Erinna

A Greek Poetess

This 1845 portrait of Erinna by Rembrandt Peale hangs in the Baltimore Museum of Art in Baltimore Maryland.

In painting this imagined “portrait” of a woman lost in reverie, Rembrandt Peale validated two prime tenets of 19th-century Romanticism in art and literature. Both emotion and the mind of the artist were deemed authentic sources of aesthetic experience that painters and poets might draw upon to create meaningful works of art. Peale's subject is Erinna, a colleague of the better-known ancient Greek poetess Sappho. Erinna wrote The Distaff, lamenting the death of a friend. Nineteenth-century viewers with classical educations would have been able to indulge in reveries of their own when viewing images such as this one.

The Tate gallery has this 1864 pre-raphaelite scene of Sappho and Erinna in a Garden at Mytilene by Simeon Solomon see here.

This portrait was made with delicate hands; Prometheus my good friend,
There are people with skill equal to yours too.
Anyway, if whoever drew this girl so-true-to-life,
Had added speech, Argathrchis would be complete. -- Erinna