{"product_id":"frank-dicksee-la-belle-dame-sans-merci","title":"Frank Bernard Dicksee – La Belle Dame sans Merci","description":"\u003cp\u003eJohn Keats's ballad \"La Belle Dame sans Merci\" (1819) is one of the defining texts of English Romanticism: a knight, pale and feverish, tells how he met a beautiful woman in the meadows — a fairy's child — who enthralled him, brought him to her elfin grot, and left him on the cold hillside when her spell had spent itself, where he remains, alone and desolate, dreaming of the other kings and warriors she has destroyed before him. The poem is concerned with enchantment, with the particular madness of erotic obsession, and with the condition of the artist or visionary who is consumed by his vision rather than sustained by it. Keats himself was twenty-four when he wrote it; he was dead within two years.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFrank Bernard Dicksee (1853–1928) was among the most accomplished painters of the late Victorian academic tradition, and his 1902 painting of Keats's subject translates the poem into the visual language of the Pre-Raphaelite movement — rich colour, meticulous detail, a combination of medieval imagery and frank sensuality that the Victorians found at once compelling and disturbing. The woman on horseback, in her flowing pink gown and elaborate red-and-gold tack, regards the knight with an expression that is simultaneously inviting and remote; he, horseless, looks up at her with the helpless absorption of a man already lost. The painting captures the poem's central paradox: that beauty and destruction are here inseparable.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFine Porcelain — 10 oz. Dishwasher and microwave safe.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFrank Bernard Dicksee, \u003cem\u003eLa Belle Dame sans Merci\u003c\/em\u003e, 1902, oil on canvas. Public domain.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Tazzarte","offers":[{"title":"Fine Porcelain — 10 oz","offer_id":57723407925579,"sku":"45bcccb0-a18d-44c3-983d-16d018cad4df","price":34.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"White Ceramic — 11 oz","offer_id":57724212314443,"sku":null,"price":27.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0816\/8475\/8859\/files\/LaBelleDame_Mug.png?v=1748417104","url":"https:\/\/tazzarte.com\/products\/frank-dicksee-la-belle-dame-sans-merci","provider":"Tazzarte","version":"1.0","type":"link"}