Henry Holiday's and M.C. Escher's allusions to John Martin

[top left]: Detail of an illustration by Henry Holiday to Lewis Carroll's "The Hunting of the Snark" (1876)

[top right]: Mirror view of a horizontally compressed detail from John Martin's "The Bard" (ca. 1817, see red and green marks below)

[bottom left]: M.C. Escher: Cimino Barbarano, 1929
(middle segment, redrawn from original, horizontally compressed)
See also: www.mcescher.com/Gallery/ital-bmp/LW129.jpg

[bottom right]: John Martin: The Bard
ca. 1817
(Color desaturated segment)
Original painting: Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection
collections.britishart.yale.edu/vufind/Record/1671616



M. C. Escher took the whole concept of John Martin's The Bard. Henry Holiday in most cases quoted different elements (shapes) in his source images and often gave those elements a completely new meaning. (In one case the shapes even were the cracks in the varnish of a source image.)



=== John Martin: The Bard ===

Yale Center for British Art: "Based on a Thomas Gray poem, inspired by a Welsh tradition that said that Edward I had put to death any bards he found, to extinguish Welsh culture; the poem depicts the escape of a single bard. Escher turned that landscape into am Italian scenery."

In mydailyartdisplay.wordpress.com/the-bard-by-john-martin, "Jonathan" connects the painting to the poem The Bard written by by Thomas Gray in 1755:
· · ...
· · On a rock, whose haughty brow
· · Frowns o'er cold Conway's foaming flood,
· · Robed in the sable garb of woe
· · With haggard eyes the Poet stood;
· · ...
· · "Enough for me: with joy I see
· · The diff'rent doom our fates assign.
· · Be thine Despair and sceptred Care;
· · To triumph and to die are mine."
· · He spoke, and headlong from the mountain's height
· · Deep in the roaring tide he plunged to endless night.
· · ...

The poem and the painting may have been an inspiration to Lewis Carroll and Henry Holiday in The Hunting of the Snark:
· · 545· · Erect and sublime, for one moment of time.
· · 546· · · · In the next, that wild figure they saw
· · 547· · (As if stung by a spasm) plunge into a chasm,
· · 548· · · · While they waited and listened in awe.