ABSTRACT
The death of King Arthur is a particularly prominent icon in the paintings and illustrations of the Victorians, recurring in at least a dozen major pictures and in several illustrated books, the most famous of which is the celebrated Moxon Tennyson of 1857. Notwithstanding the claim of the anonymous Athenaeum critic reviewing the first installment of Idylls in 1859 that Tennyson's poetry contained an 'excess of the pictorial', most artists were attracted either to the scene of Arthur on the barge or to projections of his aestivation in Avalon. Reveley's picture conveys accurately the mood or tone of Tennyson's lines, but it is not, like Maclise's illustration for the Morte d'Arthur in the Moxon Tennyson, literally faithful to Tennyson's text. The Arthurian materials were for Tennyson a life-long obsession from 1830 to that last-composed, synthetically descriptive line on King Arthur, which he instructed Hallam in 1891 to insert into the Epilogue of his epic.
