The Valkyrie's Vigil. 1906. Watercolour and gold paint on paper. 40 x 29 inches (101.8 x 73.7 cm). Private collection, image courtesy of Peter and Renate Nahum. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
Hughes exhibited this watercolour at the Summer Exhibition of the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours in 1906, no. 68. It shows a beautiful young woman, with a melancholy expression on her face gazing into the distance, and sitting high atop a castle wall with her right arm outstretched. She is wearing a diaphanous blue-purple gown. In her left hand she grasps a sword while a winged helmet is held in the crook of her left arm. A suit of chain mail armour rests on the ledge behind her. She looks anything but the fierce warrior maiden of Norse mythology, however. In the midground can be seen a distant town by a river. In the background is a range of rugged desolate mountains. The time is twilight and the predominant tonalities are again blue, prompting the critic of The Speaker to comment that Hughes was "repeating the same blue phantasies" (3).
When this picture was with Peter Nahum at the Leicester Galleries in London he described it as: "imbued with an extraordinary and phantasmagoric character," suggesting that it "may be seen as an Edwardian contribution to European Symbolism. Its subject The Valkyrie's Vigil shows one of Odin's war-maidens who, in Scandinavian mythology, hovered over battlefields selected those warriors who were to die and conducted them to Valhalla. Hughes was certainly influenced in his choice of subject, which he returned to on several occasions, by Richard Wagner's Die Walkure, the second opera of The Ring, which had been first performed in London in 1882." The Valkyries, the second of the four operas that comprise Wagner's Ring Cycle, was particularly fashionable in the late nineteenth century.
The Valkyrie were not a particularly popular subject for Victorian artists within the Pre-Raphaelite circle. Frederick Sandys' famous wood engraving Harold Harfagr of 1862 served as the basis for his later painting Valkyrie of 1868-73. The Birmingham artist Bernard Sleigh's painting Valkyrie sold at Christie's, London, on 28 March 2007, lot 164, and his Brunhilda's Dream sold at Bonhams, London, on 30 October 2007, lot 25. The Valkyrie, as represented in Sleigh's work, represent more typical examples of how such warrior maidens are generally portrayed by nineteenth century European artists.
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Bibliography
F.J.M. "The Old Water-Colour Society'." The Speaker (14 April 1906): 3.
Lang, Paul. Richard Wagner, Visions d'artistes, d'Auguste Renoir à Anselm Kiefer. Geneva: Musée Rath, 2005, cat. 43, 165.
Osborne, Victoria Jean. "A British Symbolist in Pre-Raphaelite Circles: Edward Robert Hughes RWS (1851-1914)." M. Phil. thesis, University of Birmingham, 2009. 85.
"The Valkyre's Vigil." London: The Leicester Galleries. https://www.leicestergalleries.com/browse-artwork-detail/MTY0OTc=
Created 7 May 2026