The White Owl (1856)
by William James Webbe (English, 1830–1904)
"Alone and warming his five wits,
the white owl in the belfry sits."
— Alfred Lord Tennyson, Song — The Owl (1830)
A barn owl perches in the stone arch of a belfry, white against the dark. He is not hunting. He is not sleeping. He is simply there, in the way that owls are — completely still, completely present, entirely indifferent to being observed.
William James Webbe was a British painter associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, known for his meticulous, close-observed studies of birds and animals rendered with the movement's characteristic attention to natural detail. He exhibited at the Royal Academy throughout the 1850s and 1860s, and his animal paintings were admired for their combination of scientific accuracy and painterly warmth.
The White Owl was exhibited with the Tennyson lines as its title — a common Pre-Raphaelite practice of anchoring a painting to a literary source. The poem, written when Tennyson was twenty-one, is a short lyric about solitude and the particular quality of stillness that belongs to owls and to dusk. Webbe's painting earns the quotation: the owl in the belfry has exactly the quality Tennyson describes — self-contained, unhurried, warming his five wits in the dark.
Rectangle Canvas Wrap
Gallery-quality canvas with fade-resistant inks and a 1.25" deep pine frame sourced from renewable forests. Arrives wrapped and ready to hang.
- Materials: cotton and polyester composite canvas, pine wood frame
- Inner frame: radiata pine from renewable forests
- Leveling bumpers included for wall protection
- Ready to hang — mounting hardware pre-attached
Care: Dust gently with a clean, damp cloth as needed.