The Words She Spake Came as Through Bubbling Honey

Will Hicock Low · 1885

Medium

Black, gray and white gouache, with traces of black chalk, on cream wove card

Original size

22.3 × 40.3 cm (8 13/16 × 15 7/8 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Impressionism

Rendered entirely in black, gray, and white gouache on cream card, this 1885 work by Will Hicock Low carries the quiet intensity of a dream half-remembered — a female figure dissolving into an atmosphere of soft tone and literary suggestion. Low trained in Paris under Carolus-Duran and Jean-Léon Gérôme in the 1870s, returning to America steeped in the French academic tradition and the broader Aesthetic Movement. His work consistently sought the meeting point between fine art and illustration, between decorative beauty and earnest feeling. The monochromatic medium here — traces of black chalk underlying the gouache — gives the composition a graphic restraint unusual for the period, while the title, drawn from Keats' *Lamia*, anchors the image in the Romantic literary world Low moved in throughout his career. Low was a close and lifelong friend of Robert Louis Stevenson, and the two shared a sensibility: that beauty, carefully handled, was itself a form of meaning. This hand-painted oil reproduction translates the work's atmospheric delicacy into the richer, warmer register of oil on canvas — preserving the original's dreamlike stillness while giving it a depth and presence suited to hanging in a home.