Maria

Charles Landseer's Maria (c. 1836) likely depicts a literary character — possibly the sentimental Maria from Laurence Sterne's "A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy" (1768), who had become a popular subject for Romantic-era painters. Charles Landseer, elder brother of the more famous Edwin, specialized in historical and literary subjects that appealed to the Victorian taste for narrative painting with emotional depth. Sterne's Maria — a beautiful young woman driven mad by grief — embodied the Romantic fascination with female suffering and madness that pervaded literature and art from Ophelia to the heroines of Gothic novels.

Landseer's technique shows the smooth, refined handling expected of academic narrative painting, with careful attention to the figure's expression and gesture that conveys the emotional content of the literary source, set against a landscape that enhances the melancholic mood.