Amy Robsart and the Earl of Leicester

Amy Robsart and the Earl of Leicester from 1827, at the Ashmolean Museum, depicts a dramatic episode from Walter Scott's novel Kenilworth (1821), in which Amy secretly marries the Earl of Leicester while the latter pursues a relationship with Queen Elizabeth I. The literary subject reflects the Romantic taste for historical romance that influenced both Bonington and his friend Delacroix during the later 1820s. Bonington, who died at twenty-five in 1828, achieved a technical mastery of watercolor and oil that astonished contemporaries including Delacroix, with whom he shared a Paris studio and who acknowledged his profound influence on French Romantic painting. The vogue for Walter Scott among French Romantic painters was enormous — Delacroix also turned to Scott repeatedly — and this collaboration of interests made Bonington's studio a center for the exchange of ideas between British and French Romanticism. The Ashmolean's holding of this work places it within the context of Bonington's English connections, despite the entirely Parisian trajectory of his brief career.

The dramatic interior scene is illuminated with warm, golden light, the period costumes rendered with rich color and meticulous attention to textile detail.