Night Animals

Night Animals is a painting that came from a collaboration with the writer Adam Nicolson. He asked me to make all the pictures for his book on Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s early sojourn in The Quantock when at Coleridge’s invitation, Wordsworth joined the Coleridge family and came and worked and lived in close proximity in North Somerset on the coast together with his adored sister Dorothy, for a year or so at the end of the 18th century. The relationship between the poets was extremely close, but often fractious. Coleridge admired and loved Dorothy, though there is no proof of anything consummated beyond  an emotional connection between the two. Dorothy in turn adored her brother, and like Coleridge, believed him to have the potential of  being the great genius he became.  What is particularly interesting at this moment was that there was the great coming together of minds and ideas that kick started the romantic movement. They changed poetry: it became inclusive and connected to love and loss and the human condition in ways that were quietly revolutionary, and made connections to a corporeal way of living that became almost quantum in its ideas connecting nature to our own consciousness and interdependence that are all the rage today.  

In this painting I have tried to play out the ebb and flow of their friendships and ideas. In the end, unleashed by Coleridge’s generosity and love and Dorothy’s companionship and deeply committed self sacrifice ,Wordsworth grew in stature, wrote and developed  his Lyrical Ballards as a  sequence of poems that he kept adding  to and tinkering with for the rest of his life.  But it was while he was in Somerset that he came to the conclusion that society’s troubles were specifically urban in nature, and in his early poem, Tintern Abbey, that he wrote during this time he found the eloquence to explore this idea. It was this magical  poem that influenced my painting - TH