It is not clear whether by this ‘drawing’ Severn meant an actual drawing or the laying in of the modello now in the Tate. The project is first mentioned in a letter from Severn to Thomas Uwins of 10 November 1827: ‘you must be content with also hearing that my not twenty but fifteen feet of the Revelations is making, and I am employed at night in making a large drawing of it so, please my stars, I shall soon begin’.
The story of Severn's altarpiece filled much of his first stay in Rome, from his arrival with John Keats in 1820 until he returned and took up residence in London in 1841. The eagle at St John's feet is his traditional symbol. However, the chaining of the dragon does not take place until Chapter XX. The chapter also mentions the war in heaven in which Michael and his angels fight against the dragon Michael's host is suggested in the sky at the left. John the Divine’, who is shown writing down his account of his vision on the Island of Patmos, the ‘woman clothed with the sun’ gives birth to ‘a man child, who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron’ while the ‘great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads’ waits ‘to devour her child as soon as it was born’. When this picture was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1838 the catalogue included a reference to Revelation XII, and continued, ‘A study for a large altarpiece, presented by the late Cardinald Weld to the Church of St. William Vaughan, German Romanticism and English Art, 1979, pp.180, 283, n.13 Gladstone as an Art Patron and Collector’, Victorian Studies, XIX, 1975, p.94 Barbara Coffey and Julian Hartnoll in Victorian Art, Sacred and Secular, exhibition catalogue, RA 1979, no.1, repr. Lit: ‘Foreign Correspondence: Rome, March 1834’, Athenaeum, 5 April 1834, p.257 ‘Fine Arts: Royal Academy’, Athenaeum,, p.363 Mrs Uwins, Memoir of Thomas Uwins, R.A., 1858, ii, pp.216, 274–5 William Sharp, Life and Letters of Joseph Severn, 1892, pp.292–3 M.R.D. Stuart Castle his executors, sold Phillips 9 April 1979 (118) bt Julian Hartnoll, sold anonymously Sotheby's 17 March 1982 (83, repr.) bt Tate GalleryĮxh: RA 1838 (35) Victorian Art, Sacred and Secular, Julian Hartnoll at Burlington Fine Art Fair, RA, September–October 1979 (1, repr.) Gladstone, sold Christie's 26 June 1875 (627, as ‘The Vision of St John in Patmos’) bt Cox. Prov: Promised as a gift by the artist to Cardinal Thomas Weld, who however died in 1837 sold 1843 to W.E.
Oil on canvas, painted area (arched top) approx. T03357 THE INFANT OF THE APOCALYPSE SAVED FROM THE DRAGON c.
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