Gareth Working in the Kitchen at Camelot
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Brickdale, Eleanor Fortescue. Gareth Working in the Kitchen at Camelot. Watercolor Painting.
From 1909 to 1911, Brickdale produced a watercolor series of twenty-eight subjects from Tennyson's Idylls. Those watercolors constituted the bulk of her 1911 show of thirty-seven watercolors at Brown's Leicester Gallery in central London. That same year, Hodder and Stoughton brought out The Idylls of the King—a deluxe edition of the first four idylls, Enid, Vivien, Elaine, and Guinevere—that reproduced twenty-one of the Tennyson watercolors. (A smaller, cheaper standard edition, also published in 1911, contained only twelve plates.) One of the subjects not included in the published edition was Gareth working in the kitchen at Camelot. In this painting, which includes a cat, a cook, and young Gareth, each of these subjects is occupied with a different object. The cat gazes up at the fowl on the platter that Gareth holds; and the cook stares at Gareth who has taken a moment from his duties to stare out at the tournament below, an event that provides a bit of literal and psychological color in contrast to the drab kitchen where Gareth works.