3-003-715 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

"Dar-Thula" by Henry Tidey, from the exhibition of the New Society of Painters in Water-Colours, 1861. Engraving from a painting. '"Dar-Thula stood in silent grief and beheld their fall! No tear is in her eye; but her look is wildly sad...Her dark hair flew on wind...'Where is thy lover now - the Car-borne chief of Etha? Hast thou beheld the halls of Usnoth? or the dark brown hills of Fingal? My battle would have roared of Morven had not the winds met Dar-Thula. Fingal himself would have been low, and sorrow dwelling in Selma!' Her shield fell from Dar-Thula's arm. Her breast of snow appeared; it appeared, but it was stained with blood. An arrow was fixed in her side. She fell on the fallen Nathos Iike a wreath of snow. Her hair spreads wide on his face. Their blood is mixing round." The artist has fully entered into the character of this cruel epic...behind stands, as a shadow, the form of the victorious foe. The attitude of Dar-Thula is grandly conceived; the features of her finely-developed and pallid face are fixed in silent horror and overwhelming agony, her full-orbed eye gleaming with a fire that would scorch up all tears at their very source. In colour the artist has subdued his pencil to the grey granite hue of Ossian's poetry'. From "Illustrated London News", 1861.