Genevieve. (from a poem by S.T. Coleridge entitled 'Love')

George Dawe's painting Genevieve is a large-scale masterpiece of what art historians have termed 'Romantic classicism', highly fashionable in the early 19th century. It pulls out all the stops: on the left, a slender young female figure a in virginal white dress inclines her blushing face away from the passionate musician, her elbow resting on the plinth of stone statue of an amoured knight, which is only partially visible. To her right, a handsome seated male, dressed in a ruff and a burgundy coloured velvet suit in Elizabethan style, plucks on his harp, his fervent and melancholy gaze fixed on the young woman. The landscape background of romantic crags, ruins and a tumultuous cloudy sky, perfectly frames this dramatic scene. What is it all about?

The title helps us: Genevieve (from a poem by S.T. Coleridge entitled 'Love'). Samuel Taylor Coleridge, of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner fame, is a figure at the forefront of English Romantic poetry. His ballad-poem 'Love', was composed in 1799, though not published until 1810; Dawe's huge painting, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1812, was directly and immediately inspired by it. The academy handlist reads thus: 'All thoughts, all passions, all delights/ Whatever stirs this mortal frame/ Are all but ministers of Love...'.

Coleridge's 'Love' describes two love affairs: the love of the miserable Knight for the Lady of the Land, and the deep but unexpressed love of the poet for his beautiful and innocent 'Genevieve'. The former is impersonal and detached, while the latter is passionate and tragic. Truth underpinned Coleridge's fiction: at the time he composed the poem, he was unhappily married to another Sara (Fricker), and had fallen deeply in love with Sara Hutchinson, sister-in-law of the fellow Romantic poet and a close friend, William Wordsworth. Coleridge poetically disguised her as 'Asra' - though few people were fooled! The theme of unrequited love is writ large in Dawe's painting, and Coleridge's poem went on to influence a still more famous example of the genre in John Keats's 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci' (1819).

Scoop writer and critic Howard Davis considers Dawe's approach to the theme 'a model of subtle restraint'. He adorns Coleridge's grave-side ballad of abduction and potential rape with more muted, formulaic Gothic trappings - the fragment of ruined castle on the mountain cliff, the tenebrous and crepuscular clouds at dusk that overshadow half the picture. Embarrassed by the poet's passionate effusion, the alabaster-skinned Genevieve averts her head and blushes deeply, while the bard's hands are delicately splayed along the diagonal line of the composition, gently plucking and stroking the strings of his refulgent instrument. It is no accident that Dawe chooses to substitute the horizontal Aeolian harp of Coleridge's poem with the more familiar vertical harp - and nestles it suggestively between the poet's thighs'. 

Coleridge's anguished mental state underlying 'Love' is worth quoting at length: 'my eloquence was most commonly excited by the desire of running away and hiding myself from my personal and inward feelings, and not for the expression of them, while doubtless this very effort of feeling gave a passion and glow to my thoughts and language on subjects of a general nature, that they otherwise would not have had. I fled in a Circle, still overtaken by the Feelings, from which I was evermore fleeing, with my back turned towards them'. 

Davis astutely observes: 'It is exactly this circular sense of being simultaneously overtaken by feelings and trying to flee from them that Dawe so vividly embodies in the composition of Genevieve. It remains a testament to his ingenuity and skill as a painter that he is able to inscribe this sexual subtext into the organisation of his canvas'.

Sources:

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 'Love', https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43993/love-56d222e917181

Howard Davis, 'Sexting in George Dawe's "Genevieve" - part I', Scoop, http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/CU1712/S00286/sexting-in-george-dawes-genevieve-part-i.htm

---- 'Sexting in George Dawe's "Genevieve" - part II', Scoop, http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/CU1712/S00308/sexting-in-george-dawes-genevieve-part-ii.htm

Roma Shresta, 'Love by Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Analysis', https://www.bachelorandmaster.com/britishandamericanpoetry/love-analysis.html#.XFeui8GpU2w

Mark Stocker  Curator Historical International Art   February 2019