Doves and Dreams
Doves and Dreams is organised in partnership with the Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow
27 January - 22 April 2007
Watercolour and gold paint on vellum
s. and d.b.l.: ‘FRANCES E MACDONALD / 1897’; inscr.b.: ‘AND EVEN NOW A HARSH / VOICE SEEMED TO HANG / ABOUT MY HAIR’
18.2 x 9.2 (7 3/16 x 3 5/8)
The State University of New York at Buffalo.
In 1897 the Macdonald sisters collaborated on a series of 21 watercolours illustrating William Morris’s ‘The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems’.
The paintings richly illustrate the artists’ creative imagination and ambition.
In late nineteenth-century Britain, Arthurian subject matter presented a glorious world of knights, chivalry, courage and love, which provided a powerful visual and imaginative antidote to the harsher realities of urban industrialisation.
The sisters focused on poems addressing courtly love, not chivalric action, illustrating the narratives of the knights’ beautiful and often tragic lady loves, including Guenevere, Guendolen and Jehane.