Hi,
The subject of my painting/collage entitled
" Dotty in Diodati - Byron and Friends go mad on Lake Geneva" relates to Byron's very happy stay at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva which he leased the Summer of 1816 having fled England in the wake of his own notoriety brought about by scandalous stories regarding his alleged incestual relationship with his half-sister Augusta Leigh. In addition, he was escaping his creditors who had sent the Bailifs to his leased property at 13 Piccadilly. Byron left these shores vowing never to return, effectively ending his marriage to Annabella Millbanke, the mother of his young daughter Ada who, in turn, believed all the gossip and was appalled at Byron's cruel and immoral behaviour. Accompanying Byron into exile was his faithful valet William Fletcher, a young footman Robert Rushton, a Swiss guide Berger and and his doctor John Polidori. They landed at Ostend and made their way through Belgium in a large Napoleonic Coach bought by Byron for £500. They arrived at De Jean's Hotel D'Anglettere at Secheron, near Lake Geneva exactly a month later. Staying at the same hotel was an erstwhile admirer/groupie & and one-night stand of Byron's called Claire Clairmont, who was in fact Mary Godwin's step-sister. Mary Godwin and her lover Percy Bysshe Shelley had eloped to France in 1814 where they indoctrinated Claire into their theories concerning "Free Love". She had returned to England and seduced Byron ; promptly falling pregnant with his child Allegra who was born on the Continent. Shelley, Mary, & Claire meet Byron and Dr Polidori at the same hotel and decide to join forces and spend time together on Lake Geneva. They celebrated their friendship by taking boats out onto the Lake and when the weather got suddenly very bad sitting by the fire in the evening talking of poetry and ghosts. From this the idea was germinated that all the members of the party should take part to in a competition to see could write the best ghost story. Dr Polidori wrote The Vampyre and Mary Godwin (later Mary Shelley) famously wroteFrankenstein, or Modern Prometheus. Byron soon rejected his own idea, but did add stanzas to his very long and very successful poemChilde Harold. Shelley like Byron was doomed never to return to England. He died by drowning while sailing a small boat the Don Juan off the coast of Viareggio, Italy. Byron, heartbroken after Shelley's death and subsequently, by his daughter Allegra demise from Typhoid at a convent at Ravenna where she had been placed, left Italy for Greece to help fight the Ottoman Turks with financial support. He died at Missolonghi, Greece in April 1824 aged 36.
My painting denotes Byron's happy sojourn at the Villa Diodati confident of his future and his creativity, surrounded by his friends and yet the spectre of his soon to born and daughter, Allegra looms as well as the spectres of Shelley's dead wife (from suicide and her unborn baby). Death also lurks upon the water - prefiguring Shelleys death from drowning. The eggs are metaphors for birth and also refer to Mary Shelley's novel Frankentstein which literary theory has subsequently dubbed 'a birthing novel' as it was considered to originate in the violence of Mary Godwin's own birth, which caused her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin's all too premature death. Death and the Romantic Movement will forever be entwined in fact and in the popular imagination. It is something of these essences that I wished to convey with my painting.
Eveline Coker
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