Endings and Beginnings
" With a final embrace, Scheherazade says goodbye to the only man she will ever love. Though she longs to remain with him, she knows that can never be. Instead, she will surrender herself to her king—even if doing so leads to her execution."
The ‘1001 Arabian Nights’ begins with the madness of a king. Brought on by the infidelity of his wife, the king murders her before vowing that every day hence he would marry a virgin, sleep with her, then have her beheaded the following morning. For many years the people of his kingdom lived in terror before Scheherazade, the daughter of the Grand Vizier, offered herself to the king with a plan that, if successful, would not only save her own life but the lives of countless other young women.
This is the Scheherazade we know from the literary classic but the book tells us nothing about how she acquired the confidence to gamble her life on the tenuous belief that she alone could put an end to the king’s murderous rage against women. The inspiration for this painting came from a scene in the contemporary novel, 'In the Days of Legends', which imagines the events that would transform Scheherazade into the heroine of the better known work.
The novel begins with Scheherazade living the pampered life of an aristocratic teenager only to have that life turned upside down by the horrific discovery of the king’s butchery and her father’s complicity in it. Desperate to get away from them, Scheherazade hastily flees the capital city only to find herself beginning an epic adventure with a man, who is at first a stranger to her, but over time she falls deeply in love with. Together they confront a series of perilous encounters where the only thing keeping them from being separated or killed is her quick thinking and newly developed talent for deception. Over the months that they are together, Scheherazade matures from a cloistered, protected innocent to a resourceful, worldly wise young woman. It's this growing realization about herself that gives her the strength to finally confront the most difficult decision she will ever have to make.
Now, overcome with emotion, Scheherazade tells her beloved that she cannot continue the journey back to his land with him while he pleads with her not to return to a most certain death.