Cynesias entreating Myrrhina to Coition
Drawing
1896
1896
| Artist/Maker |
Drawing by Aubrey Beardsley, 'Cynesias entreating Myrrhina to Coition', Illustration to Lysistrata by Aristophanes, published by Leonard Smithers, London 1896 (facing page 44). Pen and ink.
Object details
| Object type | |
| Title | Cynesias entreating Myrrhina to Coition |
| Materials and techniques | Pen and ink over traces of preparatory graphite |
| Brief description | Drawing by Aubrey Beardsley, 'Cynesias entreating Myrrhina to Coition', Illustration to Lysistrata by Aristophanes, published by Leonard Smithers, London 1896 (facing page 44). Pen and ink. |
| Dimensions |
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| Credit line | Purchased with Art Fund support |
| Object history | Provenance: Leonard Smithers; Herbert Pollitt; R. A. Harari |
| Bibliographic reference | Linda Gertner Zatlin, Aubrey Beardsley : a catalogue raisonne. New Haven : Yale University Press, [2016] 2 volumes (xxxi, [1], 519, [1] pages; xi, [1], 547, [1] pages) : illustrations (some color) ; 31 cm. ISBN: 9780300111279
The entry is as follows:
1037
Cinesias entreating Myrrhina to Coition
C. 26 June 1896
Victoria and Albert Museum, London (E.299-1972)
Pen, brush and Indian ink over traces of pencil on white wove paper secured to backing with slotted hinges; 10 ⅜ x 7 3/16 inches (264 x 182 mm)
INSCRIPTIONS: Verso in pencil: E.299-1972 / 23
FLOWERS: Rose [Bourbon type] (love, passion); daisy type (innocence).
PROVENANCE: Leonard Smithers; bt. Herbert J. Pollitt; bt. [sale brokered by R. A. Walker] Sir Gerald F Kelly and Morton H Sands (sole owner by 1958), by descent in 1960 to Sand’s nephew, Colonel M. Sands; offered [with the assistance of Colnaghi Ltd.] to R. A. Harari; bt. Private collector; bt Richard Hughes Hallet (art dealer); offered to B. Rota Ltd. on 20 January 1961; bt. R. A. Harari c. 1962, by descent to Michael Harari; bt. Victoria and Albert Museum in 1972 with the aid of a contribution from the National Art Collections Fund.
EXHIBITION: London 1966-8 (USA only), 1993 (115); London 2001-3 (83).
LITERATURE: Vallance 1897 (p.210); Meier-Graefe 1908 (II. pp. 256-7); Vallance 1909 (no. 143.vi); Rothenstein 1940 (I, pp. 135-6); Gallatin 1945 (no 1071); Reade 1967 (p. 360-1, nn. 464, 466); Letters 1970 (pp.56, 138); Fletcher 1987 (pp. 170); Zatlin in Langenfeld 1989 (p. 192); Zatlin 1990 (pp. 65, 67); Samuels Lasner 1995 (no.107); Snodgrass 1995 (p. 210); Zatlin 1997 (pp. 171, 173, 237)
REPRODUCED: Facing p. 44 in ‘Lysistrata’, published by Leonard Smithers in October 1896; ‘Later Work’ 1901 (no. 92, expurgated); Reade 1967 (plate.464); Wilson 1983 (plate 37).
Cinesias leaves the war front and comes to the wall of the Acropolis in physical pain, calling for his wife Myrrhina. Lysistrata tells Myrrhina to tease him until he will do anything, even make peace with Sparta. Cinesias begs his wife to return with him. She descends from the Acropolis and insists they lie right there. While making preparations to lie with him, she teases him and then runs away. Beardsley condenses the action in this drawing to show Cinesias still deprived, chasing after the voluptuous Myrrhina, while the Chorus of Old Men confirms that he is ‘in terrible plight’ (Lysistrata 1896, p.47). Indeed, Cinesias’s thrusting phallus is half his height, and indication of the scale of his lust. Meier-Graefe, the art historian, wrote that Beardsley learned from Greek vase painters, particularly Duris and his teacher Brygos, ‘that he had no need to be prudish and that the unrestrained eroticism of certain pages remains what it is intended to be, a device to intensify the rhythm’ (1908, II, pp. 256-7). The size and state of the phalluses, however, resemble more closely those in Japanese woodblock prints, with which Beardsley was also familiar (Letters 1970 p.56; Rothenstein 1940, I, pp. 135-6; see also Zatlin 1997, pp. 171, 173, 237).
Snodgrass writes that the visual focus of the drawing is on the clothing rather than on the ‘salacious nudity’ (1995, p. 210). Myrrhina’s stockings resembling those a French prostitute might have worn, together with her quasi-naturalistic pubic hair, may in part allude to eighteenth-century pornography, but as well Beardsley explicitly evokes Felicien Rops’ pornographic pictures (Fletcher 1987, p. 170; Reade 1967, pp. 360-1, n. 466). Rops was the first to present a woman clad only in a broad black belt that emphasises her breasts and thigh-high black stockings that draw the viewer’s attention to her genitalia (for example, his coloured engraving ‘Impudence’ [reproduced in Exsteens 1928, plate 409]). Through Myrrhina’s naked body Beardsley alludes to works by Rops in which the woman is similarly undressed. Yet unlike the Ropsian woman, submissively posed in front of a fully clothed male, Myrrhina is neither seductive nor yielding, not does Beardsley exhibit her for Cinesias’s and the viewer’s delectation here or in ‘Lysistrata defending the Acropolis (no. 1035 above). Instead, he shows that a woman is not a man’s sexual toy, although as a product of Victorian culture he sometimes used motifs and attributes associated with male superiority (Zatlin in Langenfeld 1989, p. 192).
Beardsley projected women’s freedom into a nearer past by clothing his figures for this ancient Greek play in eighteenth-century costume. Cinesias’s headpiece is extravagantly feathered and stands straight up, mimicking his tumescent phallus (Zatlin 1990, p. 65). In a tantalising allusion to her teasing, the tassels of Myrrhina’s dressing gown almost caress Cinesias’s member. Fiercely aroused, Cinesias pulls at Myrrhina’s robe, disclosing virtually all of her body. He clutches her robe, but he cannot embrace her body. Despite Beardsley’s failure, Beardsley did not mock him. Myrrhina faces away from her husband, and no other depicted figures laugh at him as they do in the play. While Aristophanes’ Myrrhina denies Cinesias sexual pleasure, Beardsley’s Myrrhina refuses to give herself to the viewer. She expresses amusement, and unlike Andromeda in Frederic Leughton’s ‘Perseus and Andromeda’ (1891, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, UK), ‘she does not offer her body to a putative male viewer in exchange for assistance in her escape. Myrrhina simply dashes away’ (pp. 65, 67).
Not surprisingly, ‘Later Work’ includes only the figure of Myrrhina, cut off just below her navel, and enclosed in a twice-repeated double border; the title was altered to ‘Myrrhina’. This is the only unsigned drawing in the suite. F. W. Zandt expurgated the drawing and used it as a bookplate. |
| Collection | |
| Accession number | E.299-1972 |
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| Record created | June 30, 2009 |
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