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 Henry VIII is not. We now believe parts of the play were written by Shakespeare’s younger contemporary, John Fletcher, which perhaps devalues it for Bard purists. Some readers have found the play poorly structured, or criticised its lack of historical accuracy. The Tudors clearly continue to fascinate us – as evidenced by Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy – but this hasn’t led to a revival of Shakespeare’s version of events.
Petrena Fishburn, collection curator at the Aigantighe, says the Le Jeune painting was one of about 80 works gifted by the South Canterbury Art Society in 1956, the year the gallery opened. Because the gift was made before there was a dedicated facility, some of the documentation appears to have been misplaced, and the year of creation was never recorded.
As a scholar of 19th-century art and literature, I hoped I could fill in some of the blanks. The resulting research offered interesting insights into the unexpected journeys of artworks, the surprising tastes of colonial New Zealand, and a significant moment in Victorian theatre.
Deathbed vision
Henry Le Jeune (1819-1904) was an English painter of Flemish ancestry – hence his un-British surname. During his lifetime, he was best known for sentimental paintings of children – another genre of painting that, perhaps fortunately, has faded in popularity. Some of his works became quite well known: The Eft (1862), in which a young man shows off a newt captured in a bottle, was reproduced as a popular print and no doubt graced many Victorian children’s bedrooms.
But Le Jeune also painted scenes from literature and history, and this is a good example. In the play, Katherine of Aragon, has been cast aside by Henry in favour of Anne Boleyn. On her deathbed, she has a vision of dancing angels. For Katherine, it provides a moment of comfort and a vision of a blessed, eternal rest.
It is an unusual moment in Shakespeare’s oeuvre, when a character’s dream-vision is represented on the stage. When Katherine awakes and speaks of the dream, it’s clear only she – and the audience – has witnessed the angelic ceremony. “Saw you not,” she asks her attendant, “even now, a blessed troop / Invite me to a banquet, whose bright faces / Cast thousand beams upon me, like the sun?”
Also unusually for Shakespeare, whose stage directions are famously sparse, the scene is described extensively. It begins, “Enter, solemnly tripping one after another, six personages, clad in white robes, wearing on their heads garlands of bays.” This is undoubtedly the moment captured in Le Jeune’s painting, where angelic figures descend diagonally from the upper left in a heavenly light that also illuminates the sleeping queen. Patience, her attendant, reads beside her, unaware of the dream-vision Katherine is experiencing.
The painting wasn’t just an artistic imagining; rather, it attempted to capture a specific performance.
Though little-known today, this scene was painted by a number of 18th- and 19th-century artists, including Henry Fuseli and William Blake. The play itself was familiar to 19th-century readers, who saw Katherine as a brave and principled woman who also retained her femininity. As the essayist William Hazlitt put it, “The character of Queen Katherine is the most perfect delineation of matronly dignity, sweetness, and resignation, that can be conceived.”
But Victorian New Zealanders knew the scene through another art form: the tableau vivant, where performers hold a famous image, statue-like, for several minutes. Queen Catherine’s Dream was a favourite tableau vivant, even in provincial towns. The Ashburton Guardian on November 9, 1892 described an “entertainment given by the children of the Ashburton School”, which included a tableau of Queen Catherine’s Dream: “The queen was shown asleep, covered with robes of royalty, while above her hovered the angelic figures in white garments and winged as such beings are supposed to be. The grouping of this picture was excellent, and could scarcely have been better managed.” The notice does not mention Henry VIII or even Shakespeare, suggesting just how familiar the depiction must have been. Like those admirers of The Lady of Shalott who have never read Tennyson, viewers of Queen Catherine’s Dream appreciated the magic of the scene without ever needing to brush up on their Shakespeare.
Interchangeable spellings
Le Jeune regularly exhibited his work at London’s Royal Academy of Arts. The academy’s historical catalogue records that in 1857, he showed a picture called The Vision of Queen Katherine – King Henry VIII. Not a perfect match, but further research showed that “vision” and “dream” were often used interchangeably to describe the scene, along with every possible spelling of Catherine.
The annual summer Royal Academy show was a major cultural event, widely noticed in the press, and Le Jeune’s painting was mentioned in almost every review. Opinions were mixed, but one notable visitor to the exhibition was particularly taken with the picture – Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. He had already begun publishing under a pseudonym, Lewis Carroll, though he would only gain fame a few years later, in 1865, with the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Dodgson kept a diary in which he briefly recorded his impressions of the painting: “‘Queen Katherine’s Dream’ by Le Jeune, beautiful exceedingly, clearly taken from the scene at the Princess’s.” It was rather pleasing to imagine that the future author of the Alice books had perhaps admired the same painting that had drawn my eye in Timaru. But something else caught my attention: “the scene at the Princess’s.” What was he referring to?
