The Eve of St. Agnes, by Arthur Hughes (1832-1915). 1855-56. Oil on canvas, triptych: sides 23 1/4 x 11 3/4 inches (59 x 29.8 cm); center 25 1/2 x 22 1/4 inches (64.7 x 56.5 cm). Collection of Tate Gallery, London, accession no. NO4604. Image 1/4 released under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivitives licence (CC BY-NC-ND). [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
Hughes exhibited the principal version of this triptych at the Royal Academy in 1856, no. 1190. D. G. Rossetti, who saw it at the Royal Academy, wrote to his friend William Allingham on April 25, 1856 that "Hughes's Eve of St. Agnes will make his fortune I feel sure" (119). It was shown later that same year at the Liverpool Academy, no. 97.
These lines from John Keats's poem "The Eve of St. Agnes" are written in paint at the bottom of the original gold frame:
They told her how, upon St Agnes' Eve,
Young virgins might have visions of delight,
And soft adorings from their loves receive
Upon the honey'd middle of the night.
If ceremonies due they did aright,
And supperless to bed they must retire,
And couch supine their beauties lily white,
Nor look behind, nor sideways, but require
Of heaven with upward eyes for all that they desire.
Keats's poems tells of two young people in love, Porphyro and Madeline. The incident portrayed takes place on 20 January, the eve of the Feast of St. Agnes. Madeline, following an old superstition, performs a ritual calling on St. Agnes to send her a magical vision of her future husband at midnight in a dream. Madeline is loved by Porphyro, a young nobleman whom her family considers an enemy and who they are prepared to kill on sight. Porphyro manages to sneak into the castle undetected because of the many guests in the castle that night. Purely by chance he meets Angela, Madeline's old nurse, who tells him about Madeline's faith in the ancient superstition. He decides to make Madeline's belief a reality by his presence in her bedroom at midnight. Angela reluctantly agrees to help Porphyro by leading him to Madeline's bedchamber where he hides in a closet. Madeline soon enters, goes to bed and falls asleep. Porphyro leaves the closet and approaches her bed in order to awaken her. When his whispering fails to stir her, he picks up his lute and plays it close to her ear. Suddenly her eyes open wide but initially she is still in the grip of the magic spell. When her magic visionary state comes to an end, however, she discovers that her imaginary lover is real. Porphyro urges her to leave the castle with him and the lovers flee past the porter who is in a drunken stupor and depart the castle.
Although the three episodes in Hughes' picture were painted on one canvas, the picture was framed so as to present as a triptych. The scene to the left shows Porphyro's approach to the castle in the moonlight, the middle scene the awakening of Madeline, and the scene to the right the flight of the lovers over the drunken porter. The last scene has much in common with and was obviously influenced by William Holman's Hunt's earlier painting of 1848 The Flight of Madeline and Porphyro during the Drunkenness Attending the Revelry also known as The Eve of St Agnes.
The Eve of St. Agnes, c.1855-56. Oil on paper on panel; sides 10 1/4 x 6 1/4 inches (26 x 16 cm); center 10 5/8 x 12 1/4 inches (27 x 31 cm). Collection of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, accession no. WA1944.23. Image courtesy of the Ashmolean Museum for the purposes of non-commercial and educational research. [Painting without its frame, reproduced via Art Uk and re-used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (CC BY-NC-ND)..]
There is a reduced version of Hughes's painting of c.1855-56, likely an oil sketch, that he showed as St. Agnes' Eve at the Winter Exhibition at Ernest Gambarts' French Gallery in 1858, no. 67, This painting is now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Oil on paper laid on panels, it is less finished than the principal version, lacks the arched tops to each section, and differs in minor but significant details. The left-hand panel shows a slightly later incident in the poem where Porphyro meets with the aged Angela, Madeline's nurse, at the portal doors. In the central panel Porphyro is shown standing behind the bed and holding his lute. Madeline is depicted with her upper body raised up from the lying position and looking dazed and holding her left hand to her forehead. The background is also changed showing curtains around the bed and prominent moonlight streaming through the stained-glass windows, which are not as large or as colourful. The right-hand panel is similar to the finished composition.
The Influence of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
Timothy Hilton has suggested that Hughes drew on Pre-Raphaelite precedents when executing The Eve of St. Agnes:
Almost all his best paintings can be traced back to a precedent in the work of the members of the P.R.B. itself. The Eve of St. Agnes is typical of his art, and here he actually produced a painting better than its prototype. Hunt, it will be recalled, had illustrated Keats's poem just before he became a Pre-Raphaelite…. Hughes's interpretation adopts a triptych, and uses that quintessentially holy format to relate the most successful abduction in English literature. There are three scenes from the poem, Porphyro's stealthy approach to the castle, his awaking of Madeline in her bedchamber, and, as in Hunt's painting, their escape, tiptoeing carefully over the drunken porter. The colours have great depth and richness; in the first panel the shadows cast by moonlight – by no means an easy thing to paint convincingly – are exceptionally finely handled, and in the centre the stained glass and silken finery glow with life through the darkness. That stained glass we have seen before, of course, in Millais's Marianna, and Madeline's embroidery frame might well have come from Rossetti's The Girlhood of Mary Virgin. [113-15]
Contemporary Reviews of the Painting
A critic of The Art Journal lamented the injustice done to the painting by where it was hung in the Architecture Room of the Royal Academy where it could barely be appreciated: "We cannot quit this room without especially noticing the injustice done to the picture in three compartments, No.1190, The Eve of St. Agnes, by A. Hughes; it is exaggerated in colour, but a production of much greater merit than a hundred others that have good positions in the three best rooms" (173). The reviewer for The Athenaeum didn't like the work, however, writing: "The Eve of St. Agnes (1190) is green, overstained, extravagant, and weak" (622).
