| Miranda | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Artist | John William Waterhouse |
| Year | 1875 |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Movement | Romanticism |
| Dimensions | 76 cm× 101.5 cm(30 in× 40.0 in) |
| Condition | Very good condition with minimal intervention in the past. |
| Owner | Private collection |
Miranda by John William Waterhouse was painted in 1875 and depicts the character Miranda from William Shakespeare's The Tempest . [1] Waterhouse also painted Miranda later in his career, both in 1916. According to Sotheby's, the painting is currently in very good condition. [2]
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Miranda was only Waterhouse's second exhibit at the Royal Academy, in 1875. It was seemingly lost for 131 years until it was found in 2004 in a private collection in Scotland, then auctioned by Bonhams on 4 November 2004. From 2009 to 2010, it went on an exhibition tour: [2] [3] [4]
- The Groninger Museum (December 13, 2008 – May 3, 2009)
- The Royal Academy of Arts in London (J.W. Waterhouse - The Modern Pre-Raphaelite ) (June 27 – September 13, 2009)
- The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (October 1, 2009 – February 7, 2010)
The painting does not depict a scene from the play, but instead is an invention of Waterhouse, who depicts the fifteen-year-old Miranda seated on a rock at the seashore, watching a ship in the far distance. Despite the era the play was written in, Miranda is depicted wearing clothing from classical antiquity, a white chiton and tainia; her clothing and the scene evokes the mythical heroine Ariadne at the time when she was abandoned by Theseus on the island of Naxos. During Act I of The Tempest, Miranda will witness this ship, which carries her eventual lover Ferdinand, destroyed by the magic of her father, Prospero — this is the more popularly depicted scene, but Waterhouse chose to paint a pensive Miranda instead. [2] [5]
In The Magazine of Art (1886), Blaikie compares Miranda to another of Waterhouse's works, Sleep and His Half-Brother Death, to both critique and compliment the artist:
There is no suggestion of the imaginative insight and exhaustive idealisation that are notable of the vision of Sleep and Death, though a satisfying potency of colour and a finely graduated brilliance of illumination give admirable force and relief to the figure. [6]
