On last week's blog, I received some comments from readers who thought the drawing of a woman from 1890 was reminiscent of Charles Shannon's first print in Oscar Wilde's A House of Pomegranates (1891), a good reason to put them together.
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| Charles Shannon, silverpoint drawing of a seated woman (1890) [Collection: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam] |
The portrait is executed in silverpoint and shows a seated woman in a wide gown; het left arm outstretched, her right is held in front of her chest. She might be engaged in needlework, but the image is too vague to say.
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| Charles Shannon, 'The Triumph of Beauty' in Oscar Wilde, A House of Pomegranates (1891) |
The other plate is an image done on papier Gillot, subsequently an etched relief block was made by the firm of Verdoux, Ducourtioux et Huillard in Paris whose monogram VDH appears in the lower left hand corner.
Here we see a woman at her morning toilet. She is surrounded by four figures. Two women hold her long hair outstretched to both sides; one is also holding up a mirror. To the left in the foreground, a woman is kneeling down, as if in prayer, while to her right a seated woman (or man?) is playing the flute. Between them is an animal, probably a cat.
The plate precedes the first story in Oscar Wilde's A House of Pomegranates, illustrating 'The Young King':
The walls were hung with rich tapestries representing the Triumph of Beauty.(page 7)
The scene on the tapestries is not described in detail and only plays a symbolic role in the story: that of material wealth that will be abandoned by the young king for the wealth of belief in good.
One commenter suggested that the silverpoint drawing was a preliminary study for the print in Wilde's book, but I don't think this could have been the case. A preliminary study in pencil seems more logical to me, but apart from that, the dating - 1890 - is impossibly early. True, by 1890 Wilde had already met with publisher McIlvaine, who had come to London to set up the new firm Osgood McIlvaine & Co, but he had not written all four stories by then and would continue to make many important changes even in July 1891 after receiving the first proofs for the book that was published in November. I think the similarity between the two works should be called coincidental, guided only by Shannon's personal interests.
