Meeting on the Turret Stairs - Frederic William Burton, 1864

Burton painted this watercolour in 1864, drawing on the Irish legend of Hellelil and Hildebrand from a Danish ballad translated by the scholar Whitley Stokes: Hellelil, a princess, loves Hildebrand, one of her father's knights, and their parting on the turret stair is the last they will share before violence separates them forever. The work belongs to a moment in Burton's career when, though better known as a portraitist and director of the National Gallery of Ireland, he was working at the highest pitch of his ambition as a painter. The piece was executed in watercolour with a minuteness of touch that rivals the oil technique of his Pre-Raphaelite contemporaries, and it was greeted on exhibition as one of the finest watercolours produced in Ireland in the nineteenth century. It entered the collection of the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin, where it remains today among the most visited works in the building, regularly cited as the painting that distils the Irish Romantic imagination into a single image. The choice of a Danish ballad mediated through Irish scholarship reflects the cultural cross-currents of mid-Victorian Celtic revivalism, the same impulse that drove Rossetti to Arthurian sources and Burne-Jones to Chaucerian ones.