Theodor von Holst | The Bride, 1842

Born in London in 1810 to Latvian parents who had recently emigrated from Riga, Theodor Richard Edward von Holst (3 September 1810 - 14 February 1844) came to occupy a unique position in British art, providing the link between earlier Romantic artists and the Pre-Raphaelites.

After studying with Henry Fuseli at the Royal Academy, and encouraged by Thomas Lawrence, von Holst went on to produce illustrations to Goethe’s Faust, Fouquet’s Undine and Dante’s Inferno.

Working mainly in isolation, the artist only achieved recognition towards the end of his short career with his large prize-winning biblical composition The Raising of Jairus’s Daughter 1841 (now lost), and a series of female heads that included The Bride, his most popular painting.

The Bride takes its subject from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem ‘Ginevra’ (1821) in which a Florentine girl is forced to marry an elderly nobleman.

After saying farewell to her young lover for the last time following the wedding ceremony, she is later found dead on her bridal bed.

The illustrated lines (9-12) appear in the opening stanza of the poem:

Ginevra from the nuptial altar went;

The vows to which her lips had sworn assent

Rung in her brain still with a jarring din,

Deafening the lost intelligence within.

Against a brilliant gold background reminiscent of religious icons, the forlorn bride is shown idly toying with a lock of hair as she leans dejectedly against the ledge of a window.

A bas-relief Cupid with bat wings points his arrow in her direction as if mocking her tragic predicament, as does the jasmine that decorates the edge of the composition.

The ruby gem which doubles up as the eye of a serpent on the bracelet around her wrist strikes a grotesque note, hinting at temptations and dangers that lie ahead.

The casement format recalls early Italian and Netherlandish painting as well as the revivalist portraiture of the Nazarenes.

In terms of the woman’s attitude and rather sulky expression, the picture has been compared to Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait Ginevra de’ Benci 1474-8 (National Gallery of Art, Washington).

Like the Ginevra in von Holst’s painting, this sitter was known to have married an older man and was also the focus of poems composed in her honour.

The subject of The Bride seems to have been one of personal significance to von Holst, perhaps due to of his own unhappy relationship with the model Amelia Thomasina Symmes Villard, whom he had married in August 1841.

This may help explain why the artist made three versions of the image: an earlier experimental picture; the present painting exhibited at the British Institution in 1842 and purchased for the Stafford collection by the Duchess of Sutherland; and a larger copy commissioned by Lord Lansdowne which was known to have hung in the breakfast room of his house in Berkeley Square, London. | Source: © Tate Gallery

Theodor von Holst | The Wish, 1840

The Wish was exhibited at the British Institution in 1841 and was purchased by John Rushout, second Baron Northwick, who hung it in his picture gallery, where it was admired by the young Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whose macabre early poem, "The Card-Dealer", is based on the painting.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti | The Card-Dealer

Could you not drink her gaze like wine?

Yet though its splendour swoon

Into the silence languidly

As a tune into a tune,

Those eyes unravel the coiled night

And know the stars at noon.

The gold that's heaped beside her hand,

In truth rich prize it were;

And rich the dreams that wreathe her brows

With magic stillness there;

And he were rich who should unwind

That woven golden hair.

Around her, where she sits, the dance

Now breathes its eager heat;

And not more lightly or more true

Fall there the dancers' feet

Than fall her cards on the bright board

As 'twere a heart that beat.

Her fingers let them softly through,

Smooth polished silent things;

And each one as it falls reflects

In swift light-shadowings,

Blood-red and purple, green and blue,

The great eyes of her rings.

Whom plays she with? With thee, who lov'st

Those gems upon her hand;

With me, who search her secret brows;

With all men, bless'd or bann'd.

We play together, she and we,

Within a vain strange land:

A land without any order,-

Day even as night, (one saith),-

Where who lieth down ariseth not

Nor the sleeper awakeneth;

A land of darkness as darkness itself

And of the shadow of death.

What be her cards, you ask? Even these:-

The heart, that doth but crave

More, having fed; the diamond,

Skilled to make base seem brave;

The club, for smiting in the dark;

The spade, to dig a grave.

And do you ask what game she plays?

With me 'tis lost or won;

With thee it is playing still; with him

It is not well begun;

But 'tis a game she plays with all

Beneath the sway o' the sun.

Thou seest the card that falls,-she knows

The card that followeth:

Her game in thy tongue is called Life,

As ebbs thy daily breath:

When she shall speak, thou'lt learn her tongue

And know she calls it Death.