Most peoples, cultures and nations have their own legends or mythology. Over the last six months, I explored those that dominated classical Mediterranean cultures from about 700 BCE in the epics of the Trojan War. By popular request, my next narrative series turns to the legends surrounding King Arthur, whose stories have been painted extensively across Europe since the fifteenth century.
While Arthur is claimed to be British, and his court at Camelot may have been in any of several locations across England, many Arthurian legends have appeared in sources from continental Europe. In late medieval and early Renaissance times, wall paintings of King Arthur and his knights were widely popular, and miniatures accompanied accounts in several European languages.
What must have been one of the largest and most splendid, although never completed, was painted by Pisanello in the Ducal Palace of the Gonzagas in Mantua, Italy. Commissioned in 1447, it was lost from sight when the roof collapsed, and wasn’t rediscovered until 1969.
This view of the most finished section of wall shows a sequence of scenes thought to have been taken from the legend of Tristan.
Another wall only survives in sinopia, the earth pigment used to draw in the first stage for painting. Above are crowds of ladies from the court watching a tournament, and below is a view of the extensive castle.
By coincidence, only a few years later the Englishman Sir Thomas Malory (1414/18-1471) occupied his time in prison by writing the most influential source of Arthurian legends, Le Morte d’Arthur, which he completed in 1469-70 shortly before his death. His manuscript might have slipped into oblivion had it not been for William Caxton (c 1422-1491), who brought printing to Britain and, in 1485, printed an edited edition. Until 1934, it was Caxton’s book that formed the basis for most retellings of these legends, at least for English speakers. Then a new manuscript of Malory’s book was discovered in the library of Winchester College. Many scholars have since come to prefer that as being closer to the original.
Paintings of Arthurian legend were few and far between from the Renaissance to the early nineteenth century. Malory’s account fell out of print for a period of over 180 years, until new editions appeared in 1816 and 1817, bringing an Arthurian revival with a succession of illustrated editions and greater popularity than ever before.
The opportunity arose during the reconstruction of London’s Palace of Westminster, containing the Houses of Parliament, following its destruction by fire in 1834. Prince Albert, who had only been married to Queen Victoria for a year, was chairman of the Fine Arts Committee responsible for decoration of the new palace. The established Scottish artist William Dyce suggested to the prince that the queen’s robing room should be decorated with paintings from Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, and Dyce was commissioned in 1847 to paint them. Neither he nor the prince survived to see them completed, and Dyce collapsed in his terminal illness while he was at work on the paintings.
Dyce’s watercolour of Piety: The Knights of the Round Table about to Depart in Quest of the Holy Grail (1849) uses hatching more commonly found in illustration and prints, and was the study for this fresco for the Queen’s Robing Room in the Palace of Westminster.
It shows a melée of knights of the Round Table paying tribute to King Arthur and Queen Guinevere (at the right), as those knights prepare to depart on their quest for the Holy Grail, the legendary chalice used by Christ at the Last Supper before his crucifixion (or possibly a cup used by Joseph of Arimathea to collect Christ’s blood). It’s perhaps the Arthurian equivalent of Frith’s Derby Day.
Dyce tried to couple this series of Arthurian frescos with the seven Christian virtues. He completed those for Mercy, Hospitality, Generosity, Piety, and Courtesy, but not for Courage or Fidelity. Links between the narratives chosen and the corresponding virtue aren’t particularly strong.
The taste for Arthur and Malory continued to grow, and came to be the dominant theme of a group of young artists who dubbed themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brethren.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti was particularly fascinated by Arthurian legend. He painted two versions of Arthur’s Tomb, the first (above) from 1855. In these, after Arthur’s death, Lancelot leans over his tomb and starts to make love to the mourning Queen. The decoration on the side of the tomb shows King Arthur presiding over the Round Table.
In 1859, the Poet Laureate to Queen Victoria, Alfred, Lord Tennyson published his first set of four verse accounts of Arthurian legends, under the title Idylls of the King. He added further parts until there were twelve in total in 1885. Later Pre-Raphaelite paintings thus had the choice of following Malory or Tennyson.
