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Description: | This picture shows the moment when an earthly soul, Penelope, transforms into a heavenly being. Penelope was the only child of Sir Brooke Boothby and his wife Susannah. Her parents were so devastated over her death at the young age of six that they commissioned several memorials dedicated to her including this painting by Henry Fuseli. On Penelope's tomb they are described as 'The unfortunate parents ventured their all on this frail bark, and the wreck was total.' In the picture an angel reaches down to carry Penelope into Paradise and we can see the earth at her feet. The broken jug and butterfly represent Penelope's brief life-span. Like many of Fuseli's portraits this has a timeless quality.
Penelope Boothby (1785-1791) was the only daughter of Brooke Boothby (1743 -1824) and his wife Susannah of Ashbourne, Derbyshire. Penelope was adored by her parents and their friends, among them Sir Joshua Reynolds, who painted her portrait at the age of 3 in 1788. The Portrait of Penelope Boothby (Innocence) is in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Being a friend and great admirer of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Brooke Boothby tried to raise his child according to Rousseau's ideas, in harmony with nature and developing her innate abilities. The girl was taught to speak Latin, French and Italian, but after an agonising three-week illness in 1791 she died. The grieving Sir Brooke Boothby commissioned a number of works of art dedicated to the memory of his daughter, including the white marble tomb sculpted by Thomas Banks in St Oswald Church, Ashbourne and the painting from Henry Fuseli. He also wrote a series of poems dedicated to his daughter, Sonnets sacred to the Memory of Penelope Boothby, in 1796. The Apotheosis the glorification or deification of Penelope Boothby - shows her being guided into Heaven by an angel. The butterfly in the foreground symbolizes the short span of the young girls life. Brooke Boothby, a member of the Midlands gentry, was a poet, political pamphleteer and radical supporter of the French Revolution. In the 1760s Boothby met Jean-Jacques Rousseau at Wootton Hall in Staffordshire when he came to Britain as a refugee in 1766-7 and became a strong advocate of the philosophers theories. After Boothby visited Rousseau in Paris in 1776, he entrusted Boothby with a copy of his Dialogues which he subsequently published. He commissioned Joseph Wright in 1781 to paint his portrait as an illustration of Rousseaus ideas (Portrait of Sir Brooke Boothby, Tate Britain). During the 1770s he lived in Lichfield and was a close friend of Erasmus Darwin. Though never a member of the Lunar Society, he had a great interest in botany and possessed a collection of plants in his Ashbourne house which Darwin admired (Darwins letter to the botanist James Edward Smith, 12 September 1792). He almost certainly helped Darwin to translate the works of the Swedish botanist, Carl Linnaeus in the 1780s. Boothby wrote in his Sonnets sacred to the Memory of Penelope Boothby, that Darwins counselling aroused him from his suicidal state after the death of his daughter.
Oil painting showing a young girl, wearing a white gown, being guided to heaven by an angel. | License: | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/uk/ | Publisher: | Wolverhampton Arts and Museums Service | Rights holder: | Wolverhampton Arts and Museums Service | Subjects: | Bible Death Childhood Fine arts Religion Oil painting Women Oil Paintings Religious beliefs Children Georgian period Religious belief Girls Paintings Religious art People Memorials | Temporal: | 1792 - 1794
Georgian (1714-1837) | Source: | Black Country History | Creator: | FUSELI; HENRY (1741 - 1825) | Identifier: | http://www.blackcountryhistory.org/colle... | Go to resource |
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