PYGMALION & THE IMAGE
THE HEART DESIRES (1878)
† NCM 1900- 613-616
In this scene, Pygmalion contemplates his lonely existence. He is not looking at the living women in the doorway, or the statue of the three graces. Instead deep in thought, he ignores all the female forms, and looks instead at the floor.
The story of Pygmalion was adopted by a number of British artists and writers. In a patriarchal society vexed by the ‘woman question’, referring to an intellectual debate on the nature of women and feminist campaigns for social change after the 1700s, the idea of creating or moulding your own ideal woman would have appealed. This story was the inspiration for George Bernard Shaw’s play ‘Pygmalion’ in 1913, which later became the basis for the 1956 Broadway musical ‘My Fair Lady’ by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Lowe.
THE HAND REFRAINS (1878) Alone in his studio he carves the figure of a beautiful naked woman in marble and promptly falls in love with it. He prays to Venus to bring the sculpture to life. Here, Pygmalion is depicted admiring his work, and we can see the tools at the base of the statue used to carve out the female figure.
Derived from Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’, it tells of the sculptor Pygmalion who decides to remain celibate because of his disgust for what he considers to be the immorality of the young women of Cyprus. The sculptor creates his own ideal woman in the form of a statue, who is given life by the goddess Venus.
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