Revenge: The Sisters. 1859. Pen and brown ink and brown wash over graphite on paper; 4 ¾ x 4 ¼inches (12.1 x 10.5 cm). Private collection, Canada.
In 1856, while at the Royal Academy Schools, Holiday formed part of an informal group called the "Sketching Club." This initially consisted of himself, Simeon Solomon, and Marcus Stone, but was later to include Albert Moore, Fred Walker, and William Blake Richmond. The club met once a week at their respective houses in rotation, where the host would suggest the subject for the evening's work. This drawing, entitled Revenge: The Sisters, would have been done during the course of such a meeting held on November 20, 1859. The Revenge drawings by both Holiday and Solomon were once included in an exhibition of English Romantic Art held at the Shepherd Gallery in New York in 1989. The Solomon drawing is now in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada, accession no. 49234.
Holiday’s drawing illustrates Alfred Tennyson’s early poem, “The Sisters,” also known as “The Sisters Shame,” which was first published in 1833. This was not the first time the Sketching Club had chosen a topic based on a poem by Tennyson. In 1857 Stone had chosen Tennyson’s “Palace of Art” (text) for a theme. “The Sisters,” which is a ballad of six stanzas, and tells of one woman’s revenge against an earl who seduced, then abandoned her sister, who dies. Although she hates the earl “with the hate of hell” she makes herself attractive to him, takes him to her bed, lulls him to sleep, and then stabs him to death.
I rose up in the silent night;
I made my dagger sharp and bright.
The wind is raving in turret and tree.
As half-asleep his breath he drew,
Three time I stabb’d him thro’ and thro’.
O, the earl was fair to see!
Millais had previously illustrated this poem in the Moxon Tennyson of 1857, but chose to illustrate the lonely tower with the trees bending in the wind that also appear in the background of Holiday’s drawing. There is also an early pen-and-ink drawing, c.1859-60, attributed to Edward Burne-Jones, in the Philadelphia Museum of Art illustrating this same poem. This drawing, like the Holiday, illustrates the central theme of the poem where the sister is about to stab the sleeping Earl. In the Holiday drawing the expression on the sister’s face suggests madness even more than hatred. Alan Staley believes the model for the revengeful sister in Holiday’s drawing was Fanny Eaton (92). Holiday’s work in the background conveys well the line repeated in each stanza “The wind is blowing in turret and tree.”
An etching by William Gale of this subject was included in Passages from Modern English Poets by the Junior Etching Club that had been commissioned in 1861 but only issued in early 1862. Gale’s etching shows the sister standing with a look of madness on her face and clutching the dagger in her right hand after she has murdered the sleeping earl. Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery have two pencil drawings by Millais for Tennyson’s “The Sisters” which illustrate this same theme. These were intended as an illustration for the Moxon Tennyson but ultimately never engraved and included in the book (accession nos. 1906P591 and 1906P592).
Bibliography
English Romantic Art 1850-1920. New York: Shepherd Gallery, Autumn 1989, cat. nos. 55 and 125
Staley, Allen: The New Painting of the 1860s. Between the Pre-Raphaelites and the Aesthetic Movement. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011.
Created 16 January 2023