Millais, Mariana

she only said my life is dreary he cometh not she said she said I am a weary weary I would that I were dead 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 Marianna in 1851 in turn Tennyson's poem was based on Shakespeare's play measure for measure and the story is of a woman abandoned by her fiance for many years and we see a very typical pre-raphaelites object of a woman alone and the painting by Millay seems to meet ages away from the original play measure for measure art the story of Marianna is perhaps a serious one but it's within a play that is a comedy and yet this painting is completely divorced from that and that play has a happy ending the woman is actually reunited with her fiance and we can't imagine that in this rendering by Millay 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 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 a obvious sense of we eating I mean the poem is all about waiting and time passing and this idea of the passage of time and of painting expressing a mood or a feeling of two strands that we see a lot in pre-raphaelite painting is a heroism of emotion itself as an event that can be painted that is so particular to nineteenth-century British art and an inner emotion a solitary emotion because before there would be narrative paintings with people enacting emotions toward each other and here the narrative isn't about Mariana at the moment of her being abandoned by her fiance but a moment of waiting it's a funny moment to paint Malaya 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 we have that intensely rendered embroidery on the table and then we have those leaves that have fallen that almost look as if they will also be embroidered into that pattern but they heightened so greatly the sense of melancholy and the sense of loss in 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 those forms those colors are the things that occupy her visual field are painted so painstakingly 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 and behind her we see an altar of private devotional space so we have the sense of her life being taken up between prayer and meditative work of embroidery and this idea of waiting 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 and waiting and sitting and doing their needlework in being devout and a kind of limited life and 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 outside we see the leaves and we see the ground and we see light look Emily's ability to render the textures of the forms that he's depicted the velvet on that seat cushion and her dress and how vivid the Reds and the blues and the Gold's are at pre-raphaelite intensity of color that's so different than the colors that a Victorian viewer would see an academic painting and it's so clearly based on direct observation as opposed to a deal form he really went out of his way to make sure that there was a kind of authenticity to what his Rendell the mouse on the lower right that we see was actually painted from a dead mouse apparently that Millay caught in his studio and the mouse appears in Tennyson's poem and 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 it feels to me is a part of what the paintings about is a tension between nature and art the leaves from the outside have come in and so we have nature coming inside we have the stained glass windows which are art which look out into nature 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 and as if her embroidery is artifice that is a representation of the thing that she is yearning to join also is a the life of art the life of her embroidery and the life of devotion is not enough and there's that yearning that's or more and for love