Friday, October 17, 2008
This idyllic scene illustrates an episode from Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, published in 1590. The lengthy Elizabethan poem concerns a Christian soldier’s search for Truth. Early in his quest, the knight encounters two lovely personifications of virtue. Faith, gowned in purest white and surrounded by a halo of divine light, holds a chalice with a serpent she need not fear. Hope, garbed in heavenly blue, carries a small anchor that recalls the biblical mention of hope “as an anchor of the soul.” To quote Spenser, the Red Cross Knight himself wears “on his brest a bloudie Crosse.”The models were the oil painting artist’s own handsome children, now seventeen years older than when they posed for The Copley Family. John, the boy hugging his mother in that oil painting, is the Red Cross Knight. Elizabeth, the daughter standing in the center of the family portrait, is Faith, and Mary, the infant on the sofa, is Hope. The Red Cross Knight, Copley’s only oil painting inspired by literature, was shown at the Royal Academy in 1793.
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