1889, depicting Shelley's 1822 beach cremation. The painting's not square, but cropped, leaving Mary Shelley out of the frame. You can see the picture in full if you go here, or if you do something I've long wanted to do but never done, that is, go to Liverpool.
Odd that Trelawny seems to be examining the dinky screen on the back of his digital camera and that Byron looks like he's sporting the jeans-inside-your-boots fashion that's pretty fashionable in Warsaw.
The internet is unusually unforthcoming about Louis Fournier. Who was he? A one-hit wonder, perhaps.
Richard Holmes doesn't give anything away, but tells us that the 'celebrated' painting shows 'a miraculously undamaged corpse offered up to Heaven on a martyr's pyre, with Trelawny and Byron striking solemn Romantic poses (actually they went swimming), and a pious Mary kneeling on the wind-swept beach in floods of tears (although in fact she was never there at all)'.
1 comment:
What? You've never been to Liverpool? Well you'll have to rectify that. I first went up there to visit my pen pal Waterfall, and then to visit Suzie several times and now I go to the biennial. Always a reason to head up to the 'pool. Go go go!
Post a Comment