based on Shakespeare’s play, “Measure for Measure”. The story is of a woman abandoned by her fiancé for many years. We see a very typical Pre-Raphaelite subject of a woman alone.
Dr. Zucker: [0:39] And the painting by Millais seems to me ages away from the original play, “Measure for Measure”. The story of Mariana is perhaps a serious one but it’s within a play that is comedy. And yet this painting is completely divorced from that.
Dr. Harris: [0:52] And that play has a happy ending. The woman is actually reunited with her fiancé.
Dr. Zucker: [0:56] And we can’t imagine that in this rendering by Millais. So, what we see is this woman in this absolutely glorious blue dress who is stretching her back and seems to be in the midst of a kind of terrible melancholy.
Dr. Harris: [1:08] She’s gotten up from her embroidery. Which we get a sense that she’s been working on for a very long time, and there’s an obvious sense of waiting. I mean, the poem is all about waiting and time passing. This idea of the passage of time, and of a painting expressing a mood or a feeling, are two strands that we see a lot in Pre-Raphaelite painting.
Dr. Zucker: [1:29] There’s heroism of emotion itself as an event that can be painted that is so particular to 19th-century British art.
Dr. Harris: [1:38] And an inner emotion, a solitary emotion, because before, there would be narrative paintings with people enacting emotions towards each other. Here, the narrative isn’t about Mariana at the moment of her being abandoned by her fiancé but a moment of waiting. It’s a funny moment to paint.
Dr. Zucker: [1:53] Millais is really brilliant in his ability to create for us a sense of what she thinks and what she sees. She is surrounded in this painting by a set of things to look at. And as we look at them, we imagine her looking at them.
[2:07] We have that intensely rendered embroidery on the table. Then, we have those leaves that have fallen that almost look as if they will also be embroidered into that pattern, but they heighten so greatly the sense of melancholy and the sense of loss.
Dr. Harris: [2:21] And the sense of the passage of time. Autumn leaves, the passing of the seasons. This idea that this is a space that she occupies year after year with a sense of patient or maybe even not-so-patient waiting.
Dr. Zucker: [2:33] Those forms, those colors, the things that occupy her visual field are painted so painstakingly.
Dr. Harris: [2:39] And the room is small. We only see part of it but we have a real sense of enclosure and entrapment. She’s caught between the stool and the table that she’s been working at. Behind her, we see an altar, a private devotional space. So, we have this sense of her life being taken up between prayer and of meditative work of embroidery and this idea of waiting.
[3:02] We also see a scene of the Annunciation in the window. It’s hard for me not to read this as a sense of entrapment of women generally in the Victorian era. In waiting, in sitting, in doing their needlework, in being devout, in a kind of limited life.
Dr. Zucker: [3:17] We can see her almost physical strain against that restriction. As she stretches her back, she wants to move out into the world. There really is the sense of bondage there.
Dr. Harris: [3:27] Outside, we see the leaves, and we see the ground, and we see light.
Dr. Zucker: [3:31] Look at Millais’ ability to render the textures of the forms that he’s depicted. The velvet on that seat cushion and her dress.
Dr. Harris: [3:38] And how vivid the reds and the blues and the golds are. It’s that Pre-Raphaelite intensity of color that’s so different than the colors that a Victorian viewer would see in academic painting.
Dr. Zucker: [3:48] And it’s so clearly based on direct observation as opposed to ideal form. He really went out of his way to make sure that there was a kind of authenticity to what he’s rendering.
Dr. Harris: [3:58] Well, the mouse on the lower right that we see was actually painted from a dead mouse apparently that Millais caught in his studio. And the mouse appears in Tennyson’s poem.
Dr. Zucker: [4:06] Even the stained glass window was painted directly from an actual stained glass window at Oxford University that the artist had climbed up some scaffolding to get a good close look at.
Dr. Harris: [4:15] It feels to me as though part of what the painting is about is a tension between nature and art. The leaves from the outside have come in, so we have nature coming inside. We have the stained glass windows, which are art which look out into nature.
[4:29] There’s a confluence of the wallpaper on the wall behind her body and then the leaves outside. She’s trapped in an interior in which the exterior seems to have invaded. It feels as though there’s some theme there of nature and art, and God and the divine.
Dr. Zucker: [4:46] And as if her embroidery is artifice that is a representation of the thing that she is yearning to join.
Dr. Harris: [4:52] Also as though the life of art, the life of her embroidery, and the life of devotion is not enough. There’s that yearning for more.
Dr. Zucker: [4:59] That’s right.
Dr. Harris: [4:59] And for love.
[5:00] [music]
The Victorian idea of a medieval woman
Sir John Everett Millais, Mariana, 1851, oil on mahogany 59.7 49.5 cm (Tate)
Rising up to stretch after a long session of embroidery, Millais’ Mariana is the epitome of the Victorian idea of a medieval woman. Set in a vaguely Gothic interior with pointed arches and stained glass windows, the painting has an air of mystery and melancholy that is typical in Victorian depictions of the Middle Ages. The 1830s-50s saw an interest in the Middle Ages which appeared to offer an alternative to the problems of industrial capitalism of the Victorian era.
Also typical of the time, is the emphasis on the isolated female figure. The dark colors and straining posture of the woman lead us to wonder about her story, and the Victorian painter always has a story to tell.
An illustration for a poem by Tennyson
Mariana is an illustration to Tennyson’s poem, lines from which were included in the catalog when the painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1851:
She only said, ‘My life is dreary,
He cometh not,’ she said:
She said, “I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!’
The inspiration for the poem was taken from the character of Mariana in Shakespeare’s play Measure for Measure, who was locked in a moated grange (an estate with a moat around it) for years after her dowry was lost at sea in a storm, causing her to be rejected by her lover Angelo. However, the happily ever after ending found in Shakespeare’s play is not even hinted at in either Tennyson’s poem or the painting by Millais. Instead the young woman is totally enclosed and isolated by her surroundings, with even the garden visible outside the window bordered by a high brick wall. The visual imagery does not seem to suggest a happy ending for Millais’ heroine.
Pre-Raphaelite details
As is typical with the Pre-Raphaelites, Millais’ painting shows his mastery of the minute detail. The viewer can almost reach out and touch the softness of her velvet dress, and the jewels in her belt glitter against the dark blue fabric. The beautiful stained glass windows depicting an Annunciation scene were adapted from the windows in the Chapel of Merton College, Oxford. Even the smallest details such as the small mouse that runs across the floor and the light of the lamp by the prie dieu in the corner are painted with the same attention to truth to nature found in the more prominent elements of the painting.
Mariana and the stained glass windows (detail), Sir John Everett Millais, Mariana, 1851, oil on mahogany 59.7 49.5 cm (Tate)
A turning point
Mariana was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1851. Although Millais and his fellow Pre-Raphaelite artists were not well received by the critics, the attacks were not as savage as Millais had endured the previous year over his Christ in the House of his Parents. In fact, the young but influential critic John Ruskin was persuaded to send two letters to The Times praising the new style for its skill in drawing, intense color and truthfulness to nature. This was a turning point, both for the future of the Pre-Raphaelites and for Millais, whose future association with Ruskin was to be so eventful.
In Mariana, Millais has created both an essay in Pre-Raphaelite execution and an evocative literary female portrait. The viewer feels the release of her aching muscles as she leans backward, however we are also palpably aware of her isolation. It is a work that is at once vibrant and colorful, but also cold and forbidding.
