Ariel

Joseph Severn's Ariel of 1826 depicts Shakespeare's spirit character from The Tempest, the airy being who serves Prospero and embodies freedom, magic, and the element of air itself. Severn was the devoted friend of John Keats, who died in his arms in Rome in 1821, and his subsequent career as a painter in Rome was shaped by that association and by his Keatsian sensitivity to lyrical, poetic subjects. Ariel was an ideal subject for a Romantic painter: a figure explicitly defined by its immateriality, by flight and music and the dissolution of physical constraint, offering scope for the kind of atmospheric, luminous figure painting that Romantic taste favored. Severn's version reflects both the specifically Shakespearean literary culture of British Romantic painting and his own aspiration toward a Keatsian beauty of subject and handling.

Severn renders Ariel as a floating, luminous figure defined more by light and aerial quality than by substantial physical form. The figure's pose and setting emphasize the element of air — clouds, light, openness — appropriate to a spirit defined by its elemental nature. The handling is soft and atmospheric, the edges of the figure dissolving into the surrounding light.