Arthur Hughes. The Rift within the Lute. 1861-62. Oil on canvas. H 21½ x W 36½ inches (52 x 92 cm.). Collection and photo credit: Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery. Accession no. 1949.125.23, bequeathed by Emily and Gordon Bottomley, 1949. This first image downloaded by George P. Landow with text and formatting by Jacqueline Banerjee.
Briefly described as "a moral subject but treated symbolically with the doomed lute and verses by Tennyson" (Morris 58), this depiction of a sorrowing woman with her tuneless lute, and with some picked and some crushed bluebells, conveys a tale of lost love. The relevant verses by Tennyson come from his poem in Idylls of the King, "Merlin and Vivien":
In Love, if Love be Love, if Love be ours,
Faith and unfaith can ne'er be equal powers:
Unfaith in aught is want of faith in all.
It is the little rift within the lute,
That by and by will make the music mute,
And ever widening slowly silence all.
The little rift within the lover's lute,
Or little pitted speck in garner'd fruit,
That rotting inward slowly moulders all.
It is not worth the keeping: let it go:
But shall it? answer, darling, answer, no.
And trust me not at all or all in all.
There seems to be little hope of a happy resolution here, especially since a fox (almost blended into the woodland scenery) can be seen running away in the background [Click here for a closer view]. It is as if nature, for all its beauty and desirability, contains a threat to its own promise.
Commentary (including Enid and Geraint) by Dennis T. Lanigan
Enid and Geraint. c.1859. Oil on canvas (preliminary study for The Rift within the Lute). 10 ¼ x 14 ¾ inches (26 x 37.5 cm). Private collection. Image courtesy of Christie's, London, © 1993 Christie's Images Limited (right click disabled; not to be downloaded).
Hughes exhibited The Rift Within the Lute at the Royal Academy in 1862, no. 129, and it was bought in that year by James Leathart. Clearly, as noted above, the theme is unhappy love, the title phrase suggesting disharmony between persons, particularly lovers, perhaps the first evidence of a quarrel that may become worse. A preliminary study for the picture of c.1859, entitled Enid and Geraint, gives more context: a quarrel seems to have occurred between the two lovers from King Arthur's court. At one point, based on a letter of December 1861 from Hughes to his friend Pauline, Lady Trevelyan, Hughes apparently considered adding the figure of an elderly lady comforting the young woman into his composition for The Rift Within the Lute: "And 'what am I painting'? – Ever so many things. Shall I tell you about them? Very well then: … a young golden-haired lady, lying among bluebells, lovesick, and an aged, silver-haired mother, or grandmother or nurse, trying to pour silver ointment into the golden's wounds, the golden being very much distraught owing to Mr. Tennyson having written 'It is the little rift within the lute/That by and by will make the music mute'" (qtd. in Roberts and Wildman 28). However, the final composition only depicts the beautiful young golden-haired woman wearing a richly-coloured dress and purple cloak lying full length on the ground in a woodland, her hands clasped in front of her face which rests against a tree trunk.
Hughes used his wife Tryphena Foord as the model for the woman. Her lute lies beside her, acting as a symbolic association between music and love, similar to what can be seen in works by D. G. Rossetti. The melancholy expression on the woman's face suggests she is contemplating the correlation between the small "rift" within her lute and discordant love.
Julian Treuherz has described the setting of the painting: "The Rift Within the Lute Is painted in Hughes' favourite palette of glowing purples and emerald greens which heightens the emotion, and is in a forest setting with ivy, grasses, and moss-covered bark, details at which Hughes excelled. The bunch of bluebells placed on the lute signifies constancy in the traditional language of flowers" (166). An early preliminary pen and brown ink study for the painting is in the collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (accession no. PD.54-1950). In the study the pose is much more dramatic, with the young woman lying face down, her hands on either side of her face and possibly weeping, as compared to the painting where her face is turned to look forwards.
This painting must be considered one of Hughes's masterpieces dealing with Arthurian themes. Its importance was recognized by his friends at the time of its execution. In April 1862 Hughes's good friend, the sculptor Alexander Munro, wrote to Annie Munro about Hughes's submissions to that year's Royal Academy exhibition: He has sent… the lying down girl in the wood, which is the prettiest thing he has ever done" (qtd. in Roberts 153).
Enid and Geraint was purchased in 1863 by John Hamilton Trist. When it was exhibited at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1905, no. 314, the catalogue described it as "a first study for the Rift within the Lute, but laid aside for a larger canvas, and later on completed with alterations and additions" (Roberts, cat, 55.3, 153).
