King Arthur Carried to the Land of Enchantment, 1847. Oil on canvas, 34 x 45 inches (86.3 x 114.3 cm). Private collection. Click on image to enlarge it.
When this work was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1847 it was accompanied by these lines: “Some men yet say, in many parts of England, that Arthur is not dead; but by the will of our Lord Jesu, carried into another place, that he will come again, and win the holy cross. And men say there is written on the tomb, ‘Arthurus, Rex quondam, Rex futurus.” The quotation is taken from Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. Scott’s interest in this book therefore precedes that of Rossetti, Burne-Jones, and Morris by almost a decade since their decorations on Arthurian themes based on Malory for the Oxford Union Debating Hall occurred in 1857. The year 1847 was the same year that William Dyce received a commission to decorate the Queen’s Robing Room in the new Palace of Westminster based on incidents from Malory. In Malory’s story King Arthur is grievously wounded in his last battle with Sir Mordred, his treacherous illegitimate son by his half-sister Morgause. Arthur was laid in a barge, attended by three queens, and taken to the Isle of Avalon to regain his strength and be ready to return should his country require him. Paintings based on the Arthurian legends, taken either from Malory or the poems of Alfred Tennyson, were popular throughout the Victorian period.
Poulson has noted that Scott’s painting also has much in common with fairy subjects that were popular in the 1840s and his reference to “the land of enchantment” adds credence to the idea that Scott was treating this as a fairy subject (17). The painting failed to sell in 1847 and Scott retouched the work in 1862. It is uncertain how much he changed it but the revisions may have been prompted by the Arthurian works being produced by Rossetti and his circle at this time. It remains much more one of his early history paintings, however, than a work influenced by Pre-Raphaelitism.
.Bibliography
Poulson, Christine. The Quest for the Grail. Arthurian Legend in British Art 1840-1920. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999.
Last modified 6 February 2022