Customer Reviews

Maidens & Love (Collected Works)

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This slim little volume contains some of the loveliest of Sulamith Wulfing's ethereal paintings. I also own "Fairy Tales" and have seen "Motherhood," but this one remains my favorite.

~About The Art~

Wulfing's delicate and exquisitely colored artwork can give an initial impression of children's-book illustration (and I believe some of it was), with little to recommend it beyond mere decorative prettiness; but these subtly sensual, often eerie or even disturbing images tend to linger in the memory in a way that is difficult to explain.

Let me stress that I'm not ordinarily a fan of "juvenile art" or even art depicting children, as the genre mostly tends towards a tiresome and vapid sweetness, but Wulfing's work is something altogether different. For all its fanciful or fairy-tale subject matter, it can strike an occasional note of unsettling strangeness, producing that peculiar shiver at the sight of innocence just brushed by a breath of darkness.

For me, her work has the quality of some evocative half-forgotten dream with a message of mysterious personal importance. It's small wonder that Stevie Nicks credited the inspiration for many of her songs to the work of Sulamith Wulfing; it's ideal meditation material for calling forth the fey muses from the cobwebby attic or thorny forest of your imagination.

~About the Book~

There are 26 color pictures in all. Each work of art fills the righthand page, while a classic love quote (Tennyson, Shelley, Wordsworth, etc.) is printed on the page to the left. The original titles (in English, anyway) of the paintings are as follows:

Aureole ~ Prayer ~ Gesture ~ In the Temple ~ Golden Flower ~ Saint and her Jester ~ Hour of Visions ~ The Chosen One ~ White Rose ~ Nocturnal Butterflies ~ Flush of Youth ~ First Butterfly ~ Alone ~ Crown ~ To Meet Another ~ Found ~ Flame ~ Ornament ~ Before the Candlestick ~ Song of Love ~ Expectancy ~ Veil ~ Underground ~ Big Moon ~ Flower of Youth ~ Betrothed

One of my favorites is "Veil:" A fair girl with big melancholy eyes and a fantastically, intricately patterned dress sits on a throne in a curtained room, a wreath of large flowers on her head, a sheer white veil flowing down on either side of her. There is a candle on each arm of the throne, the one to her right burned out, the one to her left still lit, with an elongated flame; both strangely shaped by the halted streams of melted wax... How long has she been waiting there, and why?

Another favorite is "Big Moon," truly a species of eldritch erotica: a large full moon makes a pale-rosy-golden circle of light behind a bank of wildflowers, while a slender blond maiden lies half-reclined on the ground, her eyes closed, her long hands in her lap, her gown slipping down her shoulders to leave her small breasts bare. A tiny mouse wearing a crown sits next to her, playing the panpipes.

Obviously I recommend this book. I only wish that more of Sulamith Wulfing's artwork was available in print form, or that larger and more complete books would be published with collections of her paintings.

Sulamith Wülfing (1901 - 1989) was a German artist who specialized in fantasy art and children's books. Her work seems to have derived its inspiration from the Victorian Romantic/Fairy Tale illustrators (most particularly Arthur Rackham) and the Pre-Raphaelites.

Each delicately tinted illustration in "Maidens & Love" is accompanied by an appropriate verse by poets such as Alfred Lord Tennyson ("Dainty little maiden, whither would you wander?") and Sir Walter Scott ("What shall be the maiden's fate? / Who shall be the maiden's mate?").

Gorgeous textiles, jewels, moths, gothic arches surround the inward-looking maidens, their eyes either cast-down or black with atropine-drugged pupils. Their hair floats and curls like pale seaweed. They do not appear to require Earthly nourishment. Many are madonnas. All are ethereal. Long tapering white fingers gently gesture or pray or loiter palely on gorgeously textured robes.

I originally bought "Maidens & Love" as a gift, but after I looked through the illustrations and poems (the book is very small--about 4.5 x 6 inches--rather like one of those inspirational card-sized tomes you can pick up at Hallmark for Mother's Day or Easter), I couldn't decide on a recipient. Certainly not my nieces, who are too young to realize that such idealized beauty is not worth pining after (I bought one niece an archery set, and the other a book about horses).

Finally, I decided to keep the book for myself and enjoy it as art for art's sake. I might even break out my watercolors and attempt to copy one of Wülfing's illustrations. They may not be 'great art' but they are hauntingly beautiful.

More for a collector and/or great little gift/book.

I love the Artist myself.