Into the limelight

A chance encounter with a scene from Shakespeare reveals a celebrated moment in 19th-century stagecraft.

- BY THOMAS MCLEAN

Driving home from Christchurch last summer, I stopped at the Aigantighe Art Gallery in Timaru. The gallery's grand, historic home, Aigantighe House, had recently reopened after a seven-year closure for earthquake strengthening, and I was curious to see the results. Upstairs, on the first floor, a painting caught my eye. Initially, I thought it was some kind of religious image, perhaps a scene from the life of a female saint. The artist was Henry Le Jeune, a 19th-century English painter, and the work's title was Queen Catherine's Dream.

It took a few moments to realise why the painting attracted me. The image wasn't (strictly) religious; it was literary. It presented a scene from William Shakespeare's 1613 play Henry VIII, in which Henry's first wife, Katherine of Aragon, has a dream-vision of angelic figures.

The work is an example of a genre that has gone out of style: the literary painting. In the 18th and 19th centuries, artists (and later photographers) regularly turned to scenes from literature for inspiration. This style of painting disappeared in the 20th century, probably because of the rise of literary adaptations on film. But earlier artists regularly created visual records of literary works, allowing readers to see their favourite moments from an admired novel, poem or play.

If a literary work remains part of our cultural consciousness, then a visual representation of that work is easily recognised. A young man looking thoughtfully at a skull suggests Hamlet; a pensive girl on a moonlit balcony must be Juliet. But sometimes, a work of art becomes unmoored from its source material, or an author fades in popularity. Countless art enthusiasts have admired John William Waterhouse's The Lady of Shalott; far fewer will know the Tennyson poem that inspired the work.

Queen Catherine's Dream is an unusual case: most of Shakespeare's 38-odd plays are still regularly read, taught, and performed, but