Agamemnon1.0069_CollierGuildhall

John Mahler Collier, “Clytemnestra,” 1882, Guildhall Art Gallery, London

Collier painted portraits of living individuals primarily, but he also engaged several treatments of mythological women (from classical and other mythologies). No other treatment of Collier's Oresteia survives beyond his Clytemnestras. This painting is a second version of the same theme, the first hanging in the Worcester City Museum & Art Gallery.
Together, Collier's Clytemnestras manifest how the artist's "paintings of women suggest [his viewpoint and a common fear among contemporary males] that females have dangerous occult powers or latent destructiveness." (Kestner, Mythology and Misogyny (1989), 293.)

Agamemnon1.0069_CollierWorcester

A black and white photo of a woman in an ornate skirt, bare-chested, standing in a decorated room.

It is also useful to compare Collier's Clytemnestra with Guerin's "Clytemnestra" (1817) at the Louvre.

Woman in ancient garb, headpiece, holding an axe, stands in a doorway with a patterned curtain, blood visible.

Clytemnestra emerges from the presence of Agamemnon holding the drapery back in such a way that our eye is invited to look for Agamemnon and Cassandra (and Aegisthus?) in the darkness within. The blood dripping from the axe offers a sure clue for interpreting the moment.

Collier's queen exhibits a frightening facial expression. His Clytemnestra defiantly invites the viewer's gaze to enter the chamber behind her and explore its darkness.

Collier’s stylized decor evokes Mycenaean archaeological discovery that were coming to light in the artist’s day; but it is mostly his own contrivance.

"Collier had a distinct taste for the theatrical, amply demonstrated by his Priestess of Delphi, even more so by Clytemnestra. The late nineteenth-century taste for pictures of devouring females was allowed full rein in its treatment of some of the more terrifying females of antiquity. ... Had he wished to, Collier could have made an ideal director or designer for early Hollywood epics.: C. Wood Olympian Dreamers: Victorian Classical painters, 1860 - 1914 (London 1983), 215.

An anonymous reviewer of Thackeray's Vanity Fair compared Becky Sharp to Clytmnestra: "[clytemnestra] is the most awful figure in antique romance; and she is, besides, the heroine of the mightiest tragedy ever written. ... She is the heroic type of the adulteress — high of heart, bloody of hand, magnificent in iniquity ... [a] tremendous Murderess." (cited in Kestner, 294).