Eric

In 2012, the people of Ireland were asked to choose their favorite painting in the world. They did not choose a Caravaggio, a Vermeer, or a Monet. They chose this: two lovers saying goodbye on a staircase... It is called Hellelil and Hildebrand, the Meeting on the Turret Stairs, painted in 1864 by Frederic William Burton. It is a watercolor, which makes its richness and depth almost impossible to believe, and it hangs today in the National Gallery of Ireland. The story comes from a medieval Danish ballad. Hellelil, a noblewoman, fell in love with Hildebrand, the prince who had been assigned to be her personal guard. Her father forbade it and ordered her seven brothers to kill him. When they attacked, Hildebrand killed six of them. At Hellelil's desperate cry, he spared the youngest, and that hesitation cost him his life. He died of his wounds. The surviving brother imprisoned her, and she did not live much longer... Burton could have painted the battle. He could have painted the deaths, the grief, the blood. Instead he chose the one intimate moment before all of it: the lovers passing on a turret staircase, stealing a final embrace, knowing what is coming. And every detail in the painting carries the weight of that knowledge. He does not seize her in passion. He bows his head and kisses her arm with a tenderness that is almost unbearable, because it is goodbye. She does not collapse into him. She turns to climb the stairs, her face hidden from him and from us, because to look back would make it impossible to leave. The Victorian novelist George Eliot saw the painting and described it perfectly. The face of the knight, she wrote, is "the face of a man to whom the kiss is a sacrament." And that is precisely why it has moved people to tears for more than a hundred and sixty years. It shows something that most of us have felt: not love at its beginning, when it is easy, but at the moment it must be given up, which is the moment that reveals everything it was worth. Burton understood that the most powerful thing he could paint was not the tragedy itself, but the last gentle second before it arrived, held forever in paint, so that the two of them never have to climb those stairs apart. Eliot, who was a friend of Burton's, captured it best: "It might have been made the most vulgar thing in the world, but the artist has raised it to the highest pitch of refined emotion." I started this newsletter because our predecessors left us extraordinary things, and almost no one teaches us about them anymore. Every week I try to. If that is something you would like to be part of, you can join here: James-lucas.com/welcome And if you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription is what makes it possible. Thanks for reading.