The Light that She Loves
Maud Taber-Thomas’s 2014 show at Calloway Fine Art in Washington, DC took its name from a line from the Tennyson Poem "Maud: A Monodrama". The show featured fourteen large portrait paintings and one charcoal drawing, which were all inspired by literature of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The artworks were displayed with quotations from the books and poems that inspired them.
Click each image for more details about the work. Images with a link are available for purchase.
Oil on Panel, 20 x 16”, 2013 Click to read the quote that inspired this painting, and for purchasing info:
Oil on Canvas, 36 x 48”, 2014 Click to read the quote that inspired this painting.
Oil on Panel, 16 x 16”, 2012 "To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life." -Walter Pater, "The Renaissance"
Oil on Canvas, 44 x 96”, 2011 Look upward where the white gull screams, What does it see that we do not see? Is that a star? or the lamp that gleams On some outward voyaging argosy,– Ah! can it be We have lived our lives in a land of dreams! How sad it seems. -Oscar Wilde, "Her Voice" Available for Purchase:
Oil on Canvas, 36 x 48", 2009
Oil on Panel, 11 x 14”, 2013, A damsel with a dulcimer In a vision once I saw: It was an Abyssinian maid, And on her dulcimer she played, Singing of Mount Abora. -Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan
Oil on Canvas, 36 x 48”, 2014 If thou be’st born to strange sights, Things invisible to see… -John Donne, "Song: Go and catch a falling star" Available for Purchase:
Oil on Canvas, 36 x 48”, 2014 Click to read the quote that inspired this painting.
Charcoal on Arches, 44.5 x 80”, 2013 ‘T is you that are the music, not your song. The song is but a door which, opening wide, Lets forth the pent-up melody inside, Your spirit’s harmony, which clear and strong Sings but of you. Throughout your whole life long Your songs, your thoughts, your doings, each divide This perfect beauty; waves within a tide, Or single notes amid a glorious throng. -Amy Lowell, "Listening" Available for Purchase:
Oil on Panel, 16 x 20”, 2014 Click to read the quote that inspired this painting, and for purchasing info:
Oil on Canvas, 36 x 48”, 2013 Ay! though the gorgèd asp of passion feed On my boy’s heart, yet have I burst the bars, Stood face to face with Beauty, known indeed The Love which moves the Sun and all the stars! -Oscar Wilde, "Apologia" Available for Purchase:
Oil on Panel, 9 x 12”, 2010 Directly we glance at Orlando standing by the window, we must admit that he had eyes like drenched violets, so large that the water seemed to have brimmed in them and widened them; and a brow like the swelling of a marble dome pressed between the two blank medallions which were his temples. Directly we glance at eyes and forehead, thus do we rhapsodize." –Virginia Woolf, "Orlando"
Oil on Canvas, 64 x 64”, 2011 Click to read the quote that inspired this painting.
Oil on Panel, 14 x 11”, 2013, Each Morn a thousand Roses brings, you say; Yes, but where leaves the Rose of Yesterday? -Edward FitzGerald, trans., "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam" Available for Purchase:
Oil on Panel, 11 x 14”, 2009 All night have the roses heard The flute, violin, bassoon; All night has the casement jessamine stirr’d To the dancers dancing in tune; Till a silence fell with the waking bird, And a hush with the setting moon. -Alfred Lord Tennyson, "Maud: A Monodrama" Available for Purchase:
Oil on Panel, 12 x 16”, 2014 “…and the great advantage of being a literary woman, was that you could go everywhere and do everything.” ― Henry James, "The Portrait of a Lady"
Oil on Linen, 11″ x 14″, 2009
Oil on Panel, 11″ x 14″, 2009 This winter-eve is warm, Humid the air! leafless, yet soft as spring, The tender purple spray on copse and briers! And that sweet city with her dreaming spires, She needs not June for beauty’s heightening -Mathew Arnold, “Thyrsis: A Monody,”
Oil on Panel, 11″ x 14″, 2009