The Advent of Winter

Frederick Sandys

1866

Wood engraving by the Dalziels

6¾ x 4¾ inches

Illustration for The Quiver, January 1866, p.201.

Like many of Sandys’s designs, this is an atmospheric illustration to a conventional poem. It employs a neo-classical style in the manner of Frederick Leighton, with the billowing draperies rhyming the arabesques of the blown stalks in the foreground, while also making a contrast with the stiff verticality of the trees in the centre right. This is essentially classical pantheism, with the female figure embodying the in-coming season. In part a response to the Aesthetic neo-classicism of the sixties, it also prefigures the linearity and pattern-making of art nouveau in the works of nineties artists such as Aubrey Beardsley, Charles Ricketts, and Laurence Housman.

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