Abbey's Boston Library
Murals
The year after Connecticut Yankee came out, Edwin
Austin Abbey, another American expatriate painter, was
commissioned to create a fifteen-panel mural for the Book
Delivery Room at the new Boston Public Library (shown at
left). The subject he chose was "The Quest for the Holy
Grail." The two black-and-white engravings above -- "The
Round Table of King Arthur" and "The Oath of Knighthood" --
are from a souvenir album of the panels published in 1902.
The color picture below is the panel "Sir Galahad being led
to the Seat Perilous." (In Connecticut Yankee
Launcelot buys the Seat Perilous from Galahad after Hank
turns the Round Table into a stock exchange.) Abbey's work
was unveiled in 1901. Among the critics and reviewers who
praised his achievement was Mrs. Arthur Bell, who wrote in
The Artist: "Mr. Abbey's 'Quest of the Holy Grail'
is as fine a thing in painting as Tennyson's interpretation
of the same theme in verse, and is a proof, if proof be
needed, of the close kinship between all great thinkers of
the Anglo-Saxon race whatever their nationality." What, if
anything, Mrs. Bell thought was proven by MT's prose
interpretation of the theme is not known.
Color images reproduced by
permission of the Boston Public Library.
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