Study for The Devout Childhood of St Elizabeth of Hungary. Dated 1852 (but see below). Graphite and ink on paper. 10 3/4 x 6 7/8 inches (27.3 x 17.5 cm). Collection of Tate Britain, reference no. NO3521. . Image courtesy of Tate Britain, kindly released under the terms of Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED.
This is a preliminary study for the finished painting, now in the Detroit Institute of Art, that was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1852. The drawing itself is dated 1852. If such is the case, Collins would have had to paint very rapidly to go from this preliminary drawing to a finished painting able to be shown at the RA by May! It is therefore more likely that it dates to 1851 and Collins just did not date it until 1852. The sketch follows the composition of the final painting closely, although in the painting Collins has changed the distant perspective of the church wall behind St. Elizabeth and has instead substituted background features to the left, such as a meadow, a row of trees, and a blue sky.
Colin Cruise has discussed the ways in which this drawing shares features with other similarly naïve "medieval" linear style drawings produced by Pre-Raphaelite artists in the early 1850s that relate to contemporary religious debates:
[James] Collinson's extraordinarily spiky compositional drawing for his painting The Renunciation of Queen Elizabeth of Hungary (1851) and Collins's The Devout Childhood of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary (1852) demonstrate the interconnections of Pre-Raphaelite art with religious debates, the study of the lives of the saints and their representation in art. Through artistic sincerity the artist might approach a sincerity of religious feeling…. The linear style adopted by both artists is similar to that used for the outline illustrations to Anna Jameson's Sacred and Legendary Art (1848) as well as Lasinio's Campo Santo engravings and Retzsch's outline designs for texts by Shakespeare and Goethe. [63]
Alastair Grieve has discussed in detail the characteristics of these early naïve drawings by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, noting that the spare style adopted in them, and the intensity associated with the religious issues to which they allude, were now falling out of favour (43).
Closer view of Collins's signature on the left, and her missal on the right, with the Gothic pattern on its binding.
Bibliography
Cruise, Colin. Pre-Raphaelite Drawing, London: Thames and Hudson, 2012.
The Devout Childhood of St. Elizabeth. Tate. Web. 17 September 2024.
Grieve, Alastair. "Style and Content in Pre-Raphaelite Drawings 1848-50." Pre-Raphaelite Papers. Edited by Leslie Parris. London: The Tate Gallery / Allen Lane, 1984. 23-43.
Created 17 September 2024