Contemporary Reviews of The Rift within the Lute
At the Royal Academy of 1862 the painting received mixed reviews. A critic for The Art Journal though he detected the influence of Corregio's Magdalene in the Desert [Mary Magdalene Reading] : "The picture numbered 129 by A. Hughes, is strongly suggestive of Correggio's Magdalene, and this is much against it. It contains one principal figure, that of a love-lorn girl, lying by a pool, and, of course, meditating suicide. The picture is a translation from Tennyson: –'it is a little rift within the lute &c. Nothing can be more circumstantial than this story of a broken heart; its merit is its simplicity. F. G. Stephens in The Athenaeum liked the colour but felt it lacked refinement in critical areas: "Vigorous, delicate and good as is the colour of Mr. A Hughes's subject suggested by Vivien's song in the Idylls of the King (129), – a lady in purple velvet, lying in a wood with a lute beside her, whose strings are strewn with uprooted hyacinths – it lacks facial beauty, and where it would be refined is rather weak. The expression of loss and grief is admirably given. The background needs variety of colour and of solidity" (668).
A critic for The Spectator didn't particularly like either of Hughes's two submissions to the Royal Academy exhibition and couldn't even get the correct title of his second submission Bed Time: "Mr. Arthur Hughes's Bird Lime (598) is refined and tender in feeling, and delicately painted. The drawing is willfully careless, and the determination to invest flesh, draperies, and furniture with purple tints, is, to say the least, eccentric. The same faults are observable, though in a less degree, in 129, a girl lying by a brook-side, illustrative of Tennyson's lines, 'It is a little rift within the lute,' &c" (606). The Illustrated London News preferred Hughes's other submission Bed Time: "We see nothing in the lady lying at full length in No. 129 to render it a felicitous illustration of the lines from Tennyson quoted. There is some refinement in the face, but the colouring is heavy and untrue" (564).
In 1866 Leathart lent the painting to the exhibition Paintings and other Works of Art in the Town Hall at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, no. 22. On 1 October 1866 a critic for The Newcastle Daily Journal found in it: "A total absence of perspective of either lines or colour" and dismissed the painting as merely "Another of those silly modern attempts at sentiment on the Pre-Raphaelite principle of ignorance and incapacity to follow a higher order of art" (qtd. in Vickers 80).
Links to Related Material
- Merlin and Vivien (another work inspired by the poem, a bas relief by Frank Lynn Jenkins and Gerald Moira)
- Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King
- "The Legend of King Arthur: A Pre-Raphaelite Love Story (exhibition notice)
- The Arthurian Revival as an Answer to a Changing World
- The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Medievalism, edited by Joanne Parker and Corinna Wagner (review)
Bibliography
De Maio, Eduardo. Preraffaelliti Rinascimento Moderno. Forli: Fondazione Cassa dei Risparmi di Forlì, 2024. Cat. VI.7. 516-17.
"Exhibition of the Royal Academy." The Illustrated London News XL (31 May 1862): 564.
"Fine Arts. Royal Academy." The Spectator XXXV (31 May 1862): 605-06.
Fine Victorian Pictures Drawings and Watercolours. London: Christie's (November 5, 1993): lot 170, 122-23. See https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-3031592
Morris, Edward. Public Collections in North-West England: A History and Guide. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001.
The Rift within the Lute." Art UK. Web. 25 April 2023.
Roberts, Len. Arthur Hughes His Life and Works. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Antique Collectors' Club, 1997, cat. 55, 153, and cat. 55.3. 153-54.
Roberts, Leonard and Stephen Wildman. Arthur Hughes. The Last Pre-Raphaelite. Richmond, Surrey: Museum of Richmond, 1998, cat. 12. 28-29.
The Royal Academy. Exhibition, 1862." The Art JournalNew Series I (1 June 1862): 129-38.
Stephens, Frederic George. "Fine Arts, Royal Academy." The Athenaeum No. 1803 (17 May 1862): 667-68.
Treuherz, Julian. The Pre-Raphaelites. Stockholm: Nationalmuseum, 2009, cat.no. 34. 166.
Vickers, Jane. The Pre-Raphaelites. Painters and Patrons in the North East. Newcastle upon Tyne: Laing Art Gallery, 1989, cat. 50.
Created 9 March 2025; commentary added 8 March 2025