The magic mirror

The subject of this painting is from Sir Walter Scott’s poem 'The lay of the last minstrel' (1805). The lovesick Earl of Surrey – courtier, soldier and poet at the court of Henry VIII – is awestruck before an apparition of ‘the fair Geraldine’, to whose lifelong service he had devoted his pen. He kneels in a magic circle surrounded by an array of cabbalistic implements. The vision of Surrey’s unattainable maiden (seen reclining on a couch reading her lover’s verses) is conjured in a magic mirror by the agency of the sorcerer, Cornelius Agrippa.