Footnotes

Provenance
Private collection, UK.

The subject of the present work is taken form Tennyson's poem The Palace of Art, first published in 1832 and extensively revised by the poet ten years later. The poem expresses the spiritual despair of the Soul who isolates herself in her arts and can only be cured by leaving the palace of art for a cottage among men. Frampton would certainly have been familiar with The Palace of Art: St Cecilia published by Edward Moxon in 1857 with engraved illustrations by the Dalziel brothers after original designs by Rossetti.

In the introduction to the Frampton Memorial Exhibition catalogue of 1924 the art critic Rudolf Dircks noted that the artist 'was amongst the few distinguished modern painters who sought to express decorative form in his pictures...his spirit moved in the type of legendary or religious subject which lends itself particularly to decorative treatment...' and 'the poetic and decorative fervour' of his works, which were 'all accomplished in detail, beautiful and sensitive in colour'¹

Frampton had travelled in Italy as a young man and this, combined with his love of the work of Puvis de Chavannes and Edward Burne-Jones informed his art and resulted in easel and mural painting and stained glass characterised by a 'restful and dignified serenity'.²

Saint Cecilia is famous in Christian iconography as the patron saint of music and is shown here having fallen asleep whilst playing the organ, the instrument most usually associated with her. Her hair is adorned with a garland of white roses (an attribute often associated with her) and by her feet grow poppies a well-known emblem of oblivion and sleep as her guardian angel looks on.

Frampton is known to have painted this subject on several occasions and exhibited versions at The Royal Academy in 1911 and 1917. Writing in The Art Journal in 1907, Rudolf Dircks reflects on Frampton's treatment of the subject 'In St Cecily, have we not a precise and sympathetic interpretation of the lines of Tennyson – in which the full poetic beauty is apprehended pictorially?'

¹R. Dircks, cited in Memorial Exhibition of Paintings and Water-Colours by the Late E.Reginald Frampton, London, 1924, pp. 3-4.
²Aymer Vallance, The Paintings of Reginald Frampton, R.O.I., International Studio, 1919, p. 66.