Ramblings about life and art in the outback of Nebraska

I will have a rather different style painting in an invitational art exhibition celebrating the 150^th birthday of author Willa Cather. Her 100-year-old book, A Lost Lady, is the focus of this year’s Spring Conference at the National Willa Cather Center in Red Cloud, Nebraska. It’s a fabulous venue and excellent destination for literary tourism. The Foundation has tours of 8 buildings in this town where Cather lived for several years before attending college at the University of Nebraska.  

In this book, Cather describes the Forrester place just outside “Sweet Water” as unremarkable. “The people who live there made it seem much larger and finer than it was.” When Niel Herbert is asked to drive Marian Forrester home after her visit to his uncle’s law office, she asks him to come in to the sitting room and warm up. Cather sets the stage: "It was a rather dark room, with walnut bookcases that had carved tops and glass doors. The floor was covered by a red carpet, and the walls were hung with large, old-fashioned engravings: The House of the Poet on the Last Day of Pompeii, Shakespeare Reading before Queen Elizabeth."

I had to stop reading to google these engravings and learned so much more! I found my image focusing on the House of the Tragic Poet, based on an 1832 illustration by William Gell, of the reconstructed house.

Why was the House of the Tragic Poet significant in A Lost Lady? It’s an actual home found in 1824 in the ruins of Pompeii, famous for its murals depicting Euripidean tragedies (notice collaged Images in my painting from three of the ancient home’s murals: Achilles surrendering Briseis to Agamemnon, Actor with a mask, and Helen Boarding a ship for Troy). Professor Matthew Hokom says the house’s murals are mostly about devotion and sacrifice of women and goddesses placed in agonizing situations, often due to helplessness of women in a society dominated by men. 

"[The Cather library included] Lytton's 1834 novel, The Last Days of Pompeii....The novel views the rise of one culture and the death of its antecedent as inevitable but acknowledges that, with the end of pagan antiquity, something great is disappearing from the earth. This idea of a heroic age now vanished resonates throughout A Lost Lady with its eulogy for the sunset days of the pioneer....The reference to the Forresters' picture opens a window on Pompeii, which opens a window on the House of the Tragic Poet, which opens a window on the murals, which opens a window on the plays of Euripides, the entire series of perspectives deepening our understanding of Mrs. Forrester and the novel." (Hokom)

Cather expected her audience to be familiar with the city, given the cultural popularity of Pompeiian discoveries in the 19^th century. Not only did Cather contemporaries Mark Twain and Henry James write of their visits to Pompeii, but in 1908 she was there. She wrote her friend, Alice Goudy, about two days spent at Pompeii and touring the Naples Museum, which includes artwork from the House of the Tragic Poet.

At Daniel’s funeral, Cather has Marian say, "I think I will have Mr. Forrester's sun-dial taken over and put above his grave. I can have an inscription cut on the base. It seems more appropriate for him than any stone we could buy. And I will plant some of his own rose-bushes beside it." Hokom notes: “In this passage the roses, representing Mrs. Forrester, and the stone, representing the Captain, are joined over his grave.” Earlier in the novel, Cather describes the sundial as being of red sandstone from Colorado. I took artistic license in the style of sundial in my painting.

With the sundial/gravestone and blush roses as the focal point in this painting, the picture from the Forrester’s house becomes the Forresters in the picture!