The Sacrament of a Kiss: The Story of Ireland's Favorite Painting

If you visit the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin hoping to see its most beloved treasure, you might be disappointed. For most of the week, Frederic William Burton’s masterpiece, Hellelil and Hildebrand, the Meeting on the Turret Stairs, sits in darkness, hidden behind the closed doors of a protective cabinet. It is revealed to the public for only a few hours each week. This scarcity is not a gimmick; it is a necessity born of the painting’s delicate nature, but it has inadvertently amplified the work’s mystique, turning a viewing into a pilgrimage.

Created in 1864, the painting was voted Ireland’s favorite artwork by the public in 2012, beating out works by Jack B. Yeats and Louis le Brocquy. Its enduring power lies not just in its technical brilliance, but in the heart-wrenching story it tells—a narrative of forbidden love, silent longing, and impending doom.

The Artist and the Medium

To understand the painting, one must understand the artist, a man who defied the conventions of his time. Frederic William Burton was born in County Wicklow, Ireland, in 1816. Unlike his Victorian contemporaries who favored the durability and prestige of oil paint, Burton had an intense dislike for the medium, particularly its smell. He trained originally as a miniaturist, a discipline that requires a steady hand and microscopic attention to detail. When he eventually moved to larger scales, he never abandoned the water-based mediums of his youth.

The Meeting on the Turret Stairs is technically a watercolor (specifically gouache and watercolor on paper), yet it possesses the depth, saturation, and richness of an oil painting. Burton achieved this through painstaking layering, applying thousands of tiny, hatched strokes that give the chainmail its metallic sheen and the princess’s blue dress its velvety weight.

A Tragic Ballad

The subject matter was drawn from a medieval Danish ballad, translated into English in 1855 by Burton’s close friend, the Celtic scholar Whitley Stokes. The ballad tells the tragic tale of Hellelil, a princess, and Hildebrand, her personal guard and the Prince of Engelland. The two fall deeply in love, but their romance is discovered by Hellelil’s father, who is incensed by the breach of station. He commands his seven sons—Hellelil’s brothers—to kill Hildebrand.

The ballad is violent and bloody. It describes Hildebrand slaying the father and six of the brothers before Hellelil, unable to bear the slaughter, calls out his name, begging him to spare the youngest. In the folklore logic of the ballad, speaking his name strips him of his strength, and he is immediately struck down and killed. Hellelil subsequently dies of a broken heart.

The Moment of Silence

However, Burton chose not to paint the blood and battle. Instead, he selected a moment of quiet, unbearable tension before the violence begins. He depicts the lovers passing each other on the narrow, stone spiral of a turret staircase. It is a fleeting, stolen moment. They do not look at each other; their eyes are averted, perhaps in shame, perhaps to hold back tears. As Hildebrand descends the stairs to meet his fate, he pauses to kiss Hellelil’s arm—not her lips, but the heavy fabric of her sleeve. It is a gesture of profound reverence and restraint.

The novelist George Eliot, a close friend of Burton, was captivated by this specific detail. She wrote of the painting:

“The face of the knight is the face of a man to whom the kiss is a sacrament.”

This line perfectly encapsulates the mood of the piece. It is a spiritual union as much as a romantic one.

The composition reinforces the tragedy. The stone staircase is claustrophobic, pressing the lovers together yet signaling their separation. Hildebrand is moving downward, toward death; Hellelil is moving upward, toward a life of mourning. On the steps, Burton painted crushed flower petals, a subtle symbol of their destroyed happiness and the fragility of their lives.

A Legacy of Longing

The painting’s journey to the National Gallery is also a story of affection. It was bequeathed to the gallery in 1900 by Margaret Stokes, the sister of the translator Whitley Stokes. Margaret was a writer and antiquarian who, rumor suggests, held a lifelong, unrequited love for Burton himself, adding yet another layer of longing to the painting’s history.

Today, the restricted viewing times serve to protect the light-sensitive pigments, but they also preserve the painting’s emotional impact. When the cabinet is finally opened, viewers are invited to step into that private, silent stairwell for a brief moment, witnessing a farewell that has resonated for over a century. In an era of loud, immediate imagery, Burton’s masterpiece remains a testament to the power of what is left unsaid.