[Victorian Web Home —> Visual Arts —> Illustration —> A Sentimental Journey —> Next]
Maria of Moulines
Tony Johannot
Breviers
1857
Engraving on wood
14.7 cm high by x 10.2 cm wide, vignetted
Tenth full-page illustration for A Sentimental Journey (1857), facing page 198.
[Click on image to enlarge it and mouse over text for links.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
When we had got within half a league of Moulines, at a little opening in the road leading to a thicket, I discovered poor Maria sitting under a poplar. She was sitting with her elbow in her lap, and her head leaning on one side within her hand: — a small brook ran at the foot of the tree.
I bid the postilion go on with the chaise to Moulines — and La Fleur to bespeak my supper; — and that I would walk after him.
She was dress’d in white, and much as my friend described her, except that her hair hung loose, which before was twisted within a silk net. — She had superadded likewise to her jacket, a pale green riband, which fell across her shoulder to the waist; at the end of which hung her pipe. — Her goat had been as faithless as her lover; and she had got a little dog in lieu of him, which she had kept tied by a string to her girdle: as I looked at her dog, she drew him towards her with the string. — “Thou shalt not leave me, Sylvio,” said she. I look’d in Maria’s eyes and saw she was thinking more of her father than of her lover, or her little goat; for, as she utter’d them, the tears trickled down her cheeks. ["Maria. Moulines," pp. 159-60]
— just heaven! it would fill up twenty volumes — and, alas! I have but a few small pages left of this to crowd it into; and half of these must be taken up with poor Maria, my friend Mr. Shandy met with near Moulines.
The story he had told me of that disordered maid affected me not a little in the reading; but when I got within the neighbourhood where she lived, it returned so strong into my mind, that I could not resist an impulse which prompted me to go half a league out of the road to the village where her parents dwelt, to enquire after her. "Maria. Moulines." — vignette of Maria at her father's grave, pp. 196-97]
Thus, for both Yorick and the reader familiar with Tristram Shandy the image and description of the mourning, slightly mad shepherdess constitutes a bridge between the earlier novel and A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy. Maria's sad story occurs in Vol. IX, which Sterne published just the year before.
Although the two-volume edition of 1768 lacks even so elemental an illustration as a wood-engraved frontispiece, subsequent eighteenth-century British and French editions provided considerable visual elaboration, with headnote vignettes, tailpieces, thumbnails, and even full-page illustrations. Within a decade of the book's initial publication, Maria, despite her appearing in the last pages of the text, had become one of the most popular characters for visual representation in what was, as Katherine Turner notes in the Broadview edition (2010) preface, a highly visual and image-oriented culture. The melancholy shepherdess Maria inspired numerous illustrations and at least fifteen well-known paintings by the close of the eighteenth century. Moreover, between 1780 and 1820, the Wedgwood factories used Maria's downcast image on a number of products, including a jasper cameo set in a steel belt buckle that depicts her in profile, her hand to her head (a pose indicative of grief) underneath a poplar, with her dog attentively trying to get on her lap. This particular interpretation seems to have influenced Fussell's 1841 illustration Maria, which significantly serves as that highly illustrated volume's frontispiece, signaling to the reader that the illustrators recognize the importance of this pastoral character in the book's narrative-pictorial sequence, and that readers will encounter this sentimental embodiment of grief in due course. Maria's image even circulated outside the confines of illustrated texts and paintings, both of which commodified her classical pose for the wealthy. Angelica Kauffman's portrait of poor Maria and her faithful dog Sylvio (1777) circulated as a print throughout Europe, and probably influenced the Wedgewood stoneware design, as well as the statuesque image of the classical shepherdess produced in 1781.
Tony Johannot's 1857 illustration alliteratively entitled Maria of Moulines represents a realistic reinterpretation of the conventional image. Whereas in the 1841 version she sighs as she looks down and her diminutive dog momentarily turns away from her as he registers the approach of a stranger (Mr. Yorick, upper left), Johannot increases the size of the poplar and indicates that Yorick is within several feet of her. She, however, does not register the clergyman's presence, but rather seems to be studying the reader, althoiugh the dog looks at Yorick. In background, the French illustrator has included the Romanesque bell-tower of the village church and several other buildings whose steep roofs likewise direct the viewer's eye heavenward. In the churchyard we may presume that Maria's father lies — in a scene in the 1841 edition, Maria contemplates the gravestone on her knees, but the village of Moulines lies on the distant horizon. Finally, Johannot has included the ribbon that serves as Sylvio's leash, and implies through the dog's head, ears, and body configuration that he is a spaniel.
