The master starts with a painterly cliché
(Loutherbourg, Thomson, Reynolds):
idealized girls in ideal landscapes
crossing a body of water.
But his illegitimate daughters
Evelina and Georgiana
surprised his heart,
disturbed the expected image
into a father’s tender celebration
of female awakening to our animal life.
Those living girls he imposed
on the old archetypes:
dark grottoes, sacred springs,
the idylls of Theocritus and Virgil.
These beautiful yet real
gentle yet brave young women
alone in the wooded West Country
from a well-worn path
(tunneled by arching trees)
to the brook.
In the distance Calstock bridge
and the vale of Tamar River
murmuring far-off echoes
of human industry encroaching
on gods of river and forest.
Georgiana, the younger, seated
under saplings on the bank
beside her white bag
white cloth draped across her lap
watches her sister Evelina
crossing the water to mature trees
on her uncertain adventure,
holding her wet red bag reflected
in water rising to her thighs.
Their mother, Sarah Danby, would apprentice
her daughters as schoolmistresses
to avoid the worst drudgeries of common labor—
no question of studying art—before becoming
Mrs. Evelina Dupuis and Mrs. Georgiana Thomson.
Evelina would flourish to seventy-three
but Georgiana, some say,
died in childbirth before such ripening.
But here, on canvas,
both the stasis and progression of time:
Halfway across the brook, the black dog
follows Evelina as she approaches
the opposite bank and cleft rock
under one more rising sun
in the immortal baptisms
of womanhood.
Crossing The Brook (J.M.W. Turner)
