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About Christian Waller:
Christian Waller was born Christian Marjory Emily Carlyle Yandell in 1894 in Castlemaine, Victoria. In 1910 she moved to Melbourne with her family. There she attended the National Gallery Schools and won acclaim from a young age, receiving a number of student prizes, exhibiting her work with the Victorian Artists Society and featuring in illustrated publications such as Franklin Petersons Melba’s Gift Book of Australian Art and Literature in 1915. In 1915 she married fellow artist Mervyn Napier Waller. He lost his right arm the following year serving on the Western Front, and Christian supported him upon his return to Australia by working as a commercial artist. During the 1920s she became a book illustrator, and her work from this period has been described as reflecting “Classical, Medieval, Pre-Raphaelite and Art Nouveau influences” (See Thomas, David, 'Waller, Christian Marjory Emily Carlyle (1894–1954)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/waller-christian-marjory-emily-carlyle-11944/text21407, accessed 4 February 2012). From 1928 Waller started designing stained glass windows. This was an artistic medium in which she was prolific, and for which she became well known, during the 1930s and 40s.
]]>This watercolour by Australian artist Christian Waller was gifted to the Art Gallery of Ballarat in 1933 by the Women’s Association. It depicts a woman in medieval dress whom the title identifies as Morgan Le Fay. Morgan Le Fay is a sorceress/healer in Arthurian legend. Starting with Chrétien de Troyes in the late twelfth century, she is often named as Arthur’s half-sister (by his mother Igerne). She plays a key adversarial role in much Arthurian literature; she is often depicted trying to expose the adulterous liaisons of Lancelot and Guinevere, and attempting to bring about Arthur’s downfall. She does this by using her magic powers to give Arthur’s sword, Excalibur, to her lover Accolon (while leaving Arthur unknowingly with a counterfeit), and by throwing Excalibur into the lake. At the end of Thomas Malory’s fifteenth-century text Le Morte d’Arthur, however, she resumes her healing role by taking Arthur to Avalon and tending to the wounded king. For a copy of Le Morte d’Arthur, see: http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/m/malory/thomas/m25m/. In the background of Waller’s painting are numerous medieval references: a lance, a heraldic shield, a helmet, a picture of a knight riding a horse, and a set of highly symbolic keys given Morgan Le Fay’s power in Arthurian legend.
About Christian Waller:
Christian Waller was born Christian Marjory Emily Carlyle Yandell in 1894 in Castlemaine, Victoria. In 1910 she moved to Melbourne with her family. There she attended the National Gallery Schools and won acclaim from a young age, receiving a number of student prizes, exhibiting her work with the Victorian Artists Society and featuring in illustrated publications such as Franklin Petersons Melba’s Gift Book of Australian Art and Literature in 1915. In 1915 she married fellow artist Mervyn Napier Waller. He lost his right arm the following year serving on the Western Front, and Christian supported him upon his return to Australia by working as a commercial artist. During the 1920s she became a book illustrator, and her work from this period has been described as reflecting “Classical, Medieval, Pre-Raphaelite and Art Nouveau influences” (See Thomas, David, 'Waller, Christian Marjory Emily Carlyle (1894–1954)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/waller-christian-marjory-emily-carlyle-11944/text21407, accessed 4 February 2012). From 1928 Waller started designing stained glass windows. This was an artistic medium in which she was prolific, and for which she became well known, during the 1930s and 40s.
For a copy of Keats’ La Belle Dame sans merci, see http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173740.
]]>This painting by English artist Arthur Hughes was acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria in 1919 with funds from the Felton Bequest. It portrays a scene from the well-known ballad of the same name penned in 1819 by Romantic poet John Keats. The poem is a tale of unrequited love featuring an Arthurian knight and a beautiful woman he meets in the woods. Described by Keats as a ‘faery’s child’, the woman woos the knight with songs, food and promises of love, before taking him back to her elfin grot and lulling him to sleep. While asleep, however, he dreams of death-pale kings, princes and warriors crying “La Belle Dame sans merci/Thee hath in thrall!” before waking up alone on a cold hillside. In the painting, the infatuated knight is pictured in the woods shortly after he has met the beautiful woman and lifted her onto his horse. In the background, the apparitions of the pale figures he will later dream of are visible, trying to convey their warning in vain. Keats borrowed the title for his Arthurian ballad from a fifteenth-century courtly love poem by Alain Chartier.
For a copy of Keats’ La Belle Dame sans merci, see http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173740.
This work by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a renowned nineteenth-century painter and member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, depicts a young woman in a voluminous medieval-looking gown raising a golden cup decorated with a heart shaped design to her lips. In her other hand she clasps the lid of the cup to her breast. A lace cloth, ivy (the symbol of fidelity) and 4 brass plates (2 depicting deer, 1 depicting Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit and the other showing Hosea and Joshua with a bunch of grapes) are visible in the background. This painting is one of three watercolour replicas that Rossetti produced in 1867 of an oil painting that is currently held by the National Gallery of Western Art, Tokyo. The frame of the original painting is inscribed "Douce nuit et joyeux jour/ A chevalier de bel amour (Sweet night and pleasant day/to the beautifully loved knight)," which suggests that the woman is toasting her recently departed knight. The source of these words is uncertain, but it is thought that Rossetti, well-known for his poetry as well as his artwork, probably wrote it himself. (For more on the Tokyo painting, see http://collection.nmwa.go.jp/en/P.1984-0005.html).
The Arthurian theme and subject matter of the painting are typical of Rossetti’s work from the mid-1850s, and the work of the second phase of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood more generally. As Elizabeth Prettejohn suggests, these paintings convey a sense in which the “the world presented in the pictures is somehow distant or remote from the everyday”. They depict scenes of leave-taking, but the circumstances are left untold, and we do not learn the fortunes of the figures involved. This, she suggests, “contrasts abruptly with the narrative specificity of most Victorian painting, and of earlier Pre-Raphaelite pictures. The precise detail in the drawings gives us a medieval world that is apparently complete in itself, but to which we as spectators only have partial access” (Elizabeth Prettejohn, The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites, Tate Publishing, London, 2000, pp.106-7).To view this image,
1. go to: http://www.artgallery.sa.gov.au/agsa/home/Collection/CollectionSearch.jsp
2. search by artist or title.To view this image,
1. go to: http://www.artgallery.sa.gov.au/agsa/home/Collection/CollectionSearch.jsp
2. search by artist or title.