William Powell Frith, R.A.

With J. Leger & Sons, London;

Where acquired by Sir David Montagu Douglas Scott (1887–1986), Kettering, by 1947, for £47.5.0.

Art Journal, 1855, p. 172;

G. Reynolds, Painters of the Victorian Scene, London 1953, p. 59, reproduced pl. 21;

G. Reynolds, Victorian Painting, London 1966, reproduced p. 48, pl. 23;

J. Maas, Victorian Painters, London 1969, reproduced p. 114.

Harrogate Corporation Art Gallery, A Festival of Britain exhibition of paintings by William Powell Frith, R.A., 1819–1909, 7 July – 30 September 1951, no. 46;

London, Whitechapel Gallery, William Powell Frith, 25 October – 1 December 1951, no. 42;

Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland, Sunshine and Shadow - The David Scott Collection of Victorian Paintings, 11 April – 2 June 1991, no. 29.

Although this painting has the mood of a Victorian genre painting, it in fact shows the writers Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Godwin at the time of their love affair in 1814. Frith, who announced himself 'a worshipper of Shelley, and [one who had] read everything respecting him that came in my way', described how in preparation for the present painting he visited the house of Shelley's son at Boscombe in Dorset, where he studied portraits of the poet and of Mary, and upon which he based their likenesses.

An earlier version of this painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy, but under the discreetly abbreviated title of The Lovers' Seat in 1876, the identity of the two figures concealed presumably because as a representation of an adulterous love affair it would have been regarded as exceptionable to contemporary moral codes. Frith may have not been entirely satisfied with the treatment that he had given to the two figures, as he suggested in his autobiography, and perhaps worked on it further the following year, dating it accordingly.

Shelley had previously married Harriet Westbrook, with whom he had eloped to Edinburgh in 1811, but relations between them broke down after the birth of their two children. Shelley then met and fell in love with Mary Godwin, with whom, together with Mary's fifteen-year-old stepsister Jane, known as 'Claire', Clairmont, he left the country, to commence a triangular love affair which would last for eight years. In 1816, Harriet drowned herself in the Serpentine, and shortly afterwards Shelley and Mary Godwin were married. In the same year she commenced her novel Frankenstein which was published in 1818.

The frame was made by a Mr Pond and was awarded a prize when displayed at the Alexandra Park International Exhibition in 1885.