Stop and Look: Medea by Frederick Sandys

In this picture we see the portrait of a beautiful woman, favoured as a motif by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in the 1850s and ’60s, sliding in Sandys’s hands into full-blown Symbolism: the work is a turning-point in nineteenth-century art history. The big change lies in a new interest in tortured female psychology. Sandys, who hailed from Norwich and gravitated into the orbit of Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites, was a man who in his own life acted out the drama of the male transfixed by female beauty. He was married only briefly, divorced his wife after three years and thereafter lived with a mistress by whom, and by at least one other woman, he had several children, including beautiful daughters he repeatedly drew. They, and their mother, figure in many of his pictures like images from which he couldn’t tear himself away: the idea of the irresistible and perhaps dangerous woman haunted his art throughout his life.  

The subject of this picture is not apparently modelled on any of Sandys’s relations. Handsome as she is, Medea is presented here not simply as a beauty, but as the heroine of a tragedy, a wronged woman, devising revenge by means of her powers as a sorceress. She has helped Jason and his Argonauts steal from her father Aertes, king of Colchis, the legendary Golden Fleece, which Sandys shows hanging between oak trees in the symbolic background behind her. The two fell in love and exchanged vows of fidelity, but he has betrayed her with Glauce, princess of Corinth. The poison she prepares in a brazier decorated with the pierced design of a salamander is compounded of sinister ingredients, which we can see arrayed in front of her: toads (a pair of them, red-eyed, are copulating on her table), a dried sting-ray, and blood which she pours from a curiously moulded glass beaker.

Her strongly-featured face is a dramatisation of the tortured emotions she feels: love, hatred, jealousy and anguish for the evil that she is contemplating – she was to go on to kill her rival’s children as well as two of her own by Jason. Much of the late nineteenth-century preoccupation with the femme fatale is prefigured in this image. Sandys was admired by his contemporaries as a superlative draughtsman and here he combines that virtuosity with a startling originality of conception. The story is told partly by the strange objects assembled in front of the witch, partly by the scenes flattened behind her in silhouette against the gold ground. The most vivid three-dimensional realism is projected onto a symbolic two-dimensional encapsulation of the narrative.

When Sandys submitted this picture to the Royal Academy for the Summer exhibition of 1868, it was rejected. Perhaps the toads were too much for some members of the hanging committee. But he sent it in again the following year, and it was much admired. Nevertheless this was almost the last oil painting that he exhibited. Henceforward he would execute nearly all his work in pastel, and concentrate on portraits.  

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life