A review in the Art Journal provided the answer: [Le Jeune’s] dream follows … the feeling of the representation at the Princess’s theatre.” The Princess’s Theatre occupied a building in London’s Oxford Street. It was demolished in the 20th century, but many visitors to London may recall the enormous HMV record shop, which stood on its footprint from 1986. From a historical perspective, the Princess’s Theatre is most famous for a series of extravagant Shakespeare performances directed by Charles Kean in the 1850s. This was intriguing: the painting wasn’t just an artistic imagining; rather, it attempted to capture a specific performance.
Kean directed a production of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII in 1855, two years before Le Jeune’s painting. His wife, Ellen Kean, one of the stars of the Victorian stage, took the role of Katherine of Aragon. Indeed, Le Jeune’s sleeping queen bears a strong resemblance to the celebrated performer.
But it gets even better. One of the reasons Kean’s productions are so noteworthy is that he restored scenes that previous directors had cut. “Queen Catherine’s Dream” was one of those scenes. And, as part of this restoration, Kean employed some state-of-the-art theatre craft: by using either limelight or an early type of electric light, he devised a way to focus a diagonal beam of light across the stage. This, possibly literally, put a group of angelic figures suspended above the stage in the limelight, as they were dangled from a carefully concealed mechanical device. What Blake and Fuseli had imagined, Kean had brought to the stage. The scene was one of the sensations of the theatrical season.
Arguably, this was the production that reawakened interest in Queen Catherine’s Dream. Without it, it’s entirely possible that Ashburton’s school children never would have assembled their tableau vivant.
Until now, when scholars referred to the scene, they had only one visual representation to work with: a black and white engraving that appeared in the June 2, 1855, Illustrated London News. “By an admirable contrivance in the fourth act,” the News reported, “the Dream of Queen Katherine was realised, and a vision of angels descended, gliding on a sunbeam upon her slumber in actual presence with the most beautiful effect”.
Now, in Timaru, we can say, with near certainty, that a second representation of this staged moment exists, in oil and in colour.
No records
But how did the painting get to Timaru? And is it the same work exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1857? Queen Catherine’s Dream was given to the Aigantighe 99 years after that initial showing. No provenance records from the intervening years appear to have survived in either the gallery or South Canterbury Art Society archives.
By trawling the original auction catalogues, exhibition catalogues, and newspaper notices, then closely examining the marks and labels on the back of the painting, a narrative emerged.
Based on my research, the painting in Timaru is not the painting Le Jeune showed in 1857 at the Royal Academy, but a second version made for a specific collector, one John Montefiore.
It first appears in a Christie’s sale of Montefiore’s collection in 1874, where it was described as “Painted for the owner”. If it had been exhibited at the Royal Academy – a strong selling point – this would have been noted in the catalogue, as it was for several other paintings Montefiore owned.
The piece was again offered for sale by Christie’s in 1879. Then, in the following year it appeared on the other side of the world, at the Melbourne International Exhibition. It was acquired (or perhaps already owned) by Alexander Fletcher, a well-known art dealer, who brought it to New Zealand in 1889, where it was shown at the New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition in Dunedin. Presumably, someone then bought the painting from Fletcher, and it remained in one or more New Zealand collections until it was acquired by the South Canterbury Art Society, and then by the Aigantighe.
The fate of Le Jeune’s original painting remains unknown. It was sold at auction in 1882, but then seems to disappear from art history. Perhaps it was destroyed in World War II; perhaps it is sitting in some grand home, admired as a decorative work, with its history waiting to be recovered. In the meantime, the painting in Timaru takes on even more importance as the only known representation in oil of this remarkable moment in British theatre history.
For those fans of TV’s Fake or Fortune?, it should be noted there isn’t much of a market for little-known scenes from Shakespeare by minor Victorian artists.
But if you’re interested in the representation of literary scenes in art, the history of Shakespeare on stage, Victorian stagecraft, the movement of artworks across the British empire, or the history of Shakespeare in Aotearoa, then you might find yourself dreaming of a visit to Timaru.
Thomas McLean is Professor of English at the University of Otago.