The Valkyrie’s Vigil
Artist: Edward Robert Hughes (British, 1851-1914)
Date: 1906
Medium: Watercolour and gold paint on Whatman paper
Collection: The Leicester Art Galleries, London
Description
Edward Robert Hughes was a notable and respected figure amongst the second generation of Pre-Raphaelite artists. Hughes, with a number of his contemporaries, was influenced by and continued to practice the painting techniques pioneered in the middle of the century by members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; he, like Millais and Holman Hunt, was concerned with qualities of minute realism and bright colour. Hughes maintained these traditions, along with a fondness for romantic and symbolical subjects, well into the Twentieth Century.
The present watercolour is imbued with an extraordinary and phantasmagoric character, and may be seen as an Edwardian contribution to European Symbolism. Its subject The Valkyrie’s Vigil shows one of Odin’s war-maidens who, in Scandinavian mythology, hovered over battlefields selected those warriors who were to die and conducted them to Valhalla. Hughes was certainly influenced in his choice of subject, which he returned to on several occasions, by Richard Wagner’s Die Walkure, the second opera of The Ring, which had been first performed in London in 1882.
