The Devout Childhood of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, by Charles Allston Collins (1828-1873). 1852. Oil on canvas. 35 ¾ x 23 ¾ inches (90.8 x 60.3 cm). Collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts, accession no. 2015.29. Image courtesy of Rupert Maas, the Maas Gallery, London. Not to be downloaded; right click disabled.
Collins exhibited The Devout Childhood of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary at the Royal Academy in 1852, no. 1991. It was accompanied by these lines in the catalogue: "If she found the doors of the chapel in the palace shut, not to lose her labour, she knelt down at the threshold, and always put up her petition to the throne of God." Collins had likely begun the painting in January 1851 again utilizing the Pre-Raphaelite technique of painting on a wet white ground to make the colours more brilliant and to give the painting luminosity. John Everett Millais had hoped that Collins would complete this painting for the Royal Academy exhibition of 1851 and that Thomas Combe would purchase it to hang as a companion piece to his own The Return of the Dove to the Ark that was shown at the Royal Academy that same year. A letter from Millais to Mrs. Combe of April 15, 1851 reads: "It was very unfortunate that Charley could not complete the second picture for the Exhibition. I tried all the encouraging persuasions in my power; but he was beaten by a silk dress, which he had not yet finished" (Millais I: 101). The garment worn by the young St. Elizabeth in Collins's picture is the same dress as that worn by the girl to the left in Millais's The Return of the Dove to the Ark wears, although the dress in Millais' picture has a bit more of greenish tinge to it. Rupert Maas has postulated, based on an earlier suggestion by Malcolm Warner, that had Combe purchased Collins's picture he could have hung these two pictures as part of a sort of a triptych of the theological virtues, with Collins's painting representing Faith, William Holman Hunt's A Converted British Family representing Charity, and Millais's painting The Return of the Dove to the Ark representing Hope (Maas 49). Millais designed the frames for both his and Collins's paintings to harmonise with each other. When Combe was unable to buy Collins's The Devout Childhood of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary he ended up buying Convent Thoughts in its stead. While this painting could also be thought of as representing Faith, it is not nearly so good a match for Millais's painting as was the St. Elizabeth, both in size and colour.
Saint Elizabeth of Hungary was a thirteenth century noblewoman who renounced her throne, her possessions, and her family, for spiritual reasons in order to become an ascetic and minister to the poor. She was born in 1207 A.D., the daughter of the King Andrew II of Hungary and his wife Gertrud of Merania. As a young child Elizabeth was betrothed to the firstborn son of Herman, the Landgrave of Thuringia, She was taken to Wartburg, Thuringia in 1211, never to return to her native country. In 1221, at age fourteen, she married Lewis IV of Thuringia and bore him three children. When she was widowed at the young age of twenty she renounced her crown to dedicate her life to Christ. She left the hostile court at Wartburg and lived at the court of Conrad of Marburg, where she founded a hospital for the poor. She died in 1231 at the age of twenty-four. Her burial site soon became a place of pilgrimage and she was canonized a saint by Pope Gregory IX in 1235. The quotation found in the Royal Academy catalogue, "If she found the doors of the chapel in the palace shut, not to lose her labour, she knelt down at the threshold, and always put up her petition to the throne of God," was taken from Alban Butler's Lives of the Saints. Butler was an eighteenth century English Roman Catholic priest and this was his principal literary work that was published between 1756-59. Collins's picture thus has overt Roman Catholic overtones, even for a Tractarian, and his High Church allegiance was obviously why he based his painting on Butler and not on the broad church Anglican cleric and novelist Charles Kingsley's popular The Saint's Tragedy published in 1848.
In Collins's painting the pious young St. Elizabeth has arrived at the church prior to the priests opening the door. She is shown wearing a shot blue silk dress, a gold crucifix and gothic chain around her neck, and kneeling in a praying position to begin her devotions at the closed wooden oak door of the church. The red wool cap she wears on her head is symbolic of her charity because she spun wool to clothe the poor (Maas 52). Her missal, bound in black, lies on the marble threshold to the church. Collins used The Miracles of our Lord by the illustrator and illuminator Henry Noel Humphries, published by Longman & Co. in 1848, as the basis for the missal (Maas 52). The gravel path to the church upon which she kneels is scattered with shells, perhaps intended to signify a spiritual meaning. The oak door with its rusty hinges in Collins's St. Elizabeth is the mirror image of the door from Worcester Park Farm that Holman Hunt would paint several months later for his The Light of the World. As Maas points out: "Both are of grained and knotted oak, with similar hinges, and neither door has a handle or a lock" (50). A rose bush can be seen growing up the side of the stone wall of the church. This is likely symbolic of the best-known miracle attributed to St. Elizabeth, the miracle of the roses. Driven by her need to aid the poor of her land Elizabeth would daily take bread to impoverished people determined that no one should go hungry. One day she met her husband unexpectedly while she was on her secret mission to deliver bread to the poor. Her husband asked her what she was carrying under her cloak in order to counter claims that she was stealing from the castle. When she opened her cloak God had miraculously changed the loaves of bread into roses. In the background of the picture the sapling of a horse-chestnut tree is seen to the left, immediately behind the wall of the church, with a meadow and then a forest of trees seen in the distance.
