Left: Whole painting. Right: Closer view of the central figures.
Pyramus and Thisbe (A Modern Illustration of an Ancient Fable) by William Maw Egley (1826–1916). 1859. Oil on canvas laid to panel. 17 ½ x 13 ½ inches (44.4 x 34.2 cm). Private collection. Image courtesy of Sotheby's.
Egley exhibited this painting at the British Institution in 1861, no. 592. It was accompanied by these lines in the exhibition catalogue: "The flame was mutual, and the two lovers, whom their parents forbade to marry, regularly received each other's addresses, through the chink of a wall which separated their houses – Lemprière." The classical story of Pyramus and Thisbe was originally taken from Ovid's Metamorphoses. The two are ill-fated lovers from Babylon whose parents forbade their love; but they communicated their feelings of fidelity for each other through a crack in the wall between their connected houses. In the end the tale ends tragically with both lovers dead. Geoffrey Chaucer later treated the subject in English in the 1380s in his The Legend of Good Women. Many Victorians would have been aware of the tale from Shakespeare's Midsummer's Night Dream, Act V, scene 1 where a play about the two lovers is enacted, although a very poor performance of the story. The classical tale was treated most notably by Edward Burne-Jones in his watercolour Pyramus and Thisbe Triptych of 1872 and John William Waterhouse in his Thisbe of 1909.
Egley has chosen to paint a contemporary version of this tale with a boy and girl expressing their feelings for each other through a crack in the fence that divides their two properties. F. G. Stephens, reviewing the British Institution exhibition of 1861 in The Athenaeum, felt this work showed progress in Egley's art: "Mr. W. Maw Egley's production shows considerable improvement in simplicity and treatment, being far less hard and ivory-like than before with him, though not quite free from those faults. It shows the love of two pretty children who are about to kiss through a hole in some garden palings, the girl standing on tiptoe while the boy peers through. The colour is sweet and fresh. Its title, Pyramus and Thisbe: a modern illustration of an ancient fable" (234). W. M. Rossetti in The Spectator considered this a second-rate piece of Pre-Raphaelite painting: "Nor is pre-Raphaelitism altogether absent from the gallery, although, it must be confessed, of a very second-rate quality. Mr. W.M. Egley is its chief exponent, and exhibits a quaint, rigid conceit, Pyramus and Thisbe, in which two children are kissing each other through a chink in a garden paling" (138).
The end of the girl's skipping-rope, a half-eaten apple and her fallen, red-plumed hat, all depicted, like the grass and leaves, in close Pre-Raphaelite detail.
Susan Casteras has compared the young girl in this painting to Olivia in Egley's most famous painting The Talking Oak: "Another instance of juvenile courtship appears in Egley's Pyramus and Thisbe, also 1861, with its childish personages trying to communicate through an aperture in a fence. Here, the young girl's fancy shoes, elaborately rendered pantaloons and dress, and even her placement against a rough, vertical, wooden surface are arguably reminiscent of the older protagonist in The Talking Oak (32).
Bibliography
Casteras, Susan. "William Maw Egley's The Talking Oak." Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts LXV, No. 4, 1990, 26-39.
Fine Victorian Paintings, Drawings and Watercolours. London: Sotheby's Belgravia (June 27, 1978): lot 39, 19.
Rossetti, William Michael. "Fine Arts." The Spectator XXXIV (February 9, 1861): 138.
Stephens, Frederic George. "Fine Arts. British Institution." The Athenaeum No. 1738, (February 16, 1861): 234.
Created 15 July 2024