Amelia Opie's "Maid of Corinth" and the Origins of Art

Abstract

In "The Maid of Corinth" Amelia Opie takes as her topic Pliny's myth of the origin of painting, a popular subject for artists in Britain in the eighteenth century. Reading the poem in the context of a contemporary iconography that sometimes rendered the artist a mere instrument of Cupid's design, this article demonstrates Opie's insistence on both the original creativity of the woman artist, and the public role of creative women, situating the art arising from private feminine desire in the context of public discourse of civic virtue. In so doing the poem challenges contemporary readings of female creativity as secondary to masculine artistic genius, and thus transforms the myth from the origin of art to the origin of the female artist.

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