The Rift within the Lute

The Rift within the Lute (1861) takes its title from Alfred Lord Tennyson's 'Merlin and Vivien' from Idylls of the King, where the phrase describes how a single small flaw in a marriage can gradually destroy it entirely: 'It is the little rift within the lute, / That by and by will make the music mute.' Hughes was among the Pre-Raphaelite painters most drawn to Tennyson's poetry as a source for imagery, and the psychological subject of an intimate relationship's dissolution suited his interest in depicting emotional states through body language and setting. The domestic interior in which such a scene would be set — its symbolic objects and spatial arrangement — offered opportunities for the kind of densely meaningful detail the Brotherhood prized. The Tullie House Museum in Carlisle holds this canvas, which represents Hughes working at his peak in the early 1860s, when his technical mastery and emotional intelligence were most fully integrated.

The intimate scale of the composition focuses attention on the emotional dynamics between figures. Hughes's Pre-Raphaelite precision extends to the domestic objects that carry symbolic meaning — the lute itself would be a natural prop — while the figures' positioning in space communicates their emotional estrangement without resort to theatrical gesture.