page_title: John Reinhard Weguelin
section_title: Selected works
hierarchical_section_title: John Reinhard Weguelin / Selected works
caption_attribution_description: English: The Mermaid of Zennor, by English painter John Reinhard Weguelin (1849-1927). Watercolour, 1900. Inspired by medieval legend of a mermaid who lived at Pendour Cove, near Zennor, Cornwall, about whom various stories are told. The young man in the picture is Matthew Trewhell, a chorister of St. Senara's church in Zennor, with whose voice the mermaid was besotted. According to legend, he fell in love with the mermaid and went to share her watery home, although his voice can still be heard at Pendour Cove when he is singing.
context_page_description: John Reinhard Weguelin RWS ROI was an English painter and illustrator, active from 1877 to after 1910. He specialized in figurative paintings with lush backgrounds, typically landscapes or garden scenes. Weguelin emulated the neo-classical style of Edward Poynter and Lawrence Alma-Tadema, painting subjects inspired by classical antiquity and mythology. He depicted scenes of everyday life in ancient Greece and Rome, as well as mythological subjects, with an emphasis on pastoral scenes. Weguelin also drew on folklore for inspiration, and painted numerous images of nymphs and mermaids.
  Although his earliest work was in watercolour, all of Weguelin's important works from 1878 to 1892 were oil paintings. In order to supplement his income, he drew and painted illustrations for several books, most famously Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome. His subjects were similar to those of his contemporary, John William Waterhouse, who also specialized in painting the female figure against dramatic backgrounds, but unlike Waterhouse, many of Weguelin's subjects are nude or scantily-clad. Weguelin was particularly noted for his realistic use of light.
context_section_description: The Death of the First-born (1877, watercolour) was Weguelin's debut at the Dudley Gallery, and his last important watercolour until 1893. The subject was one that Alma-Tadema had treated in both 1859 and 1872. Its title refers to the last of the ten Plagues of Egypt appearing in the Book of Exodus, in which the first-born children of all Egypt were struck down, convincing the Egyptians to release the Hebrews from bondage.
  The Death of the Firstborn, by Mr. Weguelin, shows a young man stretched out stark for the funeral-rites, and his mother (perhaps, rather, his wife) crouched on the ground with her face hidden between her knees; a sufficiently well-conceived treatment, fairly executed, but not to be called intense.
  The daughters of the Greek king Danaüs pour jugs of water into a bottomless jar that they are condemned to fill, in The Labor of the Danaïdes (1878). This painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy.
  Weguelin's most famous painting is probably Lesbia (1878), inspired by the woman who inspired many of the Roman poet Catullus' works. Catullus used the pseudonym "Lesbia" to refer to an aristocratic lover whom he did not wish to scandalize, although their relationship was tumultuous, and Catullus writes bitterly of its ending. She is widely supposed to have been Clodia, around whom swirled rumors and scandals involving some of the most prominent men at Rome, although no contemporary source makes that identification, and this element of mystery adds to the appeal of both the poems and Weguelin's painting.
  In the painting, Lesbia is depicted as a young woman, standing contrapposto and framed in the gateway of a garden. She is clad only in a diaphanous gown through which sunlight is visible, and in her hair is a garland. Lesbia is feeding the birds, which fly and perch about her and gather at her feet. The birds depicted are house sparrows. Behind Lesbia are flowers, trees, and a view of the sea.
  The Tired Dancer, also known as Revelry (1879), was exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery. It was reviewed in The Dublin University Magazine:
  J.R. Weguelin's "Tired Dancer" is very clear and rich. The girl has flung herself upon a marble seat beneath a marble pillar; her loose dress of dark red gause forms a brilliant patch against the marble, and yet it does not hide the limbs beneath. Her dark hair is crowned with clustering yellow flowers, the face is utterly asleep, and the right arm flung out straight upon the marble slab behind her well conveys the idea of complete weariness. The execution of the marble is a kind of reminiscence of Alma Tadema's work.
  A Portrait (1880) was exhibited at the Royal Academy.
  In Pressing Grapes (1880), two young women, their skirts gathered to their knees, stand in a stone tub, pressing grapes, as the juice pours into a bucket through a notch in the side of the tub. The two women stand on either side of a pole suspended from above, which they grasp with their hands to keep their balance. Behind them are arches, through which a richly-forested landscape can be seen below and stretching into the distance. Stone jars and baskets of grapes line the wall. A young girl with a ribbon in her hair leans against a large vessel, her feet on a stool as she watches the women work. The painting was discovered at a home in Portland, Maine in 1997, and subsequently determined to be the work of Weguelin. This may be the same painting as The Vintage.
  The Vintage (1880, oil on canvas, 45 1/2 x 30") was exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery with an excerpt from Macaulay's poem, Horatius: And in the vats of Luna/This year the must shall foam/Round the white feet of laughing girls/Whose sires have marched to Rome. In its review, The Times described the painting as, "a rare example of pictorial use made of a good subject which is contemporary as well as antique." A simpler version appears as one of the illustrations to the 1881 edition of the Macaulay poems.
  The Fishers (1881) was exhibited at the Royal Academy.
  A Roman Acrobat (1881) was exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery. It was critiqued in The Gentleman's Magazin
caption: The Mermaid of Zennor (1900).
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