Olivia

Olivia, painted in 1887 by Edmund Blair Leighton, takes its subject from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night — Olivia being the Countess who falls for the disguised Viola whom she believes to be a young man. Blair Leighton was part of a tradition of Victorian painters who turned to Shakespeare for subjects that allowed romantic and dramatic content within the frame of literary respectability. Olivia is a particularly interesting Shakespearean subject because of her confusion about gender: she falls for an apparent young man who is in fact a woman in disguise, and the painting may be intended to capture this ambiguity — a female subject consumed by a love that is not quite what it seems. By 1887 Blair Leighton was well-established on the Royal Academy exhibition circuit and his Shakespeare subjects were among his most popular works, appealing to a public that had absorbed the plays as part of a shared cultural vocabulary.

Oil on canvas with the polished academic finish and careful figure modelling typical of Blair Leighton's work. The palette favours the warm, rich tones associated with Elizabethan and Stuart interior settings.