King Pelles' Daughter Bearing the Vessel of the Sangrael by Anthony Frederick Augustus Sandys (1829-1904). Left: 1861. Oil on panel. 12 ¾ x 9 ½ inches (32 X 24 cm). Private collection. Image courtesy of Peter and Renate Nahum. Right: Brush and black ink on paper; 12 5/8 X 9 1/4 inches (32.1 X 23.4 cm). Collection of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Image courtesy of the author.
King Pelles' Daughter Bearing the Vessel of the Sangraelis one of a series of works based on the Arthurian legends by the Pre-Raphaelites and their circle in the late 1850s and early 1860s. The subject is from Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d' Arthur, originally printed by William Caxton, although the edition that would have been most accessible to Sandys at this time would have been the so-called Southey edition, published by Longman's & Co. in 1817. Impetus at this time to illustrating incidents from Le Morte d' Arthur was given by the murals painted in 1857 for the Oxford Union Debating Hall by D.G. Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris, J.R.S. Stanhope, Arthur Hughes, Val Prinsep, and J. H. Pollen, the so-called "Jovial Campaign." The illustrations by Rossetti and Holman Hunt for the Moxon Tennyson, published in 1857, were also undoubtedly major influences. Sandys produced a number of works based on Arthurian themes in the early 1860s including La Belle Yseult [La Belle Ysonde] of 1862, Morgan Le Fay of 1862-63, and Vivien of 1863.
King Pelles' Daughter Bearing the Vessel of the Sangrael is undeniably one of Sandys' finest drawings which was later worked up into an oil painting that Sandys showed at the Royal Academy in 1862, no. 361. In this particular case, however, the drawing is a tour de force of Pre-Raphaelite draughtsmanship and a much more impressive achievement than the painting. The Holy Grail [Sangrael] is alleged to be the cup of the Last Supper in which Joseph of Arimathea later caught Jesus' blood at the crucifixion. After the crucifixion Pontius Pilate gave Jesus' body to Joseph of Arimathea who interred it in his private tomb. Joseph was a secret follower of Jesus and a wealthy and influential member of the Sanhedrin, the Council of Elders, that ruled Jerusalem under the Roman authority. It has also been speculated that Joseph of Arimathea was related to Jesus through his mother Mary. Medieval traditions portray Joseph of Arimathea as the custodian of the Holy Grail. It was supposedly he who brought the Grail to England, more specifically to Glastonbury. His descendants were entrusted with the guardianship of the Sangrael from generation to generation.
There are a number of versions as to how the Holy Grail was lost. The most popular one has God removing the Grail because of his displeasure with the dolorous stroke that Sir Balin struck upon King Pelles, the Grail's guardian. Although King Pelles still lived, the wound could not be healed until the Sangrael was restored. It was Merlin who sent a message to King Arthur, via Sir Gawain, directing Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table to undertake the quest to recover the Grail. Merlin informed Arthur that the knight who will accomplish the sacred quest had already been born and was of a suitable age to enter upon it. This knight was Sir Galahad, the grandson of King Pelles and thus a descendant of Joseph of Arimathea, and a knight with a pure heart and valour beyond all other men. Sandys's painting and drawing refer to an earlier incident in the Arthurian legends, taken from Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d' Arthur when Elaine, the daughter of King Pelles, appeared in the presence of her father and Sir Lancelot with a "vessel of gold betwixt her hands" which was the Sangrael. A prophecy was fulfilled by the deception of Sir Lancelot into believing that Elaine was his beloved Queen Guinevere, and Sir Galahad, the "perfect knight", was born of their union (Elzea 162).
