(piano music)
>> Dr. Harris: She only said, "My life is dreary,
"He cometh not," she said.
She said, "I am aweary, aweary,
"I would that I were dead."
>> Dr. Zucker: These are lines from a poem by Tennyson,
the great Victorian poet,
who had recently been made Poet Laureate in England
just the year before John Everett Millais painted "Mariana"
in 1851.
>> Dr. Harris: In turn, Tennyson's poem was based on
Shakespeare's play, "Measure for Measure,"
and the story is of a woman abandoned by her fiance for many years,
and we see a very typical pre-Raphaelite subject
of a woman alone.
>> Dr. Zucker: And the painting by Millais
seems to me ages away from the original play, "Measure for Measure."
The story of Mariana is perhaps a serious one,
but it's within a play that is a comedy,
and yet this painting is completely divorced from that.
>> Dr. Harris: And that play has a happy ending.
The woman is actually reunited with her fiance.
>> Dr. Zucker: And we can't imagine that in this rendering by Millais,
so what we see is this woman in this absolutely glorious blue dress
who is stretching her back and seems to be
in the midst of a terrible melancholy.
>> Dr. Harris: She has gotten up from her embroidery,
which we get a sense that she's been working on for a very long time,
and there is an obvious sense of waiting.
I mean the poem is all about waiting and time passing
and this idea of the passage of time,
and a painting expressing a mood or a feeling
are two strands that we see a lot in pre-Raphaelite painting.
>> Dr. Zucker: It's that heroism of emotion itself
as an event that can be painted
that is so particular to 19th century British art.
>> Dr. Harris: And an inner emotion,
a solitary emotion
because before, there would be narrative paintings
with people enacting emotions toward each other.
And here, the narrative isn't about Mariana
at the moment of her being abandoned by her fiance
but a moment of waiting.
It's a funny moment to paint.
>> Dr. Zucker: Millais is really brilliant in his ability
to create for us a sense of what she thinks
and what she sees.
She is surrounded in this painting
by a set of things to look at.
And as we look at them,
we imagine her looking at them.
We have that intensely rendered embroidery on the table,
and then we have those leaves that have fallen
that almost look as if they will also be embroidered
into that pattern, but they heighten so greatly
the sense of melancholy and the sense of loss.
>> Dr. Harris: And the sense of the passage of time.
Autumn leaves, the passing of the seasons,
this idea that this is a space that she occupies
year after year with a sense of patient
or maybe even not so patient waiting.
>> Dr. Zucker: Those forms, those colors,
the things that occupy her visual field
are painted so painstakingly.
>> Dr. Harris: And the room is small.
We only see part of it,
but we have a real sense of enclosure and entrapment.
She is caught between the stool and the table
that she's been working at.
And behind her, we see an altar,
a private devotional space,
so we have the sense of her life being taken up
between prayer and this meditative work of embroidery
and this idea of waiting.
We also see a scene of the Annunciation in the windows.
It's hard for me not to read this as a sense of entrapment
of women generally in the Victorian era,
in waiting, in sitting, in doing their needlework,
in being devout in a limited life.
>> Dr. Zucker: And we can see her almost physical strain
against that restriction.
As she stretches her back,
she wants to move out into the world.
There really is the sense of bondage there.
>> Dr. Harris: Outside, we see the leaves,
and we see the ground,
and we see light.
>> Dr. Zucker: Look at Millais' ability to render the textures
of the forms that he's depicted,
the velvet on that seat cushion and her dress.
>> Dr. Harris: And how vivid the reds and the blues and the golds are.
It's that pre-Raphaelite intensity of color
that's so different than the colors
that a Victorian viewer would see in academic painting.
>> Dr. Zucker: And it's so clearly based on direct observation
as opposed to ideal form.
He really went out of his way to make sure
that there was a kind of authenticity
to what he is rendering.
>> Dr. Harris: The mouse on the lower right that we see
was actually painted from a dead mouse apparently
that Millais caught in his studio,
and the mouse appears in Tennyson's poem.
>> Dr. Zucker: And even the stained glass window
was painted directly from an actual stained glass window
at Oxford University
that the artist had climbed up some scaffolding
to get a good close look at.
>> Dr. Harris: It feels to me as part of what the painting is about
is a tension between nature and art.
The leaves from the outside have come in,
so we have nature coming inside.
We have the stained glass windows which are art
which look out into nature.
There is a confluence of the wall paper
on the wall behind her body and then the leaves outside.
She's trapped in an interior in which the exterior
seems to have invaded.
It feels as though there is some theme there of nature and art
and God and the Divine.
>> Dr. Zucker: And as if her embroidery is artifice
that is a representation of the thing
that she is yearning to join.
>> Dr. Harris: Also as though the life of art, the life of her embroidery,
and the life of devotion is not enough,
and there is that yearning ...
>> Dr. Zucker: That's right.
>> Dr. Harris: And for love.
(piano music)