| The Vision of Catherine of Aragon | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Artist | Henry Fuseli |
| Year | 1781 |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 147.3 cm× 210.8 cm(58.0 in× 83.0 in) |
| Location | Lytham St Annes Art Collection, Lytham St Annes |
The Vision of Catherine of Aragon, or Queen Catherine's Vision, is a painting in oils on canvas by the Swiss artist Henry Fuseli, created in 1781. The work is held at the Lytham St Annes Art Collection, in Lytham St Annes, Lancashire, England. [1]
This canvas represents a passage from the play Henry VIII , Act IV, scene 2, by William Shakespeare, where Queen Catherine of Aragon has a macabre dream of her own end after being banished in favour of Anne Boleyn. The Queen is lying on her deathbed, and she raises her left arm towards the crown offered to her by several partially naked female ghostly apparitions, in an emotion that surprises her servant sitting at her bedside, at the foot of a lyre and a sculpture. Both women are dressed in ancient classical attire, not in the 16th-century fashion. In the Shakespearean text the spirits wear garlands and oval masks known as visards, while holding palm or laurel branches, but Fuseli omitted these details. In the background there is the deposed Queen's gaoler, almost hidden in the darkness. [2]
There is a painting depicting Catherine alone (probably a study for this work) at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. In the same museum there is also a painting that focuses exclusively on the female apparitions. [3]
The painting was commissioned by the fifth baronet of Upton Sussex, Sir Robert Smyth, in 1780. After being exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1782, the work was inherited by his son and later by son of the latter, until it was auctioned in 1878. The work became part of the collection of Leonard Redmayne, and upon his death in 1906 it was inherited by his children. In 1931 the painting was loaned to Lytham St Annes Town Council, and in 1950 it became part of the town's art collection. [4]
Berthe Marie Pauline Morisot was a French painter and a member of the circle of painters in Paris who became known as the Impressionists.
Catherine of Aragon was Queen of England as the first wife of King Henry VIII from their marriage on 11 June 1509 until its annulment on 23 May 1533. Born in Spain, she was Princess of Wales while married to Henry's elder brother, Arthur, Prince of Wales, for a short period before his death.
Mary Tudor was an English princess who was briefly Queen of France as the third wife of King Louis XII. Louis was more than 30 years her senior. Mary was the fifth child of Henry VII of England and Elizabeth of York, and the youngest to survive infancy.
Antonio Allegri da Correggio, usually known as just Correggio, was the foremost painter of the Parma school of the High Italian Renaissance, who was responsible for some of the most vigorous and sensuous works of the sixteenth century. In his use of dynamic composition, illusionistic perspective and dramatic foreshortening, Correggio prefigured the Baroque art of the seventeenth century and the Rococo art of the eighteenth century. He is considered a master of chiaroscuro.
Henry Fuseli was a Swiss painter, draughtsman, and writer on art who spent much of his life in Britain. Many of his works depict supernatural experiences, such as The Nightmare. He painted works for John Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery and created his own "Milton Gallery". He held the posts of Professor of Painting and Keeper at the Royal Academy. His style had a considerable influence on many younger British artists, including William Blake.
Sudeley Castle is a Grade I listed castle in the parish of Sudeley, in the Cotswolds, near to the medieval market town of Winchcombe, Gloucestershire, England. The castle has 10 notable gardens covering some 15 acres within a 1,200-acre estate nestled within the Cotswold hills.
Queen's House is a former royal residence built between 1616 and 1635. It was built near the now demolished Greenwich Palace, a few miles downriver from the City of London and is now in the London borough of Greenwich. It presently forms a central focus of what is now the Old Royal Naval College with a grand vista leading to the River Thames. The Queen's House architect, Inigo Jones, was commissioned by Queen Anne of Denmark in 1616 and again to finish the house in 1635 by Queen Henrietta Maria. The Queen's House was commissioned by both Anne and Henrietta as a place to display artworks they had accumulated and commissioned; this includes a ceiling of the Great Hall that features a work by Orazio Gentileschi titled Allegory of Peace and the Arts.
In common parlance, the wives of Henry VIII were the six queens consort of King Henry VIII of England between 1509 and his death in 1547. In legal terms, Henry had only three wives, because three of his marriages were annulled by the Church of England. However, he was never granted an annulment by the Pope, as he desired, for Catherine of Aragon, his first wife. Annulments declare that a true marriage never took place, unlike a divorce, in which a married couple end their union. Along with his six wives, Henry took several mistresses.
Catherine of Lancaster was Queen of Castile by marriage to King Henry III of Castile. She governed Castile as regent from 1406 until 1418 during the minority of her son.