Ford Madox Brown’s Death of Sir Tristram from 1864 shows an episode from Malory, in the story of Sir Tristram and La Belle Iseult. It was also a showpiece for a stained glass window produced by Brown’s company for the entrance hall of a Bradford merchant’s mansion.
Once revived, Arthurian legend has gone from strength to strength. Edward Burne-Jones’ Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon was completed shortly before the artist’s own death in 1898. This brings together the four queens who were to take the king to Avalon with a string quartet seated in front of Arthur’s deathbed (detail below), but there’s no sign of the black boat to carry him across.
Despite their Victorian revival, Malory’s legends are steeped in scandal. The tragic adulterous relationship between Tristan (Tristram) and Iseult (Isolde, Yseult) is thought to have originated in an ancient Persian story, and possibly Celtic legend, was retold in French mediaeval poems, and again in Arthurian legend as the story of Lancelot and Guinevere. In its essence it’s a love triangle.
Tristan, a Cornish knight, is successful against an Irish knight, then goes to Ireland to bring Iseult back for his uncle, King Mark, to marry. However, Tristan and Iseult fall in love as a result of a potion they have both taken. Eventually King Mark learns of the affair and tries to entrap the couple. This is complicated by war between Ireland and Cornwall, and at length Tristan and Iseult agree to disengage from one another. There are many variants with different endings, some of which are inevitably tragic.
John William Waterhouse’s Tristan and Isolde from 1916 gives a standard and faithful pictorial account of the couple drinking the potion from a golden chalice, while on a ship carrying them back to King Mark. Both are dressed in role, and in the spirit of popular images of Arthurian legends.
With a choice of accounts by Malory and Tennyson, some stories became confounded, such as those of the Lady of Shalott and Elaine of Astolat.
William Holman Hunt and Edward Robert Hughes’ The Lady of Shalott (1905) shows this woman who has been confined in a tower weaving, by a curse that she must not look directly at the outside world. Here she has been thrown into chaos when she sees Sir Lancelot in her mirror: she’s so taken by the sight of the knight that she gets up and looks directly out of her window. Knotted up in the threads of her weaving, she knows that she has broken the curse, and will die. She leaves the tower and boards a boat in which she dies as it drifts down river towards Camelot.
That story had been made popular in Tennyson’s poem of the same name, published in two versions in 1832 and 1842, and based on a thirteenth century Italian novellina rather than Malory. Then in his first Idylls of the King of 1859 Tennyson included the story of Lancelot and Elaine based on Malory’s very different account.
This Elaine of Astolat, Tennyson’s Lily Maid, falls in love with Lancelot. After he’s wounded in a tournament, she devotedly nurses him back to health during his recuperation in her father’s castle. When he leaves and she learns that her love for him will remain unrequited, she wishes for death, and ten days later dies of a broken heart. Elaine had made clear that on her death, she wished her body to be taken by boat to Camelot, bearing a last letter. Her wishes are followed by her father and brothers, who place her in a boat with one of their servants, who is stricken with grief at her death.
Sophie Gengembre Anderson’s Elaine (1870) is shown making that final journey, her dead hands holding her last letter and lilies. As with other paintings of this phase of the story, she is dead when placed in the boat, and accompanied by a servant.
Although Arthurian legend and its major accounts lay great emphasis on the king and knights of the Round Table, and became popular at the height of Victorian prudery and often in versions edited for children, love goes well beyond the ‘courtly’, with Queen Guinevere’s overt adultery prominent.
John Collier’s richly floral painting of Queen Guinevere’s Maying from 1900 follows Tennyson’s reworking of Malory in showing Guinevere radiant during a May Day procession reminiscent of Flora in classical myth. It carefully avoids reference to the evil Mordred taking this opportunity to plot how to split Arthur’s court by means of a scandal involving Guinevere, and its consequences.
Such difficulties were glossed over by illustrators too. This illustration of The Death of Guinevere was published in a 1922 retelling “edited for boys”, one of the set provided by Newell Convers Wyeth, the brilliant father of the late Andrew Wyeth.
I hope that you’ll join me to explore paintings of Arthurian legends in the coming weeks and months.