"Thy Music, faintly falling, dies away, Thy dear eyes dream that Love will live for aye," [Golden Strings], by John Melhuish Strudwick (1849-1937). 1893. Oil on canvas. 30½ x 15½ inches (77.5 x 39.4 cm). Private collection. Image courtesy of Christie's, London, and not to be reproduced; the right click has been disabled.
Strudwick exhibited this picture at the New Gallery in 1893, no. 106, its title again derived from a couplet by his friend, the architect G.F. Bodley. Bodley must have admired this painting because in the following year he commissioned a replica of it for his own collection, which was then exhibited at the New Gallery in 1895 under the title Golden Strings (Hall, n.75, 473). The painting features a beautiful young woman with red-gold hair, her face in three-quarter profile to the right. She wears a red and silver silk brocade dress covered by a red smock and with a white lace undergarment. She is playing upon an unusual lute-like stringed instrument. A frieze of religious figures can be seen running above her head.
John Christian felt this work was a study in pure Aestheticism:
It has all the hallmarks of Strudwick's style, or, to put it another way, is a perfect demonstration of Aesthetic values. There is no narrative subject. Instead, mood is established by means of a musical reference, while a beautiful model in exotic draperies provides the pretext for a ravishing visual ensemble. Even the haloed figures in the frieze behind the girl's head seem to have no symbolic significance, being introduced merely for decorative effect and to suggest a vaguely medieval-cum-Renaissance mise-en-scène. Particularly typical of Strudwick is the extreme emphasis on surface pattern and texture. It is as if embroiderers and goldsmiths have been literally at work, bringing every detail to the highest pitch of polished perfection and finesse. [58]
The painting was purchased directly from Strudwick by his principal patron, the Liverpool shipping magnate William Imrie.
Contemporary Reviews of the Painting
The painting was not widely reviewed when it was shown at the New Gallery in 1893. Frederick George Stephens, who was no fan of Strudwick's work in general, was once again derogatory in his comments in The Athenaeum. He felt Strudwick imitated the work of Rossetti and Burne-Jones without possessing any real inspiration of his own: "A less ambitious and complicated picture is No. 106. a half-length figure (half the size of life) of a damsel with a lute, upon which she is supposed to be playing with fingers very oddly drawn. A decidedly pretty piece of sentimentality, but feverish in colour, it is deficient in manliness, and, while pretending to exhibit the fruits of study and research, it is really laboured and polished till it is too smooth to be artistic. No part of it is massed, nor, in the pictorial sense, possesses any solid quality" (576).
Link to Related Material
Bibliography
British Pictures. London: Maas Gallery, 2000, no. 56.
Christian, John. Important British & Irish Art. London: Christie's (November 26, 2003): lot 13, 56-59. https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-4194471
Hall, Michael. George Frederick Bodley and the Later Gothic Revival in Britain and America. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014. 232-33.
Kolsteren, Steven. "The Pre-Raphaelite Art of John Melhuish Strudwick (1849-1937)." The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic Studies I:2 (Fall 1988): 11-12, nos. 22 & 24.
Stephens, Frederick George. "Fine Arts. The New Gallery." The Athenaeum No. 3419 (May 6, 1893): 576-78.
Wood, Christopher. Dictionary of Victorian Painters. Woodbridge: Antique Collectors Club, 1995. 171.
Created 5 October 2025