Hope Comforting Love in Bondage

What you are looking at

Two figures sit side by side on a stone bench in a shadowy room. On the left is a young man with huge wings of deep crimson and purple that spread behind both figures and fill the top of the picture. He is Love, the classical Cupid or Eros, but he is not triumphant. His body is wrapped and his legs are tied with strips of gray cloth, his hands hang between his knees, and he stares at nothing with a dull, exhausted expression. On his head is a wreath of red roses.

Beside him sits Hope, a young woman in a long green dress under a saffron-gold cloak, her hair bound in a patterned cap. She lays one hand on his shoulder and reaches the other toward his arm, looking at him with grave, steady attention.

At Love's feet lie his weapons, discarded: a quiver of arrows on a ribbon, a bow and a loose arrow on the floor. Sprigs of white blossom are caught in his feathers, and a branch of pink blossom appears on the bench at the right. Behind, a small leaded window shows a glimpse of trees and hills. The overall palette is rich and jewel-like, deep reds, greens and golds, typical of the late Pre-Raphaelite painters.

How Meteyard made it

Sidney Harold Meteyard (1868–1947) was a Birmingham artist, a student and later teacher at the Birmingham School of Art and a member of the Birmingham Group, the circle of painters and craftsmen inspired by Edward Burne-Jones (himself Birmingham-born) and William Morris. Meteyard worked across many media, including stained glass, enamel, book illustration and tempera, and his oil paintings share the decorative, carefully patterned style of the Arts and Crafts movement. This canvas, almost square at about 104 by 109 centimeters, was painted in 1901.

What does the painting mean?

The picture is an allegory built from personifications rather than a scene from a specific story. Love in bondage is an old theme in Renaissance and later art, in which Cupid is bound, disarmed or punished, sometimes to show love restrained by chastity or reason, sometimes to show love suffering. Here the emphasis is on suffering: Love is captive and despairing, his power to wound set aside on the floor.

Hope's role is to console. Green has long been the traditional color of Hope in Christian and allegorical imagery, and she wears it here. The blossoms, signs of spring, may reinforce the promise that the season of captivity will pass.

A Victorian viewer would have recognized the mood from G. F. Watts's famous Hope (1886) and Burne-Jones's allegories of love. Meteyard does not appear to have left a written explanation, so these readings rest on the conventions of the imagery rather than on the artist's own words.

Where to see it

The painting belongs to Birmingham Museums Trust (accession 1948P5) and is part of the collection of Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, which holds one of the world's great collections of Pre-Raphaelite art. Check the museum's website for current display. It makes a fitting companion to the Pre-Raphaelites and to classical love subjects such as Canova's Cupid and Psyche and Edward Poynter's Psyche in the Temple of Love. The painting is in the public domain.