神託を仰ぐ

Waterhouse showed this at the Royal Academy in 1884 with a note explaining the strange object at its heart. The oracle, he wrote, was a teraph, a human head preserved with spices and fixed to the wall, and when lamps were lit before it, diviners grew so worked up they believed they heard it whispering the future. So he paints the moment of listening. A priestess presses her ear to the embalmed head, and a half ring of seven women leans in around her, faces caught somewhere between hope and dread as they wait to hear what she has heard. The composition works like a keyhole, funneling all that attention toward one whispered answer. The picture was a hit, and Henry Tate, the sugar magnate, bought it for the collection that became the Tate.