For inspiration for his composition Maas feels that Collins had looked at Eduard Hauser's illustrations from Chapter IV to the Count de Montalembert's Life of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, translated into English by Ambrose Lisle Philips and published in London in 1839: "One illustration in particular evidently offered Collins several elements of composition: the architecture of the doorway, the plants in the foreground, the mountains in the background and the dress of the Saint" (51). Eduard Caspar Hauser (1807-1864) was a convert to Roman Catholicism who had come under the influence of the Nazarene painter Johann Friedrich Overbeck in Rome. There is controversy as to whom Collins used as the model for the head of Elizabeth. Maas has concluded "Collins' St. Elizabeth is likely to be from several models, including Elizabeth Siddal" (55).
When the painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1852 a critic for The Art Journal recognized Collins affiliation to Pre-Raphaelitism: "No. 1091. The devout childhood of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, C. Collins, "If she found the doors of the chapel in the palace shut, not to lose her labour, she would kneel down at the threshold, &c." We find, therefore, a girl kneeling close against the chapel door; but the manner of kneeling rather resembles listening than an act of devotion. The manner of the picture is that called pre-Raffaelism" (174).
The reviewer for The Athenaeum praised the picture except for how Collins had represented the face of the saint:
No. 1091 is taken from the legend of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary. This maiden of precocious piety was wont, when she found the chapel door shut, to kneel at its outside. The representations of texture are perfect; the strong wall is as true as is the oak graining of the door. The hinges are most mediaeval and Puginesque, – the costume of blue and green silk is Byzantine. The hands and face of the maiden adhere nicely to the flat surface, – but the expression is rather pouting than devout, and the countenance is more pinky and school-girlish than saint-like. [582]
The Illustrated London News failed to be impressed considering the work to be merely a distasteful piece of sickly sentimentality:
The same artist's representation of The Devout Childhood of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary (1091) is a still more disagreeable affair, on account of the sickly sentimentality with which it is imbued.... there she kneels, in a very fine blue taffeta dress, of quaint construction, with her commonplace face resting against the oak door, as she tries to peer through a crevice; but whether at a supper party or a religious ceremony, there is nothing in the character or expression of her countenance to indicate. The grass-plat, gravel walk, and two rose-trees are mere efforts of copyism, worthy only of a child. [407]
W. M. Rossetti in The Spectator gave it mixed reviews feeling that Collins needed to make further progress in his art:
The devout Childhood of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, by Mr. Collins, is a good example of Pre-Raphaelite industry; the grain of the oak church-door, the young rose-bushes, and the accessories generally, being reproduced with great care and success. There does not exist a more conscientious or consistent adherent of the school than Mr. Collins. But his aspiration scarcely keeps pace with his perseverance. He is content to paint subjects of a single figure or head, affording no opportunity for stirring action, or for more than passive strength of feeling; and even for expressing this, he puts up with models whose appropriateness is only negative. It is quite right that his St. Elizabeth should not be the mere dummy of a saint: but neither is she the flesh and blood of a saint; and this is not right. Mr. Collins might have done more for the sentiment of such a subject; but something further still is required – he should rise altogether above the little excellences of quietness, into masculine vigour and sympathies. [543]
David Masson in The British Quarterly Review of 1852 noted that included in the Pre-Raphaelite pictures in the present Royal Academy exhibition were three by Mr. Collins, one by Mr. W. Holman Hunt, and three by Mr. J. E. Millais. He then discussed each of Collins's submissions in turn including the second one Beati Mundo Corde:
