Edwin Austin Abbey (American, 1852�-1911)
The Penance of Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester, 1900
The Story:
The subject of this large narrative painting comes from Shakespeare's Henry VI: Part II, act 2, scene 4. Eleanor, having vainly urged her husband, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, the Lord Protector, to usurp the throne of England, has committed the treasonable offense of consulting sorcerers about the length of the king's life. She has been sentenced to three days' public penance walking barefoot through the streets of London. Eleanor, clad in a white sheet, turns her head to her husband, who stands beside members of his entourage dressed in mourning cloaks, and says to him:

Come you, my lord, to see my open shame? Now thou dost penance too. Look how they gaze! See how the giddy multitude do point, And nod their heads, and throw their eyes on thee! Ah, Gloucester, hide thee from their hateful looks, And, in thy closet pent up, rue my shame, And ban thine enemies, both mine and thine!

Abbey's interpretation of the Shakespearean environment is tense and hallucinatory. The painting's shallow, crowded frieze of monumental figures is typical of the artist's work of the late 1890s and reflects both medieval and English Pre-Raphaelite prototypes.
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