page_title: Mariana (Millais)
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Mariana (Millais) / Background
context_page_description: Mariana is an 1851 oil-on-panel painting by John Everett Millais. The image depicts the solitary Mariana from William Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, as retold in Tennyson's poem "Mariana". The painting is regarded as an example of Millais's "precision, attention to detail, and stellar ability as a colorist". It has been held by Tate Britain since 1999.
context_section_description: In Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, written between 1601 and 1606, Mariana was a woman who was about to be married, but she was rejected by her fiancé Angelo when her dowry was lost in the shipwreck that also killed her brother.  She retreated to a solitary existence in a moated house.  Five years later, Angelo was tricked into consummating their betrothal.  Tennyson retold the tale in his 1830 poem "Mariana", and returned to it in his 1832 poem "Mariana in the South". 
  Millais was a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of English artists who came together in 1848 with the goal of renewing British painting. They found in the art of the early Italian Renaissance—before Raphael—a sincerity of purpose and clarity of form that they sought to emulate.  The Pre-Raphaelites frequently used allegorical images to create a narrative to teach a moral virtue or virtues, and sometimes used contemporary literature as inspiration for their paintings, which often include numerous details that allow the viewer to "read" the painting. 
  Millais used Tennyson's poetry to create a narrative for his painting of Mariana and he wanted to allow the viewer familiar with Tennyson's poetry to read the entire poem through the painting.  It was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1851 – the year after Tennyson was appointed as Poet Laureate – with a display caption that contained lines 9 to 12 from Tennyson's poem "Mariana" (1830):
      She only said, 'My life is dreary,
  
        He cometh not,' she said;
  
      She said, 'I am aweary, aweary,'
  
        I would that I were dead!'
  Millais's painting may have been painted as a companion piece to William Holman Hunt's 1850 painting Claudio and Isabella, which also depicts a scene from Measure for Measure.
  The composition and details of the painting were influenced by Van Eyck's 1434 painting The Arnolfini Marriage.
caption: William Holman Hunt, Claudio and Isabella (1850), Tate Britain
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