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Hermia and Helena
before 1818
Washington Allston
Born: Georgetown, South Carolina 1779
Died: Cambridgeport, Massachusetts 1843
oil on canvas
30 3/8 x 25 1/4 in. (77.2 x 64.2 cm.)
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Museum purchase through the Smithsonian Institution Collections Acquisition Program and made possible by Ralph Cross Johnson, the Catherine Walden Myer Fund, and the National Institute
1990.21
Smithsonian American Art Museum
2nd Floor, East Wing
Washington Allston said that this painting represented "the singleness and unity of friendship." He posed the two women so that they suggest one figure, and they read from a shared book. In Shakespeare's comedy A Midsummer Night's Dream, Helena eloquently describes her friendship with Hermia in the third act: "So we grew together, / Like to a double cherry . . . / Two lovely berries moulded on one stem."
Like many Americans of his time, Allston was educated in the classics. He painted Hermia and Helena in England when the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was reviving Shakespeare's plays. A friend of Allston's, Coleridge felt that Shakespeare expressed human sentiment perfectly.
Exhibition Label, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2006
Keywords
Figure group - female
Landscape - waterfall
Literature - Shakespeare - Midsummer Night's Dream
Portrait female - Helena
Portrait female - Hermia
Recreation - leisure - reading
painting
paint - oil
fabric - canvas
About Washington Allston
Born: Georgetown, South Carolina 1779 Died: Cambridgeport, Massachusetts 1843
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