Finding of Don Juan by Haidée
Artist: Ford Madox Brown (British, 1821–1893)
Date: 1873
Medium: Oil on panel
Collection: Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham, United Kingdom
Don Juan, Poem, Canto II
Exiled from Seville. Don Juan travels to Cádiz, accompanied by Pedrillo, a tutor, and servants. Throughout the voyage, Juan pines for the love of Donna Julia, but seasickness distracts him. A storm wrecks the ship; Juan, his entourage, and some sailors escape in a long boat. Adrift in the Aegean Sea, they soon exhaust their supplies of food and eat Don Juan's dog. Afterwards, the sailors turn cannibal and eat Pedrillo; later, the cannibal sailors go mad and die. This Canto is largely based on accounts by survivors of the wreck of the Wager, including Byron’s grandfather, Admiral John Byron, who as a young man had endured the wreck of H.M.S. Wager off the coast of Chile.
Finding of Don Juan by Haidée, 1873, by Ford Madox Brown Juan is the sole survivor of the shipwreck and the escape in the long boat. Upon landfall at one of the Cyclades islands, two women, Haidée and Zoe, the latter being the maid of the former, discover the shipwrecked Juan and care for him in a cave at the beach. Haidée and Juan fall in love, despite neither speaking or understanding the language of the other. Moreover, Haydee's father, Lambro, is a pirate and a slaver who dislikes Don Juan, and has him enslaved and sent to Constantinople, in the Ottoman Empire.
