3-008-984 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The International Exhibition: "Farewell - For Ever", by V. Manzano, 1862. Engraving of a painting. 'A young cavalier lover has been severed from his lady-love by her...being forced to take the veil and enter a convent. Wretched and inconsolable, he...dresses himself in deepest mourning and goes to the convent to catch one glimpse of the loved one...He sits...before the double iron grating of the cage, the perpetual prison of his lost love...Here she at length comes...but with no words of hope or comfort, only the dreaded "Adios per siempre." The poor distracted fellow in vain presses his hand to his ear that he may not hear them. He hears them as he sinks in his utter despair into the chair, still clinging to the cruel bars...and they will long be echoed and re-echoed in his heart. The situation is certainly very dramatic, as we are compelled to speculate upon the cause of this separation - whether it has been through any fault on either side, or whether through adverse circumstances; whether the nun is immured willingly, wilfully, or compulsorily. Yet the picture can scarce make the deep impression upon our Protestant imagination that it will upon the native of a country where the inquisition and the conventual system have been such terrible facts'. From "Illustrated London News", 1862.