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In 1801 Amelia Opie published a slim volume including the short tale The Father and Daughter and a miscellaneous collection of poems and songs. Of particular interest is "Epistle supposed to be Addressed by Eudora, The Maid of Corinth, to Her Lover Philemon, Informing him of her having traced his Shadow on the Wall while he was sleeping, the Night before his Departure: Together with the joyful Consequences of this Action."1 Described as the "most considerable" poem in the volume by the Monthly Review, "The Maid of Corinth" offers a retelling of Pliny's account of the origin of painting in Book 35 of his Natural History.2 In selecting this theme, Opie explores a subject already widely familiar to contemporary audiences. The story of the discovery of painting is simple enough, as the epigraph to the poem reveals:
Dibutades, a potter of Sicyon, first formed likenesses in clay at Corinth, but was indebted to his daughter for the invention. The girl, being in love with a young man who was soon going from her into some remote country, traced out the lines of his face from his shadow on the wall by candle-light. Her father filling up the lines with clay formed a bust, and hardened it in the fire with the rest of his earthen ware.3
By the eighteenth century, the myth was variously described as the origin of drawing, or of painting, or of art. Between 1770 and 1801, a number of artists in England produced competing versions of the tale, including Alexander Runciman's The Origin of Painting (1771), David Allan's The Origin of Painting (The Corinthian Maid) (1775), and Joseph Wright of Derby's The Corinthian Maid (1783-84). Wright's painting, like Opie's poem, was inspired by a contemporary literary version of Pliny's text found in a brief passage in William Hayley's A Poetical Epistle to an Eminent fainter (1778). Opie's use of the familiar myth as the basis for her long narrative poem is noteworthy from three perspectives. First, she comments on the autonomous creativity of the female artist through exploring the iconography of the myth which itself had by the eighteenth century developed two competing visions of the maid of Corinth as an artist, one a creative human figure possessed of unusual aesthetic...