Home

 

Home    Galleries    Information    Contact   Links   Blog   aStore

Art Books/Vids
Oils 
Watercolour
Pastels
Painting Videos

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

THE SIXTH PICTURE
Queen Elizabeth, the Faerie Queen of her Knights and Merchant Venturers, commissions Sir Walter Raleigh to sail for America and discover new countries, 1584. 

Painter—A. K. LAWRENCE                                   Donor—THE EARL OF DERBY 

THE reign of Elizabeth was the most romantic and warlike in our history, and none the less so because the romance and chivalry which made it famous were based upon the belief in Eldorado. “Romance and money-making, desperate daring and dividends were closely associated in the minds and hearts of men. There was no line drawn between the bread-and-butter facts of life and the life of poetry and imagination. The transactions of the money market and the war plans of sober statesmen turned on expeditions resembling those which in our own day explore Everest and the South Pole for nought save honour. Partly for that reason the Elizabethan age aroused the practical idealism of the English genius to the greatest height. Drake, Sidney, Spenser, Raleigh, and Shakespeare himself passed their lives among men to whom commerce was a soul-stirring ad­venture of life and death. . . . To ~the men of London and of Devon the unmapped world beyond the ocean seemed an archipelago of fair islands, each waiting to be discovered by some adventurous knight vowed to leave, his bones far away; or to come back rich and tell his tales in the tavern” (Trevelyan).

One of the most famous and fateful of these adventures was that for which the Queen gave her commission to Sir Walter Raleigh in 1584. He was “to discover unknown lands, to’ take possession of them in the Queen’s name, and to hold them for 6 years.” The lands thus acquired—Rokoken, Roanoke, and the mainland adjacent were afterwards named Virginia. Successive colonies were sent out, and Raleigh spent in all £40,000 on this venture. “It is by his long, costly, and persistent effort to establish this first of English colonies that Raleigh’s name is most favourably known; and though it ended in failure, to him belongs the credit of having, the first of Englishmen,’ pointed out the way to the formation of a greater England beyond the seas” (Sir J. K. Laughton).

The subject offered a magnificent opportunity to the painter, and he has grasped it with great imaginative power. It is not easy to account, in a sober history, for the fascination which a hard, masculine old maid exerted for so long over the young and brilliant men about her. But in this picture the feat has been easily achieved. It presents to the eye a spiritual not a material fact. We view a historic scene with the inward vision of the actors in it. We think not at all of dates or details: of a more familiar Dover, a risky speculation, a hard mistress; of long years of failure and a death, upon the scaffold. We see that, which inspired a great generation— we see the Elizabeth they saw, their Gloriana, their Seniper Eadem, their Faerie Queen; we are conscious of the Court, the Castle, the Ships, the great adventure, only as transfigured into the image of their ideal beauty.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8