Henry Nelson O'Neil, A.R.A.

This painting illustrates Byron’s Don Juan, Canto II, Verses 110-12. Following his exile from Seville Don Juan travels to Cadiz but his ship is destroyed in a shipwreck and the survivors become cannibalistic, insane and die leaving Don Juan alone on the longboat that had saved them from a watery doom. He eventually reaches an island in the Cyclades and is found exhausted and unconscious on the shore by Haidee, the daughter of a villainous pirate. She takes him to a cave to recover and she and her maid Zoe nurse him back to health. Despite not speaking or understanding each other’s language Don Juan and Haidee fall in love but as they celebrate their union, Haidee’s father Lambro, who was thought to be dead, returns to the island. Disliking Don Juan, Lambro enslaves him and sends him to Constantinople, leaving Haidee to die of despair.

O’Neil’s 1870 canvas was painted only a year after Ford Madox Brown painted his first version of The Finding of Don Juan by Haidee, a watercolour (National Gallery of Australia, Melbourne). It is unlikely that O’Neil would have seen that watercolour but he may have seen the book illustration for a highly popular volume of the English poets edited by William Michael Rossetti and published by Moxon.