Sally Anne Huxtable has a more occult reading of Sandys's design for the story and how the tragic fate of the love of Elaine for Lancelot is predetermined and out of her control:
"It is this same force that seals the fate of Elaine of Corbenic, daughter of the Fisher King, King Pelles, and guardian of the Sangreal, as depicted in Sandys 1861 King Pelles' Daughter Bearing the Vessel of the Sangraal. Her destiny is directed by the ultimate destiny of the mediaeval world – that the redemption offered by the death of Christ, as represented by the Sangreal. To fulfil her Father's prophecy that she will bear the future Sir Galahad, she has to seduce Sir Lancelot by tricking him into thinking she is Guenevere. Although the complicated and doomed love story she shares with Lancelot has aspects of romance, it is ultimately governed by the fact of Lancelot's fate to be tragically in love with Guenevere, and, most powerfully the occult and mystical demands of the Sangreal which rules both the body and the soul. It is the Holy Grail which, through Elaine, saves the life of the wounded Lancelot and, ultimately, destroys Elaine. Thus, in the preliminary drawing for the later painting, the Sangreal she holds, not only resembles the Neo-Gothic chalices of Pugin, but again, we see the use of the occult images of the Picts…. Even the title of Sandys's work is telling – Elaine's own agency as a woman is ultimately overruled by the fact that she is the daughter of King Pelles The Fisher King, and therefore governed by her lineage as a guardian of the Grail. Her own identity is subsumed in that destiny. [74-75]
The drawing and oil painting are a bust length portrayal of a beautiful young woman holding a medieval style chalice. The chalice is decorated with Celtic interlace ornament and stylized designs taken from Pictish sources (Elzea 162). These are similar to the Pictish designs on the gown of Morgan Le Fay in Sandys's painting of 1862-63. The finial is modelled in the form of a winged dragon. The central part of the chalice is ornamented with roundels, one of which depicts the crucifixion. As Betty Elzea has pointed out, this chalice is very much in the style of contemporary metalwork by the architect William Burges. Sandys would surely have known Burges as he was a member of the Pre-Raphaelite circle at this time and Sandys had probably been introduced to him through Rossetti. In the painting the model's hair is a rich red-brown and she wears a greenish-blue band around her head. Her expression is more intense and foreboding than in the drawing. She wears a greenish-blue dress over which is a white cape with gold threads which appears to be the same worn by the model in Oriana. Her right arm is in a knitted sleeve of crimson (Elzea 162). The model for Elaine in both the painting and the drawing seems to be the same as for his painting Oriana of 1861 as the models share the same curly hair and distinctive chin dimple.
This drawing has obviously been inspired by the prints of Albrecht Dürer, an artist whom Sandys greatly admired, and on whose monogram he based his own. It is also characteristic of a particular type of highly finished pen-and-ink drawings produced by artists in the Pre-Raphaelite circle, such as Rossetti, Simeon Solomon, and Edward Burne-Jones, in the late 1850s and early 1860s. The painting shows the influence of Rossetti, particularly his Bocca Baciata of 1859.
The drawing once belonged to James Anderson Rose, a London solicitor who knew many of the Pre-Raphaelites, and who formed a distinguished collection of their works. He also shared their enthusiasm for collecting blue-and-white Chinese porcelain. Rose was probably Sandys' most important early patron and at his posthumous sale at Christie's on May 5, 1891 fourteen drawings by Sandys were included. The British Museum owns another drawing by Sandys entitled The Damosel of the San Grael, of c.1880, which is very different in treatment and composition from this drawing (Elzea cat. 4.5). D.G. Rossetti also did a watercolour entitled The Damsel of the Sanc Grael in 1857 and then a later oil version in 1874.
Bibliography
Elzea, Betty. Frederick Sandys 1829-1904. A Catalogue Raisonné. Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Antique Collectors' Club Ltd., 2001, cat. 2.A.27 and cat. 2.A.28, 161-62.
Huxtable, Sally-Anne: '"Her False Crafts": Morgan Le Fay and the Wild Women of Sandys's Imagination." PRS Review XXIV (Autumn 2016): 66-77.
Lanigan, Dennis T. A Dream of the Past. Toronto: University of Toronto Art Centre 2000, cat.71, 185-87.
Lanigan, Dennis T. Beauty's Awakening. Drawings by the Pre-Raphaelites and Their Contemporaries from the Lanigan Collection. Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 2015, cat. 59, 146-47.
Created 13 July 2025