"The Annunciation" by Frederic Shields

The Anunciation

Frederic Shields

1893-94

Oil on canvas

(unframed) H 84.5 x W 53.5 cm

Painted for the Chapel of the Ascension

Bayswater Road, not far from the Marble Arch, fronting Hyde Park

Collection: Manchester Art Gallery, accession no. 1917.282

Bequeathed by Leicester Collier, 1917

William Sharp in the National Review declared this the "one great Religious picture painted this year ... a very noble and beautiful work. He called Shields, whose recent neglect he deplored, "almost our only great painter of Religious art who combines intense sincerity of emotion and aim with rare distinction and a fine sense of colour and line" (469-70). How very fortunate that this exceptional work has come down to us, when the chapel itself was lost in World War II.

The Chapel of the Ascension and Mr. Frederic Shields

Mary Lloyd - The Face of an Angel, Part IV (on her probable involvement here as model)

Commentary by I. Langridge

And now let us turn to the Annunciation. It may be urged with regard to it, that Art has said the last word there is to say on the subject. Recollections of the traditional Annunciations of the Old Italians (varied according to the poetic insight and special character of the different painters) flit through one's brain. Sweet, strange, haunting creations, which once seen, must colour, one would think, all one’s conceptions of the Annunciation for ever after.

No faintest echo of any of them is here, however!

A deep evening stillness lies upon the landscape. The folded hills sleep behind the sleeping village. The air deepens and melts into a violet dusk exhaled by night herself. The flat-roofed houses are all dark save for one point of orange light from a window (is it that of St. Anna, one wonders?) making the in tense loneliness of the scene seem more apparent. It is a transfigured world in this enchanted twilight, full of a strange intentness — listening and waiting it would seem. For what? The deeply blue sky is set with one star, whose piercing glitter, augmenting this effect, suggests an heavenly eye watching her, “upon whom the ends of the world are come.” The crescent moon presides virginal over the scene.

In the foreground the Virgin kneels beside her unfinished day's work. There is no joy apparent in her acceptance of the Divine will, only she is awed through out her being, and ready to receive without question whatever may be in store for her of love and pain. Something in the bowed figure touches one with the emotional intensity of music. I am tempted to quote Heine's description of Scheffer's Margaret in trying to elucidate this Virgin. “She has more feeling than face,” he says — “she is a painted soul.”

The Angel Gabriel, tender and aerial as those swathes. of mist which linger in the hollows of the hills at evening-time, floats before her, uttering the message. A branch of flowering almond adds a note of beautiful symbolism, for the almond is not only considered since the Middle Ages as the type of the Trinity (God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost are one, even as shell, fibre and kernel are one nut), but it is also a type of the Immaculate Conception. An old German writer thus poetically states it: “Aaron laid a rod in the earth, which bore the almond nut, noble beyond all measure, that didst thou bear, mother, without man's aid, Sancta Maria.”

The colour harmonies of this beautiful composition augment the earnest and suggestive treatment. [342]

Photo credit: Manchester Art Gallery, reproduced via Art UK on the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (CC BY-NC-ND). Formatting and text by Jacqueline Banerjee.

Bibliography

The Ascension. Art UK. Web. 28 September 2024.

Langridge, I. “The Chapel of the Ascension and Mr. Frederic Shields.” Art Journal. (1902): 337-43. Internet Archive. Web. 28 September 2024. [Complete text in the Victorian Web.]

Sharp, William. "The Art of the Year." National Review Vol. 21 (1893): 459-73. Google Books. Free Ebook. Web. 28 September 2024.

Created 28 September 2024