Paolo and Francesca, by Sir Frank Dicksee (1853–1928). Signed and dated 1895. Oil on canvas. Oil on canvas. 52 ¼ x 52 ¼ inches (130 x 130 cm) – tondo. Private Collection, image courtesy of Martin Beisly Fine Art. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
Dicksee exhibited Paolo and Francesca at the Royal Academy in 1895, no. 171. Two years later, in 1897, it was included in the exhibition held at the Guildhall Art Gallery, Loan Collection by Painters of the British School who have flourished during Her Majesty's Reign, no. 150. Simon Toll has referred to it as "one of his most tragic, passionate and beautiful compositions" (99). This picture was again influenced by Venetian High Renaissance painting. Dicksee portrays the ill-fated lovers seated on a high-back sofa. Francesca is clad in a ravishing vibrant green dress with a gold belt around her waist to which is attached her purse. Paolo wears a green-brown doublet and rust-coloured hose. His right arm rests on her right shoulder while his left hand grasps her right hand which he is kissing. Her left arm rests on his thigh. Their feet rest on a sheepskin on which lies the illuminated manuscript they were reading of the tale of Lancelot and Guinevere.
The story comes from Canto V of the Inferno of the Divina Commedia [Divine Comedy] written by Dante Alighieri. Dante and his guide Virgil encounter the adulterous lovers Paolo Malatesta and Francesca da Polenta in the Second Circle of Hell, where carnal lovers are punished. Francesca tells them the tragic story of how she and Paolo were murdered, stabbed to death by her jealous husband, Paolo's brother Giovanni. Her husband was deformed and Francesca had married him, not for love, but for political reasons. Her marriage proved to be unhappy. Unlike his brother, Paolo, the younger son of Malatesta da Verucchio, lord of Rimini, was handsome. Their affair had been precipitated by their reading an Arthurian romance about Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere:
One day, for our delight, we read of Lancelot,
How him love thrall'd. Alone we were, and no
Suspicion near us. Oft times by that reading
Our eyes were drawn together, and the hue
Fled from our alter'd cheek. But at one point
Alone we fell. When of that smile we read,
The wished smile so rapturously kissed
By one so deep in love; then he, who ne'er
From me shall separate, at once my lips,
All trembling, kiss'd. The book and writer both
Were love's purveyors. In its leaves that day
We read no more. [Canto V, trans. by Cary 20]
Anne-Florence Gillard-Estrada felt that, although Dicksee's work could be said to have been inspired by the Aesthetic Movement, it lacked the passion of a related work by Dante Gabriel Rossetti:
His treatment of Dante's couple follows Hallé's [Charles Edward Hallé] earlier model, except that he adopted the format of the tondo so that the composition may focus on the lovers. Paolo and Francesca do kiss but in a rather restrained way. As in Hallé's work, Francesca's attitude is one of devotion and muted affection. She leans against him while he holds her hand, his other arm hugging her close to him; she allows him to kiss her hand, and her limp arm on his lap signals female submission. Her open mouth and eyes may suggest abandon, but it is rather inhibited. The scene depicts a rendezvous that preserves propriety. There is none of the heady atmosphere of Rossetti's paintings. The harmony of green and brown and the eclectic setting inscribe the canvas within the Aesthetic Movement. There is a timeless sofa, and the open illuminated book lies on the floor. And yet, unlike more complex Aesthetic artworks, this painting, again, borders on genre. The traditional triangular position of the figures is taken up but this romantic scene partakes both of courtly love and of Victorian sentimentalism. [74]
Simon Toll has compared this picture to Dicksee's depiction of Romeo and Juliet:
When in 1894 Dicksee painted Paolo and Francesca he was no less emphatic in the sexual charge between the two figures. The circular format of the picture thrusts the figures closer, emphasising the intimacy between them and us as the voyeuristic witness. They almost spill out of the painting, the book tumbling forward and the looming back of the settle creating a shallow perspective. The placing of Paolo's strong hand on Francesca's shoulder pulls her closer to him as he draws her pale hand to his lips. The contrast of his golden skin with her ivory-white hand emphasises their masculinity and femininity. She has literally become weak at the knees as he draws her body closer and she leans towards him. A nude study of two models posing for the painting demonstrates Dicksee's meticulous academic preparation for his pictures but also shows that he posed nude a male and female model together, embracing. However, there is nothing lascivious in either the drawing or the finished painting – it is intimate and romantic but not louche. Dicksee was far too sophisticated a painter to descend into eroticism, preferring suggestion and allusion to overt sensuousness. [qtd. in Beisly 5-6].
A small watercolour version of this subject, dated 1894, was included a Sotheby's sale of the Leverhulme Collection held at Thornton Manor, Wirral, on June 26-28, 2001, lot 400. Although the composition was in reverse, it was otherwise essentially the same. A chalk study for the head of Francesca is reproduced in The Magazine of Art in 1895, facing p. 244. A photogravure of Paola and Francesca was published by the Fine Art Society.