The 1841 and 1857 illustrators may well have been familiar with at least some of the Maria paintings and illustrations circulated in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, particularly those by Maria Kauffman and Joseph Wright of Derby. The most famous of these were the five studies by Maria Anna Angelica Katharina Kauffman (1741-1807), the Swiss Neoclassical painter who had a successful career in London and Rome. Remembered primarily as a history painter with a bent for the sentimental, Kauffmann painted portraits, particularly of aristocractic women, landscapes, and decorations. She was one of the two female founding members of the Royal Academy in London in 1768, the very year in which Sterne published A Sentimental Journey.
The Wright of Derby painting of 1781 may likewise be regarded as part of an almost cult-like response to Sterne's description of the melancholy-mad shepherdess:
This sweet young girl sits in a soft rural setting holding her flute, with her little dog at her feet looking up at her faithfully. This should be a happy, wholesome country scene, but the pose of this gentle figure suggests sadness: she sits on a grassy bank with her elbow on her crossed knee, her head resting on her hand as she looks dreamily ahead seeing nothing of her idyllic surroundings. Perhaps the autumnal tones and the gathering clouds give an extra hint of gloom: the good days and bright skies of summer are passing.
How brilliantly an artist can paint a mood into a picture. Joseph Wright's portraits in landscape settings are familiar to us, his sitters exuding health and radiance, wearing fine clothing in rich colours materials that are a hallmark of his style and which suggest the comfort and wealth of his sitters. This painting, though, is not a straightforward portrait, but a scene from literature. Maria is a sad character from Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey (published 1768). She has lost her mind after being abandoned by her lover, and while roaming in the countryside is met by Parson Yorick on his travels through France. Novels and poetry full of acute feelings were popular in the late 18th century. In painting a tragic heroine Wright was following this contemporary trend in which melancholy figures find solace in nature. Maria sits here with her pipe upon which she had played sweet, plaintive melodies. Her very position denotes melancholy, known and often copied from the German painter Albrecht Durer's engraving, Melancholia I of 1514; the mourning pose also derives from ancient tomb relief sculpture. [Jackaman]
Left: Jacque and Fussell's frontispiece of Yorick's coming upon the melancholy shepherdess outside Moulines, Maria. Right: Thomas Stothard's original conception of Maria as a well-dressed shepherdess, Yorick and Maria.
Above:The same illustrators' interpretation of the melancholy shepherdess outside Moulines as a headpiece to the chapter, Maria. Moulines (p. 158).
De Voogd, Peter. "Sterne and Visual Culture." The Cambridge Companion to Laurence Sterne, ed. Thomas Keymer. Toronto and Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2009. Pp. 142-59.
"Elizabeth Jackaman looks at a painting ...Maria from Sterne, 1781 by Joseph Wright of Derby (1734–97)." Online version available from Derbyshire Life and Countryside, April 2010 [updated: 17:06 20 February 2013]. Web. 22 September 2018.
Insane Maria. Kauffman, Anna Angelica Maria. (1768-81). Pic234. Oil on metal, oval, 31.1 cm by 25.4 cm. Online version available from Burley Collections. Burghley House Stamford, Lincs PE9 3JY 01780 752451. Web. 22 September 2018. See also oil on canvas, 65.5 x 65.5 cm. The Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia.
Sterne, Laurence. A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy. Illustrated with one hundred engravings on wood, by Bastin and G. Nichols, from original designs by Jacque and Fussell. London: Joseph Thomas, 1841.
Sterne, Laurence. A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy. With 100 illustrations by Tony Johannot. London: Willoughby, 1857.
Turner, Katherine. "Introduction" to Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2010. Pp. 11-46.
Last modified 29 September 2018