Читать книгу The Fatal Cup: Thomas Griffiths Wainewright and the strange deaths of his relations - John Price Williams - Страница 47

Abercromby sisters - it is not known which - sat in his studio in the cellars of Somerset House for his 1821 painting Undine Comes into the House of the Fishermen, a less-than flattering depiction of a rather gawky-looking young girl in white entering a dark, threatening room.

The event was recorded by an American artist, Mary Balmanno, in her reminiscences, Pen and Pencil. As Mrs Fuseli moved forward to talk to her husband “two very pretty girls sprang forward and saluted her; they were the sisters Helen and Madeleine (sic), one of whom had been sitting for the portrait of Undine.” Helen would have been 11 at the time, Madalina a year younger.

The picture, which has Fuseli’s dark notes of the supernatural, is based on a German fairy tale in which Undine, a water spirit, meets the knight, Huldebrand in the fisherman’s house and marries him so that she can gain a soul. The tale also fascinated Wainewright, two of the pictures he exhibited at the Academy - in 1821 and 1823 - were based upon the story.

Fuseli also produced highly-erotic drawings, as did other Regency artists, including J M W Turner.2 Wainewright’s own sepia line and wash Lady passing two lovers on a bank embracing is

2. The prissy art critic John Ruskin, Turner’s executor, going through the artist’s effects in 1858, was horrified to discover a large number of highly erotic paintings and drawings. He maintained that he had made a bonfire of them as Turner was obviously insane when he did them. However in 2005 large numbers of them were identified in the Tate Britain archive.

JOHN PRICE WILLIAMS

47