So, also, with the remaining painting, which is entitled, The devout Childhood of St. Elizabeth of Hungary…. To illustrate this interesting legend, we have a pious little girl of thirteen or fourteen years of age, with a rather comely, healthy face, brown hair, and a green dress, kneeling at the iron-barred oaken door of a chapel, her hands against the wood, and a missal, which she has brought up the gravel-walk with her, deposited on the door-step. Here, too the technical performance is good; but, if we take the sentiment into account, we begin, in spite of liking, to grow angry. In short, it is in these two pictures of Mr. Collins, and in Mr. Collins's choice of subjects generally, that we discern something of that paltry affection for middle age ecclesiasticism with which the Pre-Raphaelites as a body have been too hastily charged. Little girls keeping their Chrisom pure against blue backgrounds, and other little girls kneeling on church-door steps to say their prayers, - Puseyite clergymen may like such artistic helps towards teaching young ladies the way to the blessed life; but most decidedly the public is right in declaring that though the painting were never so good, it will not stand that sort of thing. The most important thing about a work of art, and that which most surely gives the style and measure of the artist's intellect, is the choice of the subject. That is a great work of art, as distinct from a mere study, the subject of which is a broad and impressive human fact, and the sentiments of which shoots down, like a tremor, among the depths and antiquities of human association. A "Chrisom pure," and the like, may be permissible now and then, simply in as far as there is still something gentle and human in little thoughts of that kind; but an artist unmans himself if the habitual and pre-ordered forthgoing of his contemplations is along the line of these petty ecclesiasticalities, where his eyes never lose sight of the Tractarian parson, and where his hands may touch the tops of the pews…. No; if we are to have religious paintings, let us have no mere "Chrisoms pure," and other dear little adaptations of religion to the dilettantism of Belgravia; but the true legends of the church, powerful at all times and in all places. Let us have true stories of the lives of the saints, whether those of ordinary or those of ecclesiastical record; or if artists will, in their desire to paint religiously, keep strictly in the line of holiest Christian traditions – let them oftener than they do, ascend to the commencement of that line, reading not the Lyra Innocentium, but St. Matthew's Gospel, and representing, not the gravel-walks leading to the doors of nunneries, but those actual oriental fields over whose acres walked the houseless Man of Sorrows… Or, to concentrate what we have to say into a humbler, and, perhaps, in the circumstances of the case, a more available form, let Mr. Collins pitch Keble overboard, and addict himself to Tennyson. [214-15]
Collins was not the only artist within the Pre-Raphaelite circle to treat the subject of St. Elizabeth. Christina Rossetti wrote a poem St. Elizabeth of Hungary in 1850. James Collinson's Pre-Raphaelite masterpiece The Renunciation of Queen Elizabeth of Hungary of 1848-50 is perhaps the best-known example. In 1848 J. E. Millais made a drawing St. Elizabeth of Hungary Washing the Feet of Pilgrims. D. G. Rossetti's drawing of St. Elizabeth of Hungary Kneeling with her Companions dates to c. 1852. William De Morgan exhibited a watercolour The Visitation of St. Elizabeth at the Dudley Gallery in 1866.
Bibliography
Casteras, Susan P., 'Virgin Vows: The Early Victorian Artists' Portrayal of Nuns and Novices', Victorian Studies 24 (1981): 157-84.
"The Exhibition of the Royal Academy, 1852." The Art Journal New Series IV (1 June 1852): 165-76.
"Fine Arts. Royal Academy." The Athenaeum No. 1282 (22 May 1852): 581-83.
Maas, Rupert. "The life of Charles Allston Collins (1828-73): and his painting The Devout Childhood of St Elizabeth of Hungary." The British Art Journal XV, No. 3 (Spring 2015): 38-60.
Masson, David. "Pre-Raphaelitism in Art and Literature." The British Quarterly Review XVI (August 1852): 197-220.
Meisel, Martin, "Fraternity and Anxiety: Charles Allston Collins and the Electric Telegraph." Notebooks in Cultural Analysis. Edited by Norman F. Cantor and Nathalia King. Durham: Duke University Press, 1985. Vol. II: 112-68
Millais, John Guille. The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais. New York: Frederick A Stokes Company, 1899.
Neale, Anne. "Considering the lilies: Symbolism and revelation in Convent Thoughts (1851) by Charles Allston Collins (1828-1873)." The British Art Journal XI (2010": 93-98.
Rossetti, William Michael. "Fine Arts. The Royal Academy Exhibition." The Spectator XXV (5 June 1852): 543-44.
"The Royal Academy." The Illustrated London News XXII (22 May 1852): 407-08.
Created 15 September 2024