The Duenna's Return, from "Illustrated London News"
Engraver William Luson Thomas British
After John Callcott Horsley British
Not on view
Within a 17th-century interior, an elderly woman carrying keys enters a room to discover that the young woman under her care has been trysting with an admirer—the latter's is face still visible through an open window in the adjacent room. Horsley became a Royal Academician in 1864, served as the institution's professor of drawing, and also was a proficient etcher and draughtsman on wood. Thomas's wood engraving reproduces a painting that Horsley showed at the Royal Academy in 1860, and the imagery well represents the type of romantic genre subjects for which he became known—Richard Parkes Bonington had pioneered this newly intimate mode of historical painting while working in France during the 1820s. The artist later reworked and simplified the composition in an etching published in "A Selection of Etchings by the Etching Club" in 1865, an example of which is in the Met's collection (17.3.2641(57)).
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