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Lot Essay
Holst was the son of a Latvian music master who settled in London in 1807. In the 1820s Holst became a pupil of Fuseli, and like him specialised in literary subjects with an emphasis on the macabre and supernatural. This painting shows a scene from the legend of Faust, as retold by the German playwright Goethe, where the scholar Faust plays dice for his soul against Mephistopheles, an agent of the Devil.
Holst exhibited several pictures with similar daemonic themes towards the end of the 1830s as a review of The Dice and another shown in 1838 at the Society of British of Artists indicates '...extraordinary pictures of the satanic school...a sprawling Mephistopholes [sic.], with every demoniac trait of face and figure exaggerated to the utmost...while a fair lady stands overlooking the board, with an untroubled placidity, scarcely less marvelous than the evil one's glassy eyes or terrible grin...' (The Athenaeum, 31 March 1838, p. 241.)
Holst exhibited several pictures with similar daemonic themes towards the end of the 1830s as a review of The Dice and another shown in 1838 at the Society of British of Artists indicates '...extraordinary pictures of the satanic school...a sprawling Mephistopholes [sic.], with every demoniac trait of face and figure exaggerated to the utmost...while a fair lady stands overlooking the board, with an untroubled placidity, scarcely less marvelous than the evil one's glassy eyes or terrible grin...' (The Athenaeum, 31 March 1838, p. 241.)