page_title: Comus
section_title: Comus in art
hierarchical_section_title: Comus / Comus in art
caption_attribution_description: In 1843 Queen Victoria's husband, Prince Albert, commissioned a number of painters to decorate a small garden pavilion in the grounds of Buckingham Palace. The artists were to select scenes from the masque Comus by the seventeenth-century poet John Milton, and subjects from the work of the Romantic novelist and poet Walter Scott. Like Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery (see Lear and Cordelia displayed above) it was hoped that the project would help encourage British history painting. This is Edwin Landseer's preliminary sketch, showing the rout of Comus and his company of revellers. The pavilion was pulled down in 1928.
context_page_description: In Greek mythology, Comus is the god of festivity, revels and nocturnal dalliances. He is a son and a cup-bearer of the god Dionysus. Comus represents anarchy and chaos. His mythology occurs in the later times of antiquity. During his festivals in Ancient Greece, men and women exchanged clothes. He was depicted as a young man on the point of unconsciousness from drink. He had a wreath of flowers on his head and carried a torch that was in the process of being dropped. Unlike the purely carnal Pan or purely intoxicated Dionysos, Comus was a god of excess.
context_section_description: Description of Comus as he appeared in painting is found in Imagines (Greek Εἰκόνες, translit. Eikones) by Philostratus the Elder, a Greek writer and sophist of the 3rd century AD.
  Comus appears at the start of the masque Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue by Ben Jonson and in Les fêtes de Paphos (The Festivals of Paphos), an opéra-ballet by Jean-Joseph Cassanéa de Mondonville.
  In John Milton's masque Comus, the god Comus is described as the son of Bacchus and Circe. This is a post-classical invention.
  Comus is featured in the baroque operas Les plaisirs de Versailles by Marc-Antoine Charpentier and King Arthur by Henry Purcell and John Dryden, and in a masque, Comus, by Thomas Arne.
  A selfish dandy, Comus Bassington is the central character in the novel The Unbearable Bassington by Saki (H.H. Munro).
  Cult British progressive folk group Comus took their name and much of the lyrical content of their 1971 album First Utterance from Comus.
caption: The Defeat of Comus, 1843, by Sir Edwin Henry Landseer, once a mural in a small garden pavilion in the grounds of Buckingham Palace.
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