100 Works of Art I Like # Post 1
Title: O ye, all ye that walk in Willowwood
Artist: Margaret MacDonald Machintosh
Date: 1902
Type: Gesso Panel
Size:206 × 562
Ever since I started studying Art history this year I discovered various types of Arts that I love Decorative Arts... I don't care how some Art Historians end up calling these types of Art as minor arts or lesser arts, to me they are exquisite! I am just incredibly attracted to them. I want to have my own house filled with pretty,little, unique art pieces.
I am not 100% sure if this is considered fine art or decorative art but I personally think it is more of a decorative-nature art piece. Anyway it is gorgeous anyway...
Some history background: This painting was made by one of the MacDonald sisters who later on married the famous architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh. The three of them are some of the most famous graduates of the Glasgow school of Art. This panel is one of her two most famous works and it was made along with some other works she and her sister did to decorate the Willow Tearooms that were designed by Margaret's husband and I think served at the focal point of the room.
This panel is inspired (as some might speculate) by a sonnet of the Pre-Raphaelite poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti entitled "Willowwood" from the House of Life. The panel can be seen as an interpretation of the poem about life, love and death. It shows the women of Willowwood described in the sonnet as they wander forever in mourning for their loved ones. Rosseti wrote these poems as his way of mourning his lover, Elizabeth Siddal. In the panel the artist depicts the sightings of his lost love in her reflection of water in a woodside well and her silent mournful from moving amongst the Willow trees.
This is the sonnet by Rossetti that inspired MacDonald
'O ye, all ye that walk in Willow-wood,
That walk with hollow faces burning white;
What fathom-depth of soul-struck widowhood,
What long, what longer hours, one lifelong night,
Ere ye again, who so in vain have wooed
Your last hope lost, who so in vain invite
Your lips to that their unforgotten food,
Ere ye, ere ye again shall see the light!
Alas! the bitter banks in Willowwood,
With tear-spurge wan, with blood-wort burning red:
Alas! if ever such a pillow could
Steep deep the soul in sleep till she were dead,Ñ
Better all life forget her than this thing,
That Willowwood should hold her wandering!'
In my mind the picture is two things... it is a mirror, a portal to another world called Willowwood. And the panel is made also in lines that in my mind resemble willow trees. I absolutely adore that picture and the whole concept of lost women that either are the lost lovers or the ones that have lost their loved ones. To me the women have somehow become creatures of magical substance just because they are connected with so strong feelings of love and grief that they simply became eternal and live on in a space between the real and the unreal... like in the minds of the people, in the world that somehow reflects the memories... if such thing makes sense. They are not complete and that's why they cannot move on.... but they do not become ghosts because only a very specific fraction of them is wanted to be alive so they cannot become ghosts in the traditional sense... I imagine that place where they are trapped as a mixture of hell and paradise... they are in a beautiful world, in a magical forest full of natural beauty, a place that is supposed to be so calming, soothing and everyone wants to go there to find their inner peace and yet its inhabitants cannot fully realize that or feel it because they simply are feelings of love and grief that was lost and cannot go on... A never-ending suffering in the most beautiful place in the world...
Even though the place is supposed to be for women (or it is depicted that way), I think that a part of Severus Snape from Harry Potter would go there... the forever existing feeling of loving some one for its true purpose, to love without asking love back, to love someone so much, so completely just because you can't help it. And never even giving your love words to express it, never being given the chance to realize that love and act upon it and grieving more than most the dead person... forever because he simply could not help but love her even when they stopped talking.
Tsunade from Naruto, in a way could also exist in that place... I think, although she does not show it, that her love for Dan and his death made her lose herself. She did overcome her grief to a certain extent and managed to go on but I think she never managed to escape that feeling of not having the one. And that was why she never had any other (known at least) major relationship.... This idea about her is actually a basis about one of my plot-bunnies that I really want to write. It is supposed to be a dark-comedy story but we'll see... I need to start it first.
Another example of a woman that really fits that category is Miss Havisham from Charles Dicken's Great Expectations... she literally mourned her wasted love to the point of destruction, causing harm both to herself and the people around her.
Other things that my mind connects to that painting is the Gemma Doyle Trillogy by L. Bray in which the girls visited a magical realm into which one of the four girls chose to stay and as a result died in the material world. That girl, Pipa, I think her personality changed as she literally became another being, from human to magical one, and in the end she stopped being the one the girls used to know but just a distortion of it whose basis (in my mind) was the secret love she and another girl, Felicity, shared and would never get a chance to grow because of her young death...