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Passage Illustrated: Melancholy-Mad Maria of Moulines

When we had got within half a league of Moulines, at a little opening in the road leading to a thicket, I discovered poor Maria sitting under a poplar. She was sitting with her elbow in her lap, and her head leaning on one side within her hand — a small brook ran at the foot of the tree.

I bid the postilion go on with the chaise to Moulines — and La Fleur to bespeak my supper — and that I would walk after him.

She was dress’d in white, and much as my friend described her, except that her hair hung loose, which before was twisted within a silk net. — She had, superadded likewise to her jacket, a pale green riband, which fell across her shoulder to the waist; at the end of which hung her pipe. — Her goat had been as faithless as her lover; and she had got a little dog in lieu of him, which she had kept tied by a string to her girdle: as I looked at her dog, she drew him towards her with the string. — “Thou shalt not leave me, Sylvio,” said she. I look’d in Maria’s eyes and saw she was thinking more of her father than of her lover, or her little goat; for, as she utter’d them, the tears trickled down her cheeks.

I sat down close by her; and Maria let me wipe them away as they fell, with my handkerchief. — I then steep’d it in my own, — and then in hers, — and then in mine, — and then I wip’d hers again; — and as I did it, I felt such undescribable emotions within me, as I am sure could not be accounted for from any combinations of matter and motion. ["Maria. Moulines," pp. 167-168]

Commentary: The Popular Mourning Nymph

— just heaven! it would fill up twenty volumes — and, alas! I have but a few small pages left of this to crowd it into; and half of these must be taken up with poor Maria, my friend Mr. Shandy met with near Moulines.

The story he had told me of that disordered maid affected me not a little in the reading; but when I got within the neighbourhood where she lived, it returned so strong into my mind, that I could not resist an impulse which prompted me to go half a league out of the road to the village where her parents dwelt, to enquire after her. "Maria. Moulines." — vignette of Maria at her father's grave, page 165]

Thus, for both Yorick and the reader familiar with Tristram Shandy the image and description of the mourning, slightly mad shepherdess constitutes a bridge between the earlier novel and A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy. Maria's sad story occurs in Tristram Shandy, Vol. IX, which Sterne had published just the year before A Sentimental Journey.

Although the two-volume edition of 1768 lacks even so elemental an illustration as a wood-engraved frontispiece, subsequent eighteenth-century British and French editions of A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy provided progressively more visual elaboration, with headnote vignettes, tailpieces, thumbnails, and even full-page illustrations. Within a decade of the book's initial appearance in print, Maria, despite her appearing in the last few pages of the text, had become one of the most popular characters for visual representation in what was, as Katherine Turner notes in the Broadview edition (2010) preface, a highly visual and image-oriented culture. The melancholy shepherdess Maria inspired numerous illustrations and at least fifteen well-known paintings by the close of the eighteenth century. Moreover, between 1780 and 1820, the Wedgwood factories used Maria's downcast image on a range of ceramics, including a jasper cameo set in a steel belt buckle that depicts her in profile, her hand to her head (a pose indicative of grief) underneath a poplar, with her dog attentively trying to get on her lap. This particular interpretation seems to have influenced Fussell's 1841 illustration Maria, which significantly serves as that highly illustrated volume's frontispiece, signaling to the reader that the illustrators recognize the importance of this pastoral character in the book's narrative-pictorial sequence, and that readers will encounter this sentimental embodiment of grief in due course. Maria's image even circulated outside the confines of illustrated texts and paintings, both of which commodified her classical pose for the wealthy. Angelica Kauffman's portrait of poor Maria and her faithful dog Sylvio (1777) circulated as a print throughout Europe, and probably influenced the Wedgewood stoneware design, as well as the statuesque image of the classical shepherdess produced in 1781.

