Pictures of the Prodigal Son in Mill on the Floss
2009; Oxford University Press; Volume: 56; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/notesj/gjp107
ISSN1471-6941
Autores Tópico(s)Historical Art and Culture Studies
ResumoIN chapter four of George Eliot's Mill on the Floss, Maggie Tulliver stands on a chair ‘to look at a remarkable series of pictures representing the Prodigal Son in the costume of Sir Charles Grandison.’1 What pictures are these? The question was posed to Notes and Queries by Thomas Hutchinson in 1903, and L. E. Davies answered.2 To Davies's mind, the pictures must be based on paintings produced in the 1660s by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo. But this identification cannot be correct. Murillo's characters are not dressed as Samuel Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison would have been dressed. Eliot's narrator is quite clear that the prodigal wears a wig (unlike Grandison himself). The wig is explained by the prodigal's ‘defective moral character,’ and its presence is clearly important to the overall effect of the narrative as pictorially presented.3 In the Clarendon Press edition of Mill on the Floss, Gordon S. Haight identifies the pictures as the series of six engravings by Augustin Legrand, published around 1810.4 Again, however, in Legrand's depiction, the characters are not in eighteenth-century attire, and they wear no wigs. Clearly, Eliot had another series in mind.
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