
Medea by Frederick Sandys (1829-1904). 1866-68. Oil on panel with gilded background. 24 1/2 x 18 1/4 inches (61.2 x 45.6 cm). Collection of Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, accession no. 1925P105. Image courtesy of Birmingham Museums Trust made available under a Creative Commons Zero licence (CCO). [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
Medea is undoubtedly Sandys's greatest masterpiece and was said to be the artist's favourite from amongst his paintings (see Wood 31). It was the last of his major subject paintings. It had been accepted for the Royal Academy exhibition in 1868, but despite its obvious quality it was not hung. This is likely because the evilness of the subject portraying a cold-blooded murderess was deemed too controversial, as were some of the over sensual decorative accessories, such as the copulating toads in the left foreground. This late rejection of the painting caused a great furore in Sandys's supporters leading to a vigorous correspondence in the press, including The Times amongst others. A critic for The Morning Press, in particular, protested the exclusion of the painting writing in May 1868: "We have reason to know that Mr. F. Sandys, one of our best draughtsmen, if not our very best, has sent in a picture of Medea, which though originally accepted, was finally rejected. The exclusion is utterly indefensible. It is simply disgraceful. To set aside any picture by Mr. Sandys in favour of such as form the average of this exhibition would under any circumstances have been an act of egregious stupidity or iniquity, but as it happens the Medea is not only fully worthy of its author, but positively the finest work he has as yet produced" (qtd. in Wood 31). The work was therefore shown the following year at the Royal Academy, no.99, and then later that year at the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists. The model for Medea was Sandys's mistress Keomi Gray, and was probably the last work for which she sat.
Betty Elzea has described how this painting is full of narrative and dramatic detail:
It shows a dark-haired young woman, waist length, facing the spectator. Her head is tightly tilted slightly to one side as she gazes to the right with a tragic expression on her face. Her long curling hair is drawn back and hangs to her shoulders. She wears a white-on-white embroidered robe of exotic origin, possibly West African. Round her head she wears an interlocking chain-like silver and shell ornament which hangs down below her ears on to her shoulders. This may be Hellenic or perhaps Near Eastern peasant jewellery. She wears two necklaces, one made of bone and blue Egyptian faience beads, and the other, many-stranded, of coral. The bracelet on her right wrist appears to be made of ancient seals, coins, and scarabs threaded together. There is a marble parapet in front of her, on which rests a small flaming brazier ornamented with a pierced design of a salamander. Her right hand clutches her coral necklace; the other hand pours a substance from a carved(?) amber-coloured glass beaker into the brazier. [184]
The gold background of this painting is particularly interesting. Elzea describes it as a mural encompassing
a stunningly fanciful array of ancient Greek, Japanese, Chinese, and Egyptian stylized motifs, the general effect being of a Japanese painted screen, the most splendid of which have designs on a flat gold ground. It's most likely that Sandys would have seen such a one, either in Whistler's possession or at the Japanese exhibit at the London International Exhibition of 1862 at South Kensington. In the uppermost zone, against the gold ground, to the left of Medea's head, is the vessel Argo, crowded with Argonauts and sailing on the sea of formalized waves. To the right of Medea's head is a group of three tall stylized oak trees, one hung with mistletoe. Between two of the oaks, the Golden Fleece is suspended. Below the oak grow thorny or noxious plants such as Monkshood, Deadly Nightshade, and a species of prickly thistle. In the gilded sky above fly six white cranes, and a bat crosses a crescent moon. Superimposed on the sky, faintly discernible, are outline drawings of stars and astrological symbols. Below this stylized landscape is a data frieze of roundels containing hieroglyphs of owls, scarabs, and Egyptian animal-headed gods, alternating with hooded snakes. In the dark area behind the shoulders of Medea lurks a hairy, bewhiskered dragon, the guardian of the Fleece, which peers with an evil expression over her left shoulder. [184-85]
The inclusion of certain plants such as Monkshood and Deadly Nightshade in Sandys's painting is important because these are the plants that Medea will use to concoct her poisons. The painting very effectively captures Medea's malevolent nature and power, the personification of a deadly femme fatale. As Elzea points out: "In Sandys's picture, the background symbolizes Medea's past, while the foreground presents her in the state of anguish and jealousy preparing with incantations the fatal mixture for impregnating Glauce's dress" (185).
