The Accolade

By 1901 Britain had spent decades in love with an imagined Middle Ages, in Tennyson's Arthurian poems, in stained glass and painted chivalry. Edmund Blair Leighton, who specialised in these polished historical scenes, gives that taste one of its most repeated images. A young queen in white and gold lays a sword on the shoulder of a knight kneeling at her feet, the exact gesture of dubbing that the title names. Leighton took the idea from old French writing on chivalry, which noted that a lady might on occasion confer knighthood herself. He built the armour and costume with a jeweller's care for detail. The coat of arms on the knight's back has led some to identify him as a medieval Polish duke, Henry the Good.