Pyramus and Thisbe

Francis Wollaston Moody's Pyramus and Thisbe depicts the tragic story from Ovid's Metamorphoses in which the two lovers, forbidden by their parents to meet, speak through a crack in a wall and arrange a rendezvous, with fatal consequences — Thisbe flees a lion, Pyramus finds her bloodstained veil and kills himself, and Thisbe kills herself over his body. Shakespeare reworked the story as a comic play-within-a-play in A Midsummer Night's Dream, but Moody's treatment clearly takes the tragic reading from Ovid directly. The myth was consistently popular with painters and decorators who could treat the wall and the concealed conversation as a subject of both visual interest and sentimental pathos. Moody's engagement with Ovidian mythology reflects the broad classical literacy of Victorian educated culture and his own decorative programme for the museum.

The wall device provides a natural compositional division, the separated lovers communicating through its crack with gestures that convey tender yearning. Moody's figures are elegantly drawn in Antique dress, the composition designed with the balanced, legible clarity of decorative painting intended to read at a distance. The palette is warm and harmonious.