Sally-Anne Huxtable has explained the symbolic meeting of some of the accessories included in Medea's chamber:
She has cast her magic circle with red thread, which may symbolize the red thread of traditional Gaelic witchcraft practice, or the red string of fate/marriage which appears in both Japanese and Chinese legend. Medea is also wearing strands of coral around her neck which act as protection and mirror the red circle. Within the magic circle we see two copulating toads representing both magic and the lust of Jason and his new lover. There are also the poisonous berries of the Belladonna/Deadly Nightshade – a plant which bears the name of the Third Fate in Greek myth Atropos, who is the Fate who cuts the thread of life for each mortal with her shears. Next to the toads and berries is a "Jenny Hanniver" which is a dried stingray fashioned into a folk art cryptozoological creature by sailors and which is believed to have magical powers and is used in magical rituals by the curanderos in Veracruz in Mexico. There is also an iridescent Paua or Abalone shell, used as a ceremonial vessel in some coastal or island indigenous cultures; this one contains blood. The chafing dish (an item usually used in Solomonic Magic rituals) is decorated with a salamander signifying temptation and burning lust and which was believed to contain a deadly poison. Standing guard over her workings is a statue of the Egyptian cat-god of protection, Bastet, and the bottom of the gilded Japanese screen decoration behind is a row of hieroglyphs including owls and scarabs. As in Morgan-le-Fay, the owl represents night, death and the underworld and the scarab with funerary rites. Above them, cranes, usually associated in China and Japan with happiness, good fortune and longevity, are departing, as all hope for Medea is lost. [74]
The Legend of Medea in Greek Mythology
In classical Greek mythology, Medea is an enchantress and the daughter of King Aeëtes of Colchis and the niece of Circe, a descendant of the Sun god Helios and therefore not merely mortal but possessed of magical and prophetic powers. When Jason arrives in Colchis to retrieve the Golden Fleece in order to claim his inheritance and the throne of Iolcus, Medea falls in love with him. She promised to assist him with his quest on the condition that if he succeeds he will take her with him and marry her. Jason obtains the Golden Fleece with the aid of Medea's herbal magic, used to drug the never-sleeping Dragon Kholkikos guarding the fleece. Medea then brutally kills her own brother Apsyrtus in order to ensure their safe escape. When Jason and Medea return to Iolcus, King Pelias still refuses to give up his unrightful claim to the throne so Medea conspires to have his own daughters kill him. The lovers then flee to Corinth where they live for some time and have several children. Jason eventually betrays Medea, however, when he agrees to marry Glauce, the beautiful daughter of King Creon of Corinth. Medea exacts her revenge against her husband by murdering King Creon and his daughter and stabbing to death her children by Jason in front of him. Medea also orchestrates Glauce's death by giving her an enchanted dress which when she puts it on catches fire, and she dies in torment. In view of the timing of Sandy's painting it is likely it was inspired by William Morris's The Life and Death of Jason, published by Bell and Dandy in 1867, rather than the Greek tragedy written by Euripides.
Contemporary Reviews of the Painting
Algernon Swinburne in his "Notes on Some Pictures of 1868", first published in the Fortnightly Weekly in July 1868, praised Sandys's picture as he had assumed it was going to be hung at the Royal Academy that year:
"Mr. Sandys' picture of Medea is well enough known by this time, wherever there is any serious knowledge of art, to claim here some word of comment, not less seasonable than if it were now put forward to grace the great show of the year. Like Coriolanus, the painter might say if he would that it is his to banish the judges, his to reject the 'common cry' of academics. For this, beyond all doubt, is as yet his masterpiece. Pale as from poison, with the blood drawn back from her very lips, agonized in face and limbs with the labour and the fierce contention of old love with new, of a daughter's love with a bride's, the fatal figure of Medea pauses a little on the funereal verge of the wood of death, in act to pour a blood-like liquid into the soft opal-coloured hollow of a shell. The future is hard upon her, as a cup of bitter poison set close to her mouth; the furies of Absyrtus, the furies of her children, rise up against her from the unrisen years; her eyes are hungry and helpless, full of a fierce and raging sorrow. Hard by her, henbane and aconite and nightshade thrive and grow full of fruit and death; before her fair feet the bright-eyed toads engender after their kind. Upon the golden ground behind is wrought in allegoric decoration the likeness of the ship Argo, with other emblems of the tragic things of her life. The picture is grand alike for wealth of symbol and solemnity of beauty. [371-72]
When the painting was finally shown at the Royal Academy in 1869 it was, not surprisingly, extensively reviewed, partly no doubt in view of its notoriety due to its earlier rejection. The painting remained controversial. Sandys's close friend E. W. Godwin, in The Architect, felt that the decision to hang Sandys's picture that year showed promise on the part of the Royal Academy:
The hanging has never been more faithfully done, and probably never so wisely. For example, portraits as a rule are placed above the line, and Mr. Sandys' Medea, rejected last year, is not only accepted, but placed on the line…. Architects will be especially thankful to this painter for the manner in which he has treated the story of Medea. All great artists – Greek, Japanese, or Mediaeval – would have treated it in much the same manner, viz. by adopting a strong conventional background and by the free use of symbols. I can quite understand that this free use of symbolism, combined with a gold background, and its very conventional wood and fleece and ship, should have led the Council last year to reject it; that they should have repented this year, when there were so many claimants at their doors, is a sign of wonderful promise. [265]
