'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of the mariner, the albatross, the crew, and the child-woman who represents Life-in-Death (this image was originally withdrawn from publication as too terrifying).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.

Provenance

By descent from the artist.