May Morning (Maryon)
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| May Morning | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Artist | Edith Maryon |
| Year | 1901 |
May Morning is a 1901 relief by the English sculptor Edith Maryon. Intended as a decoration to be placed over a fireplace, it is three times as wide as it is high, and was inspired by William Wordsworth's Ode Composed on a May Morning. The work was exhibited at the Royal Academy of Art and the Walker Art Gallery in 1901, and widely illustrated in art publications.
The relief belongs to a category of works by Maryon involving references to the elemental world. In her later career, after joining the Anthroposophical Society led by Rudolf Steiner, Maryon created additional reliefs that, like May Morning, display a narrative form.
Edith Maryon was born in London on 9 February 1872.[1][2] She was educated there and in Geneva, then studied art, including at the Royal College of Art;[3] in 1901, one of her teachers there, Édouard Lantéri, termed Maryon and Benjamin Clemens his best students.[4] Between 1899 and 1912, when Maryon was approximately 27 to 40 years old and living in London, she exhibited numerous works, particularly at the Royal Academy of Arts and the Walker Art Gallery.[5] These works, according to her biographer Rex Raab, tended to fall into five categories: first, the world of external physical being; second, references to the elemental world; third, motifs reflecting the human soul; fourth, allegorical works representing spiritual forces and beings; and fifth, a combination of emotional and spiritual aspects.[6] Maryon exhibited little if at all after 1912.[7]
Maryon was interested in the esoteric at least as early as 1909, and in 1912 travelled to Germany to meet the anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner for the first time.[8][9][10] In 1914 she travelled to Dornach—the place where Steiner had resolved to centre the anthroposophical movement and build the Goetheanum as its central structure.[11][12] Over the next decade, until her death in 1924, Maryon rarely left Dornach.[13][14] She became a close collaborator of Steiner; among other contributions while there, she was heavily involved in creating both the monumental sculpture The Representative of Humanity, and the eurythmy figures depicting an anthroposophical form of dance.[15]
Description
The relief was intended to function as a decorative element above a fireplace, and is three times as wide as it is high.[16][17] It is inspired by Ode Composed on a May Morning by William Wordsworth,[18] and the exhibition catalogues quoted four lines from the ode:[16][19][20]
"When youths and maids
At peep of dawn would rise,
And wander forth, in forest glades
Thy birth to solemnize."
According to Raab, May Morning belongs to the second category of works by Maryon, regarding references to the elemental world.[21] Other examples from this category include The Pixies' Ring, exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts and the Thirty-sixth Autumn Exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery in 1906 and 1907,[22][23] and The Enchanted Garden, exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1908.[24][25] Maryon's reliefs from her time in London, like May Morning, also presage her later anthroposophical reliefs made in Dornach, which similarly share a narrative character.[26]
