Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Arthur Hughes - Alice Gertrude Waugh, Mrs Thomas Woolner



Oil on canvas

Bradley Manor, Devon

"I recollect my lady in a wood,
Keeping her breath and peering - (firm she stood
Her slim shape balanced on tiptoe - )
Into a nest which lay below,
Leaves shadowing her brow."

Thomas Woolner (1825– 1892), the only sculptor to have been a member of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, wrote these lines in 1863, a before he married Alice Waugh. He commissioned the painting from Arthur Hughes and it was paid for by his friend, Sir Francis Turner Palgrave (1824–1897), a civil-servant poet, as a wedding present.

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