This painting by John Everett Millais, Mariana, is one of my favorite Pre-Raphaelite works. I had a chance to see it for myself a couple of weeks ago at the Tate Gallery in London. (The original Tate, I mean, which is now known as Tate Britain.)

The painting is dated 1851. Millais exhibited it accompanied by these lines from the poem Mariana by Alfred, Lord Tennyson:

She only said, 'My life is dreary -
He cometh not' she said;
She said 'I am aweary, aweary -
I would that I were dead.'

The Pre-Raphaelites were known for their painstaking representation of nature, and they insisted on working with real settings and live models. The result is a kind of ultra-realistic representation of the world, into which they often placed (usually female) subjects from literature and myth. I love the way this painting blends a fantastic subject (the fairytale world of the poem) with this very realistic natural world. That combination of the fantastic and the realistic appeals to me.

In person, the painting is smaller than you might expect. The colors are amazingly vivid, even today, and the textures look almost real. The velvet of the dress and the stool actually look soft, and the stained glass windows are shiny like glass and sort of glowing somehow as windows should be. But nothing escapes the artist's notice in this picture. There's a little brown mouse in the lower right hand corner of the painting, and his black eyes are so bright that they look absolutely real (believe me, I examined him at very close range).

I don't remember seeing this picture the last time I visited the Tate, in 1988. I think that time I focused mainly on the Turner collection (which of course the Tate is probably most famous for). Feeding my mind.

This time I spent a lot of time with the Pre-Raphaelite art. Feeding my soul.

Time well spent.