The 1792, 1841 and 1857 Illustrations of Maria as Allusions to Popular Paintings

The illustrators of the three British editions depicted here, those of 1792 (1801 re-print), 1841, and 1857, may well have been familiar with at least some of the Maria paintings and illustrations circulated in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, particularly those by Maria Kauffman and Joseph Wright of Derby. The most famous of these were the five studies by Maria Anna Angelica Katharina Kauffman (1741-1807), the Swiss Neoclassical painter who had a successful career in London and Rome. Remembered primarily as a history painter with a bent for the sentimental, Kauffmann painted portraits, particularly of aristocractic women, landscapes, and decorations. She was one of the two female founding members of the Royal Academy in London in 1768, the very year in which Sterne published A Sentimental Journey.

The Wright of Derby painting of 1781 may likewise be regarded as part of an almost cult-like response to Sterne's description of the melancholy-mad shepherdess:

This sweet young girl sits in a soft rural setting holding her flute, with her little dog at her feet looking up at her faithfully. This should be a happy, wholesome country scene, but the pose of this gentle figure suggests sadness: she sits on a grassy bank with her elbow on her crossed knee, her head resting on her hand as she looks dreamily ahead seeing nothing of her idyllic surroundings. Perhaps the autumnal tones and the gathering clouds give an extra hint of gloom: the good days and bright skies of summer are passing.

How brilliantly an artist can paint a mood into a picture. Joseph Wright's portraits in landscape settings are familiar to us, his sitters exuding health and radiance, wearing fine clothing in rich colours materials that are a hallmark of his style and which suggest the comfort and wealth of his sitters. This painting, though, is not a straightforward portrait, but a scene from literature. Maria is a sad character from Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey (published 1768). She has lost her mind after being abandoned by her lover, and while roaming in the countryside is met by Parson Yorick on his travels through France. Novels and poetry full of acute feelings were popular in the late 18th century. In painting a tragic heroine Wright was following this contemporary trend in which melancholy figures find solace in nature. Maria sits here with her pipe upon which she had played sweet, plaintive melodies. Her very position denotes melancholy, known and often copied from the German painter Albrecht Durer's engraving, Melancholia I of 1514; the mourning pose also derives from ancient tomb relief sculpture. [Jackaman]

The viewer of the Stothard illustrations is struck by its remarkable sobriety, and by Yorick's contemplating the shepherdess without animation or remark. Against the mask-like visage of the shepherdess Stothard sets the blooming cheeks of Maria. Looking down but focussing on nothing, the girl seems totally lost in her reveries, the pose with which Stothard suggests indulging in grief-stricken reflections. The illustrator uses the other person in the picture, a poplar tree with slightly agitated leaves, to highlight the heads of the pair and throw a canopy over them. Despite the fact that Stothard has depicted the leash around Maria's waist, surprisingly the dog Sylvio is absent from the composition, creating an unbroken sense of communion between an elderly, black-clad, clerical Yorick and the youthful shepherdess dressed in white, their contrasting age and youth accentuated by Yorick's clergyman's coat and the girl's voluminous dress. In his hands Yorick holds his hat and the handkerchief with which he is prepared to wipe away her tears.

Relevant illustrations from the 1841 and 1857 editions

Left: Jacque and Fussell's frontispiece of Yorick's coming upon the melancholy shepherdess outside Moulines, Maria (1841). Right: Tony Johannot's more realistic conception of Yorick's meeting Maria under her tree, Maria of Moulines (1857). [Click on the images to enlarge them.]

Above: Jacque and Fussell's interpretation of the melancholy shepherdess outside Moulines as a headpiece to the chapter, Maria. Moulines (p. 158).

Bibliography

Sterne, Laurence. A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy by Mr. Yorick. Illustrated by Thomas Stothard. London: J. Good, No. 159, New Bond Street; and E. and S. Harding, No. 102, Pall Mall, 1792; rpt., 1801].

Sterne, Laurence. A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy. Illustrated with one hundred engravings on wood, by Bastin and G. Nichols, from original designs by Jacque and Fussell. London: Joseph Thomas, 1841.

Sterne, Laurence. A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy. With 100 illustrations by Tony Johannot. London: Willoughby, 1857.

Stothard's Illustrations for Sterne's A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy by Mr. Yorick (1792). Accessed 26 September 2018. Available online at VTS: fulltable.com

Turner, Katherine. "Notes." Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768). Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2010.

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Last modified 25 October 2018