Illusion of truth: The im/materiality of Cayley Robinson's 'The Close of the Day' (1896)

In this paper I explore British artist Frederick Cayley Robinson’s (1862–1927) temporal and im/material meditations in his painting ‘The Close of the Day’ (1896). This artwork (that is not well known today) shows three young women in a domestic interior gathered for a meal (that is yet to be served), listening to a music box playing a tune from Mendelsohn’s “Songs without Words”. Their poses are echoed by the figures in the medieval triptych in the background that displays scenes from various “Mary” biblical episodes—all of which feature some alteration or subversion of their iconographic type to, it would appear, mould a combined narrative focused on feminine experience and a meditation on empiricism versus faith, physical materiality versus spirituality. Combined with the music box—whose tune rejects literal interpretation via the avoidance of lyrics—this artwork leans into the notion of mystery, faith and immaterial truth. While adopting Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics and techniques in its laborious realism, it closely attends to the notion of the illusionary nature of the physical world or “Maya”, as promoted within Theosophy at this time. Rejection of traditionally conceived “reality” is complemented by allusions to a Bergsonian sense of elongated time that is measured by one’s felt perception rather than mechanical technologies, and is non-linear in its construction. I interrogate the picture’s painterly realism versus its immaterial, spiritual allusions as a method to trouble the notion of visual “truth”.