Illustrations from 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The Art Fund presented this series of 7 illustrations to the museum in memory of its late director, Dr Robert Woof. 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' grew out of the intense creative relationship between Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth in the late 1790s. Peake's illustrations are among the most powerful especially his depiction of suffering: of the mariner, the albatross, the crew, and the child-woman who represents Life-in-Death (this image was originally withdrawn from publication as too terrifying). Peake's drawings nevertheless succeed in conveying the elusive redemptive possibilities that Coleridge imagines in the poem but never quite captures.