Cecilia became the patron saint of music through what was essentially a creative misreading. Her legend says that at her wedding, while the instruments played, she sang to God in her heart. A phrase from her feast-day liturgy, cantantibus organis ("while the instruments played"), gradually turned into Cecilia playing an instrument herself, and by the Renaissance painters routinely sat her at an organ. Waterhouse, in 1895, did something stranger. He put her to sleep and let the angels play.
His source wasn't the saint's life but Tennyson again, this time "The Palace of Art" (1832). The poem follows a soul who builds herself a magnificent palace full of art and lives there alone, above ordinary people. Among its images is St. Cecily asleep in a clear-walled city by the sea while an angel watches her. The poem's point comes later: the soul slowly breaks down in her beautiful isolation and leaves the palace for a humble cottage to mourn and pray. Waterhouse painted one lovely image from a poem that is, at bottom, a warning against loving art more than people. It's the same theme as The Lady of Shalott, from the same poet, and it's hard to believe the connection escaped him.
The music in the painting is received, not made. Many artists would recognize the idea: the melody that arrives on the edge of sleep, the sentence that turns up whole on waking. The angels kneel like accompanists, and Cecilia does nothing at all. For the patron saint of musicians it's a bold picture, one that places the source of music somewhere outside the performer.
Her actual legend is much harsher. After converting her husband, Cecilia was condemned. The executioner struck her neck three times and failed to kill her, and she lived three more days. In 1599 her tomb in Rome was opened and her body was reportedly found intact. The sculptor Stefano Maderno carved her as she was said to lie, on her side with her face turned away, and the marble still rests beneath the altar of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere. Waterhouse leaves all of that out, just as he left the Lady of Shalott still alive in her boat.
Musicians have never let her go. Her feast day, November 22, produced Purcell's "Hail, Bright Cecilia," Dryden's "A Song for St. Cecilia's Day" (later set by Handel), and Benjamin Britten's "Hymn to St Cecilia," with words by W. H. Auden. Britten was born on her feast day and took it as a sign. The painting has had a dramatic life of its own. After decades when Waterhouse was dismissed as sentimental, it sold at Christie's in 2000 for about £6.6 million to Andrew Lloyd Webber, then a record for a Victorian painting, and helped bring Waterhouse back into favor.
For anyone who makes things, the painting grants a permission that's rare in a culture of constant output: rest, and let the work come to you. Its source poem supplies the other half of the lesson. Inspiration may arrive in solitude, but it's meant to be carried back out to other people.
Waterhouse's Saint Cecilia appears on our: