Hermia and Helena

Washington Allston, Hermia and Helena, before 1818, oil on canvas, 30 ³⁄₈ x 25 ¹⁄₄ in. (77.2 x 64.2 cm.), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Smithsonian Institution Collections Acquisition Program and made possible by Ralph Cross Johnson, the Catherine Walden Myer Fund, and the National Institute, 1990.21

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Artwork Details

Title: Hermia and Helena
Artist: Washington Allston
Date: before 1818
Location: Not on view
Dimensions: 30 ³⁄₈ x 25 ¹⁄₄ in. (77.2 x 64.2 cm.)
Credit Line: Museum purchase through the Smithsonian Institution Collections Acquisition Program and made possible by Ralph Cross Johnson, the Catherine Walden Myer Fund, and the National Institute
Mediums: oil
Mediums Description: oil on canvas
Classifications: Painting
Subjects: Figure group — female
Recreation — leisure — reading
Landscape — waterfall
Literature — Shakespeare — Midsummer Night’s Dream
Portrait female — Hermia
Portrait female — Helena
Object Number: 1990.21
Linked Open Data: https://edan.si.edu/saam/id/object/1990.21

Artwork Description

Washington Allston said that this painting represented "the singleness and unity of friendship." He posed the two women so that they suggest one figure, and they read from a shared book. In Shakespeare's comedy A Midsummer Night's Dream, Helena eloquently describes her friendship with Hermia in the third act: "So we grew together, / Like to a double cherry . . . / Two lovely berries moulded on one stem."

Like many Americans of his time, Allston was educated in the classics. He painted Hermia and Helena in England when the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was reviving Shakespeare's plays. A friend of Allston's, Coleridge felt that Shakespeare expressed human sentiment perfectly.

Exhibition Label, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2006

Works by this artist (3 items)

Untitled #48

Artist

James F. Dicke II

Date2009

mixed media on canvas

Clouds

Artist

James F. Dicke II

Date1997

iris print photograph

Untitled #21

Artist

James F. Dicke II

Date2009

mixed media on canvas

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Smithsonian American Art Museum Director Elizabeth Broun shares her thoughts about personal favorites, Hermia and Helena, from the museum collection.

BETSY BROUN: The literary subject of this painting, “Hermia and Helena” by Washington Allston, is taken from Shakespeare. The celebration of intimate friendship derives from the German poet Goethe. The glazing techniques were inspired by Titian. Clearly, Washington Allston was among America’s most educated early painters. He was conversant with Europe's great traditions of literature, philosophy, and art.

Hermia and Helena were two childhood friends from Shakespeare’s comedy “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Their friendship was so close that they shared all the same tastes and predilections. They even loved the same man. In Act III of the play, Helena describes their similarities and says, “So we grew together, like to a double cherry, seeming parted, but yet a union in partition. Two lovely berries molded on one stem.” When Allston wrote of this subject to a friend in 1831, he said it represented the singleness and unity of friendship.

Singleness and unity combined 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 underway 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. Shakespeare’s enchanted wood is the second focus of Allston’s painting. The dense foliage and glowing, distant light suggest that Allston knew the work of German romantic painters who had translated the nature poetry of Goethe and Rilke into lush, evocative images.

For all these borrowings of literary and philosophical concepts, however, Allston remained persuaded that the painter’s art was one of magic formulas. He experimented to find the secret of Titian’s subtle glazes, seeking the kind of translucent depth in his pigments that the old Venetian masters had achieved. The foreground areas of “Hermia and Helena,” especially show these deep, rich colors. Unfortunately, after returning to America in 1818, his experiments often led to later deterioration of the paint film. Many of Allston’s paintings have darkened dramatically.

Allston is widely regarded as one of the great seekers in American art, with the highest aspirations for the new nation’s culture. In Washington D.C. in the 19th century, when architects of William Corcoran’s art gallery chiseled the names of the great masters into the cornice of his new building, they chose to inscribe Phidias, Giotto, Dürer, Michelangelo, Raphael, Velasquez, Rembrandt, Rubens, Reynolds, Ingres, and Allston. It’s pretty good company for an artist from the New World.