The Vampire (painting)
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"The impressions raised by the big picture of Mr. Philip Burne-Jones, "The Vampire", cannot fail to be unwholesome, or, at the best, uselessly morbid. The man or woman who would like to have such a thing hung in a gallery should be shunned. It is not, probably, nearly so creepy or ghastly as its designer and executor expected, but the sickly livid green light over all the details is a most befitting colour. In all true senses of the word, this laboriously achieved picture is distinctly low art. Rudyard Kipling, a relative of the artist, has written a " poem " of three stanzas expressly for the picture, which is printed in the catalogue. The poem in no ways detracts from the nasty morbidness of the apparent ideas of the artist, or succeeds in making them intelligible. The rhymes accompanying the picture can only be described as Swinburne and dirty water."--"The New Gallery" (1897) by John Charles Cox "The Vampire (1897) harks back to Fuseli's Nightmare (1781), just as next year's Dead Mother by Max Klinger would do."--Sholem Stein |
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The Vampire[1] (1897) is a painting by the British painter Philip Burne-Jones (1861 – 1926).
It is his most famous work and depicts a woman straddling an unconscious man.
The woman was believed to have been modelled by the actress Mrs Patrick Campbell, with whom Burne-Jones had been associated romantically.
The painting also inspired his cousin Rudyard Kipling's poem of the same name.
It was first shown to the public on April 24.
According to the essay collection Ellen Terry, Spheres of Influence (2015), the painting is described in Athenaeum as a:
- "stalwart young man, who is either dead or dying, or in a trance of terror, lies supine on his bed; upon his uncovered breast is the mark of the monster's fatal caress, and she, in the shape of a wan, demonlike woman, sits at his side and looks as if her lips had just parted from their horrid work."
A precise link to the Athenaeum issue in question cannot be found in that 2015 book.
Ellen Terry, Spheres of Influence mentions that the Athenaeum quotation was copied from David J. Skal's "Fatal Image: The Artist, the Actress, and 'The Vampire'", featured in Vampires: Encounters with the Undead.
See also
![[1]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Burne-Jones-le-Vampire.jpg){kind=link}