Heavily hangs the Tiger Lily. 1867. Watercolour and gouache on paper; dimensions unknown. Private collection.
Click on image to enlarge it.
This is surely one of Bateman’s most beautiful early works and was exhibited at the Dudley Gallery in 1867, no. 439.
The painting depicts a young red-haired woman in a blue dress in a contemplative mood seated in a chair with her head downturned and resting on her right hand. A closed book sits at the front left arm of the chair. The wall behind the lady is most likely the rear courtyard boundary wall outside the kitchen window at Bateman’s home at Biddulph Old Hall. Flowers, including tiger lilies and sunflowers, grow in borders in front of the wall.
The painting’s title comes from a line in Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem “A Spirit Haunts The Year’s Last Hours.” Bateman wrote the entire poem on on the painting’s backboard.
The first stanza reads:
A Spirit haunts the year's last hours
Dwelling amid these yellowing bowers
To himself he talks;
For at eventide, listening earnestly,
At his work you may hear him sob and sigh
In the walks;
Earthward he boweth the heavy stalks
Of the mouldering flowers:
Heavily hangs the broad sunflower
Over its grave i' the earth so chilly;
Heavily hangs the hollyhock,
Heavily hangs the tiger-lily.
The model for the woman may be Augusta Jones, a favourite model used by Burns-Jones at this time and to whom he provided an introduction to members of the Poetry Without Grammar School. The model looks similar to Augusta’s image in Burne-Jones March Marigold of c.1870. Georgiana Burne-Jones in her Memorials described Augusta as ‘a noble-looking girl, who sat for Astrologia amongst many other things, and for whom Edward had much regard and respect’ (302).
The pictures that Bateman exhibited at the Dudley gallery in 1867 were harshly criticised by The Saturday Review: “The most remarkable lady of this class is Mr. Robert Bateman‘s ‘Isabella,’ in the Dudley Gallery. It is an illustration of the old story of the pot of basil, and the ugliest we ever saw. The face of Isabella, especially about the mouth, reaches an ideal of hideousness which gives a strong impression of artistic power; to make so foul a face as that, without resorting to deformity or caricature, was a stroke of genius. Another picture by Mr. Bateman in the same gallery, called ‘Heavily hangs the Tiger Lily,’gives us a less striking though almost equally characteristic example of the personage whom we intend to call the Loathly Lady. She has red hair and a blue dress, and is seated in a stone chair, meditating; the tiger lily hangs at her left” (236).
Bibliography
Burne-Jones, Georgiana. Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones. London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1904.
“Pictures of the Year.” The Saturday Review 23 (February 23, 1867): 236-37.
Last modified 18 February 2023