Charles Kendrick
“Let the Merry Cymbals sound/Gayly pipe the Pandean pleasure” from Standard Theatre: R. D’Oyly Carte’s original company in Patience as seen by Mr. Curl Darling and Miss Murry Hill from ye orchestra stalls
New York: J.M. Stoddard & Co., ca. 1881 (cont…)
(inside)
This pamphlet offers a lighthearted extension of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience. The Anglophilic New Yorkers Mr Curl Darling and Miss Murray Hill, attending the D’Oyly Carte company’s touring production of Patience at the Standard Theatre in Manhattan, adopt the mannerisms of London’s Aesthetic set, to comic effect. The illustrations, by Charles McKendrick, probably follow quite closely scenes and costumes from the New York production. The illustration “Let the Merry Cymbals sound/Gayly pipe the Pandean pleasure” closely resembles Frederic Leighton’s painting The Daphnephoria (reproduced here), which had been exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1876, and was itself a prime example of Aesthetic movement painting. The finale in Act 1 includes the line “With a Daphnephoric bound/Tread a gay but classic measure,” cementing the association. Charles Kendrick’s cover (reproduced here) employs two favorite motifs of the Aesthetic Movement, the sunflower and the crane (possibly a reference to the artist Walter Crane).
LENT BY THE IRVING S. GILMORE MUSIC LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
The Sidney Rose Collection of Gilbert and Sullivan, Box 8 Folder 9