The Magic Banquet with the Lady Spell-Bound

On Michaelmas night in 1634, at Ludlow Castle on the Welsh border, the Earl of Bridgewater's household staged a masque to celebrate his new office as Lord President of Wales. The words were by John Milton, then in his mid-twenties, and the Lady at the heart of the plot was played by the earl's daughter Alice, who was 15. Her two younger brothers played the brothers who go looking for her. In the story she is lost in a wood and lured to the palace of Comus, a son of Bacchus and the enchantress Circe, who sets her in an enchanted chair she cannot rise from and offers her his cup. She refuses to drink. Blake painted that standoff. The Lady sits fixed at the left while Comus holds out the cup, and his followers crowd round the banquet with the heads of beasts, a cat, an elephant, a lion, because Milton's potion turns the faces of those who drink it into animal ones. This sheet is one of eight Blake painted for the masque. The set came to the Museum of Fine Arts as a gift from Isabella Stewart Gardner, the Boston collector who later built her own museum in the city, and the philanthropist George Nixon Black.