ABSTRACT
In 1867, William Morris published his long narrative poem, The Life and Death of Jason; thus the painting and the poem were in progress simultaneously and it is inconceivable that either Morris or Frederick Sandys were unaware of one another's work, since both frequented Dante Gabriel Rossetti's house at the time. Clearly Sandys's starting point is the composition invented by Rossetti for a half-length female figure with gorgeous accessories. Yet it is immediately obvious that Sandys's painting technique effects a visual transformation to the Rossettian pictorial type. The gold background is sumptuous and its details are fascinating, like a secret code that awaits deciphering. Yet it was completely ignored by the art critics of 1869, even though many of them delighted in enumerating the various magical instruments in the foreground. Clearly there is a chicken-and-egg problem, since all of the overt references to the Medea myth are in the gold background.