John Ruskin writing in his Academy Notes felt the picture showed promise of future excellence:
The Eve of St. Agnes (A. Hughes). A noble picture, apparently too hastily finished, and very wrongly put into this room. It looks too blue; but remember it is entirely a night piece, admitting moonlight into the chambers; and if a piece of real moonlight were seen, instead of the picture, through the walls of the room, it would look just as strangely blue: the fault which the eye catches is chiefly that the blue glass casts a white light, and the colours in the left hand subject are confused in relation. The ivy on the tree trunk has clearly been done without a natural model, and is not creditable to the painter of the ivy in No.578. The half-entranced, half-startled, face of the awaking Madeline is exquisite; but the lover's in both the centre and right-hand subjects very far from satisfactory. If, however, the reader knows the poem, he will be grateful for the picture; and there is promise in it of high excellence. [70]
W. M. Rossetti writing as the art critic of The Spectator particularly liked the intense colour harmonies achieved:
In the Architecture Room we again meet Mr. Hughes. His picture in three compartments from Keats's "Eve of St. Agnes," is on the whole, after Millais's Autumn Leaves, the most striking thing in the exhibition as a work painted for a beautiful and intense effect of color. The same prevailing chord of colour – greens and purples setting each other off by exquisitely-managed contrasts – is apparent here as in the April Love; but here it is a matter of effect more than of local hues, and is the more difficult and splendid in consequence. The first compartment is early moonlight out of doors, with glowing lights from within: Porphyro advances to the perilous castle which holds his Madeline. The second is moonlight at the dead night-hour in Madeline's chamber – the great painted window flooded by the moon-rays, and all within brilliant in their glory, yet uncertain and mysterious. Madeline, at Porphyro's playing, starts awake, half scared, half impassioned, and still all dreamy and tender from her spell-guarded sleep. This is a most lovely figure, imagined in a true spirit of poetry. The third compartment presents the lovers reaching the castle-door in their flight; the effect being that of lamplight, instead of moonlight, but managed well in harmony with the others. In details, much might be pointed out for admiration – something for dispraise; the figure of Porphyro is not in any instance satisfactory, and the thought of the picture, if we except the waking Madeline, is confined to the artistic invention of effect and colour. In these respects, however, there is so much of perfect instinct and deep feeling, and the work takes, on these grounds, so marked a position of its own, that other considerations become secondary. Mr. Hughes will henceforward be one of the men on whom we may securely count for an exercise of the artistic faculty in its most intrinsic essence and supreme degree. [591-92]
W. M. Rossetti, this time writing of the Royal Academy exhibition of 1857 in the American periodical The Crayon, discussed the work on two occasions in his letters from London: "There is Mr. Hughes, a young painter full of capacity and of a charming sense of beauty…. Hughes contributes first, a picture of Keats's 'Eve of Saint Agnes' in three compartments – the arrival of Porphyro at the castle by moonlight, the waking of Madeline, and the flight of the lovers" (182). He later went on praise the work more highly, particularly its colour: "The Eve of St. Agnes, now that I see it completed in effect, strikes me as being, after Milliais' Autumn Leaves, the most lovely piece of highly-wraught colour-effect in the exhibition. [209-10]
Studies
Three pencil studies of c.1854-56 are in the collection of Tate Britain (ref. nos. T07284, T06979, and T06884). Two others are in the collection of descendants of the family of Alexander Munro.
Bibliography
The Eve of St. Agnes. Ashmolean. Web. 4 March 2025.
The Eve of St. Agnes. Ashmolean (via Art Uk). Web. 4 March 2025.
The Eve of St. Agnes. Tate. Web. 4 March 2025.
"Fine Arts. The Royal Academy." The Athenaeum No. 1490 (17 May 1856): 620-22.
Hilton, Timothy. The Pre-Raphaelites. London: Thames and Hudson, 1970, 113-15.
Roberts, Len. Arthur Hughes His Life and Works. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Antique Collectors' Club, 1997, cat. 30, 136-37 and cat.30.8, 138-39.
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The Formative Years, II. 1855-1862. William E. Fredeman Ed. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002, letter 56.29, 119.
Rossetti, William Michael. "Art News from England." The Crayon III (June 1856): 181-83.
_____. "Art News from England." The Crayon III (July 1856): 209-12.
_____. "Fine Arts. The Royal Academy Exhibition." The Spectator XXIX (31 May 1856): 591-92.
Ruskin, John. "Academy Notes." The Works of John Ruskin XIV, edited by E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. London: George Allen, 1904.
Created 14 September 2004
New version of page, 4 March 2025