Richard Ansdell was a British painter of animals and genre scenes.
The Nightmare is a 1781 oil painting by Swiss artist Henry Fuseli. It shows a woman in deep sleep with her arms thrown below her, and with a demonic and ape-like incubus crouched on her chest. The painting's dreamlike and haunting erotic evocation of infatuation and obsession was a huge popular success.
Marcus Gheeraerts was a Flemish artist working at the Tudor court, described as "the most important artist of quality to work in England in large-scale between Eworth and van Dyck" He was brought to England as a child by his father Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder, also a painter. He became a fashionable portraitist in the last decade of the reign of Elizabeth I under the patronage of her champion and pageant-master Sir Henry Lee. He introduced a new aesthetic in English court painting that captured the essence of a sitter through close observation. He became a favorite portraitist of James I's queen Anne of Denmark, but fell out of fashion in the late 1610s.
Michael Sittow, also known as Master Michiel, Michel Sittow, Michiel, Miguel, and several other variants, was a painter from Tallinn (Reval), Estonia who was trained in the tradition of Early Netherlandish painting. For most of his life, Sittow worked as a court portrait painter, for Isabella of Castile and her Habsburg relatives in Spain and the Netherlands, and other prominent royal houses. He is considered one of the most important Netherlandish painters of the era.
The Three Witches, also known as the Weird Sisters or Wayward Sisters, are characters in William Shakespeare's play Macbeth. The witches eventually lead Macbeth to his demise, and they hold a striking resemblance to the three Fates of classical mythology. Their origin lies in Holinshed's Chronicles (1587), a history of England, Scotland and Ireland. Other possible sources, aside from Shakespeare, include British folklore, contemporary treatises on witchcraft as King James VI of Scotland's Daemonologie, the Witch of Endor from the Bible, the Norns of Norse mythology, and ancient classical myths of the Fates: the Greek Moirai and the Roman Parcae.
Maud Green, Lady Parr was an English courtier. She was the mother of Catherine Parr, the sixth wife of King Henry VIII of England. She was a close friend and lady-in-waiting to Catherine of Aragon. She was also co-heiress to her father, Sir Thomas Green of Green's Norton in Northamptonshire along with her sister, Anne, Lady Vaux.
The Ghost of a Flea is a miniature painting by the English poet, painter and printmaker William Blake, held in the Tate Gallery, London. Measuring only 8.42 by 6.3 inches, it is executed in a tempera mixture with gold, on a mahogany-type tropical hardwood panel. It was completed between 1819 and 1820, as part of a series depicting "Visionary Heads" commissioned by the watercolourist and astrologist John Varley (1778–1842). Fantastic, spiritual art was popular in Britain from around 1770 to 1830, and during this time Blake often worked on unearthly, supernatural panels to amuse and amaze his friends.
Catherine Howard, also spelt Katheryn Howard, was Queen of England from 1540 until 1541 as the fifth wife of King Henry VIII. She was the daughter of Lord Edmund Howard and Joyce Culpeper, a cousin to Anne Boleyn, and the niece of Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk. Thomas Howard was a prominent politician at Henry's court, and he secured her a place in the household of Henry's fourth wife, Anne of Cleves, where she caught the King's interest. She married him on 28 July 1540 at Oatlands Palace in Surrey, just 19 days after the annulment of his marriage to Anne. He was 49, and she was between 15 and 21 years old, though it is widely accepted that she was 17 at the time of her marriage to Henry VIII.
The Lytham St Annes Art Collection is a public art collection of over 240 artworks in Lytham St Annes, Lancashire. Fylde Borough Council are the custodians of the paintings, sculptures, prints and artefacts that are mostly held within the Lytham St Annes Town Hall. The collection was started in 1925 by the donation of Herd Lassie, painted by Richard Ansdell, to the townspeople of Lytham St Annes, Lancashire. It was donated by John Booth (1857–1941), son of the founder of the grocery store chain Booths. The collection of 25 works is now one of the largest public collections of Ansdell's paintings.
Titania and Bottom is an oil painting by the Anglo-Swiss painter Henry Fuseli. It dates to around 1790 and is displayed at Tate Britain, in London. It was commissioned for the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery and depicts a scene from A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare.
Dido is an oil on canvas painting by the Swiss-British artist Henry Fuseli, created in 1781. This mythological work represents Iris preparing to cut the hair of the corpse of Dido, the queen of Carthage, who lies bare-chested, with a bloody sword at her side, after committing suicide. The work is held at the Yale Center for British Art, in New Haven.