Study for Convent Thoughts, by Charles Allston Collins (1828-1873). c.1851. Black ink and grey wash over pencil on paper. 9 7/8 x 6 1/4 inches (24.9 x 15.9 cm). Collection of British Museum, museum no. 1891,0404.14. Image courtesy of The Trustees of the British Museum on the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
Early on, Collins intended the subject of his picture to be an illustration of Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem "The Sensitive Plant," initially published in 1820. This drawing illustrates the lines:
She sprinkled bright water from the stream
On those that were faint with the sunny beam;
And out of the cups of the heavy flowers
She emptied the rain of the thunder-showers.
At some point, however, under the influence of the Tractarian Movement Collins changed the subject of his picture to a nun contemplating a passion flower.
In the two drawings for this subject in the British Museum the female figure is not wearing a nun's habit, but an ordinary dress. William Holman Hunt quotes Millais as saying: "When he [Collins] left Oxford he got hipped about a fancied love-affair, and becoming a High Churchman, changed the subject of his picture from being an illustration of the lady in Shelley's Sensitive Plant … to a picture of a nun with a missal in her hand, studying the significance of the passion flower, with the title Convent Thoughts" (Hunt I: 294).
Collins' initial conception of this painting still has much in common with his final composition. The foreground and midground remain much the same likely because the figure was not painted until some time after the landscape. The pose of the nun is more upright and she holds a passion flower in her right hand and a missal in her left, as compared to his early idea where the young woman bends over to hold a lily in both hands and appears to be emptying rain water from it. In the drawing she is shown standing on a grass plot between beds of lilies on either side. Her figure is reflected in the pond on which water lilies bloom.
Bibliography
Asset number 312489001. Study for the painting "Convent Thoughts." British Museum. Web. 16 September 2024.
Gere, John A. Pre-Raphaelite Drawings in the British Museum. London: British Museum Press, 1994,cat. 88. 102-03.
Hunt, William Holman. Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Two Volumes. London: MacMillan & Co., Ltd., 1905.
Neale, Anne. "Considering the lilies: Symbolism and revelation in 'Convent Thoughts' (1851) by Charles Allston Collins (1828-73)." The British Art Journal XI, No. 1 (2010): 93-98.
Warner, Malcolm. The Pre-Raphaelites. London: Tate Gallery Publications / Penguin Books, 1984, cat. 33, 87.
Created 16 September 2024