The Sonnet

Mulready's The Sonnet (1839) depicts a romantic scene of a young woman reading a love poem — a subject that combines the period's intense valuation of literary culture with the emotional life of private feeling. Victorian genre painting frequently depicted women reading, writing, and receiving letters as a way of exploring the inner emotional life that decorum prevented from open expression. The sonnet — with its specific associations of Renaissance love poetry, of Shakespeare and Sidney — raises the woman's private reading to a cultural as well as personal level. Mulready's treatment, with its careful rendering of the figure's absorbed attention and the quality of light on the open page, creates an image of contemplative intensity within a domestic setting.

Mulready's mature technique produces luminous, jewel-like color in the figure and interior setting. The reader's absorbed expression is captured with psychological subtlety, and the paper of the sonnet catches light with convincing naturalism.