Helen of Troy

Henry Holiday, 1839-1927

1889

Pencil on paper

Approximately 42 x 18½ inches (107 x 47 cm).

In 1890 Holiday exhibited eight cartoons from Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women at the Royal Academy, nos. 1621-1628, including the subjects Terpsichore, Erato, Helen, Iphigenia, Jephthah’s daughter, Cleopatra, Fair Rosamund, and Joan of Arc.

It is uncertain exactly what these large cartoons by Holiday were intended for. His friend Edward Burne-Jones had much earlier made designs for this same series. In 1863 Burne-Jones had proposed that he would design a set of embroidered hangings illustrating Chaucer's Legende of Goode Wimmen for the principal room of a house John Ruskin was considering building, perhaps in the Wye valley. Burne-Jones therefore drew a series of fourteen or fifteen figures of heroines from classical, religious, and medieval sources as studies for the wall hangings.

These sketches were re-workings of designs for twelve tiles previously produced by Burne-Jones during May or June 1862. The embroideries were be made under Georgiana Burne-Jones’s supervision by the pupils at Winnington Hall School, the girls' school in Cheshire that Ruskin had been closely associated with since the late 1850s. This project fell through when Ruskin decided not to build his house. Burne-Jones reused his designs, however, for a series of stained-glass windows. Holidays later designs do not resemble those of Burne-Jones but his cartoon of Cleopatra somewhat resembles the wood engraving of this subject by John Everett Millais for “A Dream of Fair Women” for the Moxon Tennyson of 1857. — Dennis T. Lanigan

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