'I Usually First See a Play As a Picture': Lady Gregory and the Visual Arts (Essay‪)‬

This essay discusses the aesthetic values Lady Augusta Gregory developed through her knowledge of the visual arts and the impact they had on her dramas for the Abbey Theatre. In the process, the significant differences between Gregory and Yeats in the understanding of art and the theatre is demonstrated. Drawing on Gregory's holograph diaries, written during the years of her marriage to Sir William Gregory, the essay shows how the familiarity she acquired with a wide variety of visual art works during the Gregorys' Grand Tours of Europe in the 1880s came to play a crucial role in her development as a dramatist of the Abbey Theatre. Gregory's plays, including Spreading the News, Hyacinth Halvey, The Full Moon, The Deliverer, and The Travelling Man, are considered in relation to major works of art which influenced the compositional technique she adopted for these plays. These include works by the Spanish master Diego Velazquez, the Flemish artist Jan van Eyck, and the painters of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. In so doing, Gregory's place within the artistic milieu of late-Victorian London society is brought to the fore, highlighting her consciousness-long before her encounter with Yeats--of important debates on the question of the relationship between the Sister Arts that drew significantly upon Lessing's 1766 work on the subject, Laocoon. **********