A Life in a Year–Betrothal, from "Picture Poesies"
Not on view
Houghton's image shows a young man and woman walking arm and arm in a field of grain. The print first appeared in "A Round of Days" (1866, see 65.629.1), engraved by the Dalziel Brothers and published by Routledge. It was here reissued in "Picture Poesies" (1874), This is the final image in a series described by "The Bookseller" (1865) as "eight pictures representing the young squire at the gate and the girl at the window; the pair in the garden, and the Phyllis thoughtfully gathering a rose after he has gone, the famer's dinner and the girl's walk in the fields; the betrothal, a wood scene in which Phyllis and Cordon sit and breathe vows under a hawthorne hedge, and a walk in the moonlit fields when these two have been made one."
"The Bookseller," 1865, p. 810 describes the related series as: "eight pictures representing the young squire at the gate and the girl at the window; the pair in the garden and the Phyllis thoughtfully gathering a rose after he has gone, the farmer's dinner and the girl's walk in the fields; the betrothal, a wood scene in which Phyllis and Corydon sit and breathe vows under a hawthorne hedge, and a walk in the moonlit fields when these two have been made one." English songs and poems from the seventeenth-century forward use Corydon and Phyllis to represent pastoral lovers.
