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Sancta Lilias (The Blessed Damozel) (central figure only)
Electronic Archive Edition: 1
File Name: s244c
Copyright: Tate Gallery, London 2001
Production Description
Document Title: Sancta Lilias (The Blessed Damozel)(central figure only)
Artist: DGR
Date: 1874
Exhibition History: BFAC, 1883, no. 87; Tate, 1911, no. 2440.
Patron: The Hon. William and Mrs. Cowper-Temple
Original Cost: gift
Note: DGR gave the picture to the Cowper-Temples in gratitude for their hospitality when he visited them at Broadlands in August 1876. According to Charles Howell, the picture was originally offered to him.
Provenance
Current Location: Tate Gallery
Catalog Number: 2440
Archival History: The Hon. William and Mrs. Cowper-Temple (late Lord and Lady Mount Temple). Madame Deschamps presented the work, in memory of her mother Georgiana (Lady Mount Temple) to the Tate in 1909.
Physical Description
Medium: oil
Technique: oil on panel
Dimensions: 19 x 18 in.
Frame: Original gold frame; filigreed gold flats with raised outer gold molding carved in stylized floral pattern
Signature: Monogram
Date on Image: 1874
Note: A label on the back reads “Sept. 1874”.
Reproductions:
Surtees,
A Catalogue Raisonné
, vol. 2, plate 358.
Carrington,
Pictures and Poems
Image: On the fourth page of the text of The Blessed
Damozel text.
Ash,
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
, plate 33.
Masterpieces of DGR (Gowans and Gray),
page 53.
Stephens,
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
, page 87.
Radford,
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
, page 45.
The Blessed Damozel (Sancta Lilias) (print)
Description of the Work
Description:
An iconic head of the damozel who is holding irises in her right hand; her head, looking downward to the left, is set against a gold background uniform with the gold of the area that would have had her drapery.
Subject: The emparadised woman
Commentary
Introduction
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This unfinished work is extremely striking because of the uniform treatment
of the gold background and the gold drapery of the damozel. The modelled
head and hair appear to float not so much on as in this flat and shallow
gold surface. The effect is visually contradictory, as if DGR had introduced
a realistic and even voluptuous image into the kind of space typical of
iconic and even byzantine work.
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Production History
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The picture was begun as an early version of
The Blessed Damozel
, but DGR cut it down “to a small single head
picture”, as he told his studio assistant Treffry Dunn,
after he had begun the larger picture again (quoted in Surtees I. 142). DGR
recovered the picture (probably in 1876, when he gave the picture to the
Cowper-Temples) in order to have its background completely gilded, as it in
fact comes down to us. Both the gold background and the lilies are later
additions, and the outer edges of the hair were also reworked when the
gilding was added. In reworking the picture DGR left the damozel's gold
dress unfinished. Nonetheless, since he gave the picture as a present to the
Cowper-Temples, DGR must have thought it completed.
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Pictorial
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The picture not only forms part of the sequence of
Blessed Damozel
paintings and drawings, but relates as well to the three-quarter
length work known as
Sancta Lilias
.
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Bibliographic
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