A critic for the Art Journal found the work both eccentric and repellent:
"This room contains more than a fair proportion of what is eccentric and abnormal: witness the works of Mr. F. Sandys and Mr. E. Crowe. The former has at last found entrance for Medea (99), a picture the exclusion of which from the last exhibition made much stir. We doubt whether Mr. Sandys will add to his reputation by this highly elaborate, but somewhat repellent, performance. Still, as representative of a style which is sufficiently distinctive, it is well that the work should be seen, and thus possibly appreciated by a select few. The picture, either by its merits or his defects, certainly stands alone; there is nothing like it in the gallery – nor, some may add, in the whole of nature besides. Thus, according to the preconceptions of the public, Medea will either be vastly admired or supremely detested. It strikes us that the expression is rather over-spasmodic, and the flesh somewhat waxy, smooth, and colourless. [164]
F. G. Stephens in the Athenaeum, not surprisingly, praised the picture for its merits of draughtsmanship, modelling, and colour:
The vigorous and expressive picture by Mr. F. Sandys, Medea (99), has now a place on "the line," where its extraordinary merits may be observed; but was among those rejected for last year's Exhibition…. The enchantress is brewing poison and singing magic rhymes of invocation as she is placed before a burning lamp, which casts its yellow light upon her face and form. Her expression is terrible and horrible, and lies in the withered ivory-like look of her skin; the deep, hard anger and woe of her eyes; the ruthless, parted lips; – expression that deepens in force with the observer because of the beauty of the features, which are transformed but not debased. The student will not fail to notice the beautiful execution here, as in the drawing and modelling of the face, hands and arms; the firm colour that appears about the lower part of the throat and its adjuncts, the right hand and draperies. [675]
A reviewer for the Illustrated London News decried the initial rejection of this picture:
If unanswerable proof were needed of the extreme fallibility of the Academic Council of Selection, whether in judging the more mental or the technical attributes of a work of art, it is patent in the Medea (99), by Mr. F. Sandys, which has at length found a place. This picture was, we believe, in the "doubtful" class last year – not even among those nominally "accepted" but excluded on the ground of want to space. Yet the work evinces extraordinary intensity of conception, and combines with a fine sense of beauty an exquisite finish of execution worthy of the greatest of the early Flemish masters. The sorceress is in the act of incantation. Strange, foul, and potent ingredients for her witch's concoction – noisome toads, mandrake or other strange roots, quaint shells filled with evil compounds – are, with images of strange gods, strewn before her. The blue fire of her chafing-dish lights into weird horror the beautiful lines of her features, pales her cheeks, whitens her lips, glistens in the keen spectra of her eyes. Romantic fancy, classic taste, rigid realism, elaborately careful finish unite in one harmonious result. [506]
J. B. Atkinson in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine found the work memorable, but not admirable, thinking Sandys had been inspired by earlier images of the frightful head of Medusa: "Also worthy of remembrance, if not of admiration, is Medea, by Mr. Sandys, a head which by its rejection a year ago won unusual notoriety. The work is an anomalous compound of classic and spasmodic styles. The artist, we could suppose from this and prior pictures, may have been impressed with the unwonted intensity of expression thrown into heads of Medusa by sculptures of classic epochs, and by Da Vinci and Caravaggio in the middle ages" (224).
Influences and Affiliated Victorian Paintings
Liz Prettejohn feels Medea was influenced by the work of D.G. Rossetti, such as his Fazio's Mistress of 1863, as well as Giovanni Bellini's Portrait of Fra Teodoro of Urbino as Saint Dominic that Sandys would have seen at the South Kensington Museum (Modern Masters, Old Masters, 41 & 45). Colin Cruise thinks it could have been influenced by Simeon Solomon's Habet! that was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1865 (141). The use of Japanese screens as motifs in the background of paintings in this time period when they were just starting to become fashionable was not unique to Frederick Sandys. Perhaps the best-known example is James McNeill Whistler's Caprice in Purple and Gold: The Golden Screen of 1864. Another such screen is included in his sister Emma Sandys's Portrait of a Woman in a Green Dress of c.1870 that was exhibited in Japan and Britain: An Aesthetic Dialogue in 1991, cat. 81. The subject of Medea also featured in other Victorian paintings including Val Prinsep's Medea of 1888 and Evelyn de Morgan's Medea of 1889. Prinsep portrayed her as a femme fatale harvesting poisoned fungi from a forest floor which she will use to poison Glauce and with a dagger in her right hand that she will later use to kill her children. John William Waterhouse's Jason and Medea of 1907 depicts an earlier episode in the story showing Medea concocting a magical potion that Jason will employ to make him strong as a god and allow him complete the tasks set out for him by his uncle Pelias in order to obtain the Golden Fleece.
Links to Related Material
- The Japanese Style, or the Cult of Japan
- Medea by Charles Wetmore Storey
- Henry James on the Poetry of William Morris (see "The Life and Death of Jason")
Bibliography
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Created 16 July 2025