American Art Collaborative

Washington Allston said that this painting represented "the singleness and unity of friendship." He posed the two women so that they suggest one figure, and they read from a shared book. In Shakespeare's comedy A Midsummer Night's Dream, Helena eloquently describes her friendship with Hermia in the third act: "So we grew together, / Like to a double cherry . . . / Two lovely berries moulded on one stem."

Like many Americans of his time, Allston was educated in the classics. He painted Hermia and Helena in England when the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was reviving Shakespeare's plays. A friend of Allston's, Coleridge felt that Shakespeare expressed human sentiment perfectly.

Exhibition Label, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2006