Hello!
Today on Writer Wednesday, we’re looking at a poem by Christina Rosetti: In an Artist’s Studio. I love art- galleries, museums, art history and creating art as well. Painting and writing share a commonality too. It is in dipping our pens into our words that beautiful images emerge. Characters are like portraits and the author breathes life into them just as the painter infuses vitality into the pigment. I’m also reading about Renoir right now, through a very interesting fictional account of the creation of one of his most famous paintings in Luncheon of the Boating Party by Susan Vreeland. The painting below is Young Girl Reading by Renoir.
In An Artist’s Studio by Christina Rosetti
One face looks out from all his canvases,
One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans:
We found her hidden just behind those screens,
That mirror gave back all her loveliness.
A queen in opal or in ruby dress,
A nameless girl in freshest summer-greens,
A saint, an angel—every canvas means
The same one meaning, neither more nor less.
He feeds upon her face by day and night,
And she with true kind eyes looks back on him,
Fair as the moon and joyful as the light:
Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim;
Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright;
Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.
My best to you all,
Megan