"Dora" by William McTaggart (1835-1910)

Dora

William McTaggart (1835-1910)

1869

Oil on canvas

116.6 x 98 cm.

Royal Scottish Academy of Art and Architecture, Edinburgh, Accession no. 2000.107

McTaggart's diploma work, deposited in 1870, illustrates a scene from Tennyson's "Dora" of 1842. In this idyll, popular with the Victorians, Dora tries to reconcile her stern uncle to his daughter-in-law and grandson. [Commentary continues below.]

Text by Jacqueline Banerjee

Image from Art UK kindly made available for reuse under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence. [Click on the image to enlarge it and mouse over the text for links.]

Dora's ploy here is to take off the boy's sun-hat and put a little chain of wildflowers around his head instead, to make him look appealing (although in the poem itself, she puts the flowers round his hat). The grandfather can be seen approaching in the distance. Fortunately, in the end, the child does bring his grandfather round.

James L. Caw quite rightly points out that it is not necessary to have read the poem in order to appreciate the painting:

Its design, whether as regards the general disposition of the masses or the relationship of figures to the landscape or to each other, is balanced, harmonious and expressive; the sun-suffused colour scheme, lovely in its combination of richness and delicacy; the faces of the chief actors — Dora's sweet and pensive, the boy's very winsome in its mingling of shyness and roguery — peculiarly fascinating even for McTaggart, in whose work beauty of type and expression is a never-absent quality. The handling also is full of charm. Dexterous without parade of cleverness, and marked by extraordinary finesse of touch, the brush-work, incisive here, caressing there as suits the feeling, is highly expressive in kind.... [47]

Interestingly, there was an earlier "dark" or "twilight" version of this work, but it was repainted to produce this brighter, softer version (see Scruton 114).

Related Material

Millais's illustration for "Dora" (showing the grandfather raging at his son)

Bibliography

Caw, James Lewis. William McTaggart, R.S.A., V.P.R.S.W.; a biography and an appreciation. Glasgow, J. Maclehose and Sons, 1917. Internet Archive. Contributed by Cornell University Library. Web. 6 September 2017.

Scruton, David. William McTaggart: Landscape, Meaning and Technique. Doctoral Thesis for the University of St. Andrews, Scotland 1991. Available via the University's Repository. Web. 6 September 2017.

Created 6 September 2017