Penelope

My college degree is in English Literature, but two of my roommates were art majors. My taste in art ended up drawing from my love of literature. I'm not really into contemporary books, but absolutely love older literature. My favorite artist is John William Waterhouse (1849-1917) who was an English Pre-Raphaelite painter most famous for his paintings of female characters from mythology and literature. He created more than 200 paintings, and was one of the few artists to attain fame and fortune during his lifetime.

I've shared at least one other of Waterhouse's paintings with you already. Here is another of my favorites. Penelope and the Suitors was painted in 1912.In Homer's Odyssey, Penelope is the faithful wife of Odysseus (the king of Ithaca), who keeps her suitors at bay in his long absence and so is eventually rejoined with him. (His character was known as Ulysses in Roman mythology.) She has only one son by Odysseus, Telemachus, who was born just before Odysseus was called to fight in the Trojan War. She waits twenty years for the final return of her husband, during which she has a hard time snubbing marriage proposals from 108 suitors. On Odysseus's return, disguised as an old beggar, he finds that Penelope has remained faithful. She has devised tricks to delay her suitors, one of which is to pretend to be weaving a burial shroud for Odysseus's elderly father Laertes, and claiming that she will choose a suitor when she has finished. Every night for three years, she undoes part of the shroud, until some unfaithful maidens discover her chicanery and reveal it to the suitors. Because of her efforts to put off remarriage, Penelope is often seen as a symbol of connubial fidelity.

(note: descriptions taken from Wikipedia)