Perfect Human Sentiment
"Singleness and unity" combine in his treatment of the two friends. They each have a charming head, but between them they have only two hands holding a single book, and two sandaled feet. (As a compromise, they show three breasts and knees, with the fourth ones mostly hidden.) Showing one body frontally and the other in profile recalls the way cubist painters would represent a single figure from multiple views. Psychologist Carl Jung pointed out that such partially conflated figures are common in many cultures, from prehistory to modern times.
Washington Allston was educated at Harvard and went twice to England to study. Hermia and Helena was painted just before he returned from the second trip, in 1818. A revival of Shakespeare's plays was then under way in England. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was lecturing widely on them. He considered them the most perfect expression of human sentiment. In England, Allston was friends with Coleridge and also with William Wordsworth. Like these romantic poets, Allston celebrated dreams and ideas, as well as nature.
Pictured: Washington Allston, Hermia and Helena, before 1818; oil, 30 3/8 x 25 1/4 in. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Smithsonian Institution Collections Acquisition Program and made possible by Ralph Cross Johnson, Catherine W. Myer, the National Institute Gift.
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Hermia and Helena
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