(piano music) >> Dr. Harris: She only
said, "My life is dreary, "He cometh not," she said. She said, "I am aweary, aweary, "I would that I were dead." >> Dr. Zucker: 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: 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-Raphaelite subject of a woman alone. >> Dr. Zucker: 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 a comedy, and yet this painting is
completely divorced from that. >> Dr. Harris: And that
play has a happy ending. The woman is actually
reunited with her fiance. >> Dr. Zucker: 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 terrible melancholy. >> Dr. Harris: She has gotten
up from her embroidery, which we get a sense that she's been
working on for a very long time, and there is an obvious sense of waiting. I mean the poem is all about
waiting and time passing and this idea of the passage of time, and a painting expressing
a mood or a feeling are two strands that we see a
lot in pre-Raphaelite painting. >> Dr. Zucker: It's that
heroism of emotion itself as an event that can be painted that is so particular to
19th century British art. >> Dr. Harris: 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. >> Dr. Zucker: 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. 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 heighten so greatly the sense of melancholy
and the sense of loss. >> Dr. Harris: 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: Those forms, those colors, the things that occupy her visual field are painted so painstakingly. >> Dr. Harris: And the room is small. We only see part of it, but we have a real sense of
enclosure and entrapment. She is caught between
the stool and the table that she's been working at. And behind her, we see an altar, a private devotional space, so we have the sense of
her life being taken up between prayer and this
meditative work of embroidery and this idea of waiting. We also see a scene of the
Annunciation in the windows. 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 limited life. >> Dr. Zucker: 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. >> Dr. Harris: Outside, we see the leaves, and we see the ground, and we see light. >> Dr. Zucker: 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: 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: 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 is rendering. >> Dr. Harris: 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: 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. >> Dr. Harris: It feels to me as
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. There is a confluence of the wall paper 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 is some
theme there of nature and art and God and the Divine. >> Dr. Zucker: And as if
her embroidery is artifice that is a representation of the thing that she is yearning to join. >> Dr. Harris: Also as though the life
of art, the life of her embroidery, and the life of devotion is not enough, and there is that yearning ... >> Dr. Zucker: That's right. >> Dr. Harris: And for love. (piano music)