The Mock Marriage of Orlando and Rosalind. 1850. Oil on canvas, 24 x 20 inches (60.8 x 50.6 cm). Collection of Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, accession no. 1912P19.
The subject of this painting is taken from Shakespeare’s As you Like It, Act IV, Scene 1, showing Rosalind tutoring Orlando in the ceremony of marriage with Celia acting as “priest.” In March 1853 Deverell reported in his journal: “I commenced finishing on the picture from “As You Like It,’ re-designed and painted an entirely new figure of Rosalind, this making the 4th figure having previously erased three, and also improved the face of Orlando. Altogether I am more pleased with this picture than anything I have yet done” (Lutyens 89). The figures are painted in a theatrical fashion with dramatic gestures. The background was finished from the Combe Wood beyond Richmond. Deverell’s older sister Margaretta posed for Rosalind in a grey tunic made especially for this picture, matching the colour of her breeches. His brother Spencer posed for the head of Orlando. His awkward pose is the result of the long bow seen under his left arm. Rosalind is seen standing on a carpet of autumn leaves. The tall ferns in the left foreground are treated in a meticulous early Pre-Raphaelite fashion but, in general, the painting is less detailed with more emphasis on light and shadow than his earlier Pre-Raphaelite works like Twelfth Night. D. G. Rossetti is known to have retouched the face of Celia after Deverell’s death to make the painting more saleable.
Deverell sent five works for the Royal Academy exhibition of 1853 but only two were accepted, including this work, but both were badly hung. Deverell records in his journal: “The marriage of Orlando and Rosalind was disgracefully hung – the most insulting position in the Octagon Room – So all my hopes and labours of the preceding year were overthrown at one fell swoop!” (Lutyens 90) W. M. Rossetti confirmed the poor hanging of the picture in his review of the Royal Academy exhibition for The Spectator: “We know that Mr. Deverell must have made a pleasant thing, with a feeling for that Shakespearean mood which he illustrates, of ‘The Marriage [mock marriage ?] of Orlando and Rosalind’; but the hangers, who consider the top of the Octagon Room good enough for it, do not allow us to see that it is so” (494).
This work was initially bought by the distinguished collector John Miller. D. G. Rossetti in a letter of March 27, 1854 to Miss [Margaretta] Deverell wrote: “Victoria! Miller of Liverpool has just sent me a cheque for 50 guineas for the As you like it which it seems is as he likes it” (Correspondence II, 331).
Bibliography
Lutyens, Mary. “Walter Howell Deverell.” Ed. Leslie Parris. Pre-Raphaelite Papers. London: The Tate Gallery and Allen Lane, 1984.
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The Formative Years 1835-1854. Ed. William E. Fredeman. Vol. 1. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002.
Rossetti, William Michael. “Fine Arts. Royal Academy Exhibition: Fourth Notice.” Spectator 26, (1853): 494.
Last modified 9 March 2022