Saint Cecilia by John William Waterhouse

Saint Cecilia by John William Waterhouse, 1895

Asleep on the terrace

Cecilia is not playing and not praying. She sits asleep in a carved stone chair on a garden terrace, her head tipped back against a red cushion and her eyes closed. An illuminated book lies open on her lap, one hand resting across its pages. She wears a long white gown, the skirt worked with gold embroidery, over sleeves patterned in purple and white.

Opposite her, two angels kneel in the grass on a red cloth and play violins. They have dark wings, gold circlets in their hair and plain white dresses, and they watch her as they play. Behind them, gilded organ pipes rise from a dark wooden case: the instrument is there, but nobody is at it. Red and white roses, poppies and violets grow along the terrace. Beyond the stone balustrade lies a harbour with moored ships, a round tower, dark cypresses, and a line of blue mountains across the water under a pale evening sky.

The canvas is wide — about 117 by 196 centimetres, according to the Victorian Web — and Waterhouse gives more than half of it to the space between the angels and the sleeper.

The poem behind the picture

The painting is not taken from the legend of the saint directly but from a stanza of Tennyson's poem The Palace of Art. There, among the imagined pictures that fill the palace, Cecilia sleeps near gilded organ pipes in "a clear-wall'd city on the sea", watched by an angel. Waterhouse kept the city by the sea, the organ pipes and the sleep, and doubled the angel. The lines from Tennyson were printed with the picture when it was shown at the Royal Academy.

Exhibition and later history

Saint Cecilia hung at the Royal Academy's summer exhibition of 1895, held at Burlington House from May to August that year. It was also the year Waterhouse was elected a full Academician. A reviewer in the Art Journal reported that the picture had cost the painter nearly two years of work, and described its effect as medieval and decorative rather than realistic.

The painting later dropped out of sight. The dealer Jeremy Maas was involved in its rediscovery: it had been found rolled up in France. In June 2000 it was sold at auction for a world-record price for a Victorian painting, bought for £6.6 million by the Andrew Lloyd Webber Art Foundation. According to a 2008 report in the Daily Telegraph, the foundation later sold it privately; its present owner has not been published.

The saint

Cecilia was a Roman martyr of the early third century, remembered for a vow of chastity, the conversion of her husband, and her death for the faith. Her link with music grew out of a medieval reading of her Acts, and in 1584 she was adopted as patroness of the Academy of Music in Rome. Her feast is kept on 22 November. The organ is her usual attribute; Waterhouse includes it, but gives the music to the angels and lets her sleep.

The painter

John William Waterhouse (1849–1917) was born in Rome to English parents who were both painters. He moved to London and trained at the Royal Academy Schools, and soon began showing at its summer exhibitions, often taking his subjects from poets such as Homer, Ovid, Shakespeare, Keats and Tennyson. He painted Tennyson's Lady of Shalott three times, in 1888, 1894 and 1916.

Sources: Wikimedia Commons, File:Waterhouse stcecilia.jpg · Victorian Web, J. W. Waterhouse's "St. Cecilia" · johnwilliamwaterhouse.com, St Cecilia (1895) · johnwilliamwaterhouse.com, Collecting Waterhouse Paintings Today · Wikipedia, John William Waterhouse · Wikipedia, Jeremy Maas · Wikipedia, Royal Academy Exhibition of 1895