The subject of Paolo and Francesca was popular amongst artists associated with the wider Pre-Raphaelite circle over an extended period of time. William Dyce's Francesca da Rimini [Paolo and Francesca] of 1837 is similar to Dicksee's portrayal, but it is an outdoor scene. G.F. Watts painted the subject of the lovers four times over a period of four decades. The first one, and the only version depicting the lovers kissing, was for a fresco mural in the Villa Carreggi near Florence in 1845. A sketch for this is in the Victoria and Albert Museum, accession no. 259-1886. His best-known version of the story is of the lovers floating eternally in an embrace through Hell that dates from 1872-74 and is in the collection of the Watts Gallery, Compton. Joseph Noel Paton did several versions of this subject. The principal version in oil, entitled The Murder of Paolo and Francesca, shows Gianciotto in the background about to murder the lovers with a dagger as they embrace and kiss. Frederic Leighton's Paolo and Francesca. "Ma solo un punto fu quel che ci vinse" of c.1860-61 is in the collection of the Salar Jung Museum, Hyderabad, India. Probably the best-known version of this story, however, is D. G. Rossetti's watercolour Paolo and Francesca da Rimini in Tate Britain that dates to 1855. It is a triptych with the left-hand panel showing the lovers exchanging a passionate kiss and the right-hand panel showing the lovers locked in an embrace and floating in Hell. Another similar version is in the Cecil Higgins Art Gallery, Bedford. Alexander Munro's marble version of Paolo and Francesca at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery dates to 1851-52. The plaster version is at Wallington in Northumbria. Charles Edward Hallé painted his oil version of Paolo and Francesca in 1888. This is the version that likely had the greatest influence on Dicksee's interpretation of the story, although the scene takes place outdoors and the positions of the lovers are reversed.
Contemporary Reviews of the Painting
Claude Phillips, the critic for The Academy, criticized Dicksee's restraint in his rather insipid treatment of the emotions of this subject, finding it "a well-balanced, academic composition in which a strenuous, but not wholly successful, effort is made to obtain beauty of colour by the careful grouping of tints. It is a more than respectable achievement, yet wholly inadequate as a rendering of this moment of passion's climax in the famous love-tragedy. On a lover so respectful as is Paolo, so remorseful before he has sinned, Francesca's relentless Lord need hardly have wreaked his vengeance" (449). The Telegraph did not find the treatment of the lovers memorable either: "The colour of the picture, if it lacks vibration, shows the painter's usual effort to secure the harmonious grouping of his colours; but the mass of apple-green in Francesca's robe is far too dominant. The lines of the group have balance and harmony, but the figures of the hapless pair do not stamp themselves on the memory" (qtd. in The Artist, 262).
A reviewer for The Art Journal, likely Robert Jope Slade, compared this work to Dicksee's other submission that year entitled A Reverie, saying that, in contrast to the other work, this one "is conceived and painted in a fashion that almost suggests the pre-Raphaelites. The lovers sit close together at the moment of Francesca's supreme surrender. Before them lies the illuminated volume of the loves of Lancelot and Guinevere, the mutual perusal of which has awakened them to the actuality of their own situation. Passion pale, in a strong green dress, the woman leans towards her lover, whose foreshortened face blanches beneath its dropping hair" (171). F.G. Stephens in The Athenaeum was more critical, deciding that the work fell short in both passion and pathos: "Paolo and Francesca (171), by the same painter, has a sort of passion in its design which, remembering what Rossetti and Sir F. Leighton have given us, is by no means satisfactory; the colour is bright and attractive, but not really harmonious nor truly fine. In short, No.171 needs profounder pathos, a deeper sort of art, and more solid qualities to justify its pretensions as a work of thoughtful and genuine purpose" (647).
Bibliography
Blackburn, Henry. Academy Notes XXI (May 1895): 50.
Cary, H.F., Trans. The Vision of Dante Alighieri, or Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. London: Dent (Everyman), 1908. Internet Archive. 5 July 2026.
Chester, Austin. "More Pictures by Modern Artists: Some Themes from History and Romance." The Windsor Magazine XXVII (January 1908): 216 & 225-27.
Christian, John. "Victorian & Traditionalist Pictures." London: Christie's (11 December 2008): lot 38. https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-5161181
"Collated Opinion upon the Exhibition of the Royal Academy." The Artist XVI (June 1895): 261-62.
Gillard-Estrada, Anne-Florence. "He, 'for ever, kissed my mouth, all quivering': Paolo and Francesca in Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic painting." Dante e l'Arte XI (2025): 61-78. https://hal.science/hal-05349813/document
Phillips, Claude. "Fine Arts. The Royal Academy." The Academy XLVII (25 May 1895): 449-50.
"The Royal Academy of Arts, 1895." The Art Journal New Series XXXIV (June 1895): 161-81.
"The Royal Academy Exhibition." The Times (4 May 1895): 12.
Spielmann, Marion H. "'The Royal Academy Exhibition – I". The Magazine of Art XVIII (1895): 244.
Stephens, Frederic George. "Fine Arts. The Royal Academy." The Athenaeum No. 3525 (18 May 1895): 646-48.
Toll, Simon. Frank Dicksee 1853-1928 – His Art and Life. Woodbridge: ACC Art Books, 2016, cat.no. FD.1894.2, 98-100 & 232.
_____. "Paolo and Francesca." London: Martin Beisly Fine Art. https://martinbeislyfineartcatalogues.co.uk/PDF-Flip/PDF/Dicksee%20-%20Paolo%20and%20Francesca.pdf
Created 5 July 2026