The Meeting on the Turret Stairs – Frederic William Burton

On a spiral stair, a knight in mail catches a woman's hand as she passes and presses his mouth to her forearm. She does not look at him. Her face is bowed and turned away, her blue sleeve falling across his shoulder, and in a moment she will keep climbing. He is on his way down to the fight that kills him.

That is the whole painting. Frederic William Burton finished it in 1864.

The ballad behind it

The story is a medieval Danish ballad, which Burton knew through a translation published in Fraser's Magazine in 1855 by his friend Whitley Stokes. Hellelil, a king's daughter, loves Hildebrand, the prince who guards her. Her father sends her seven brothers to kill him. Before the fight Hildebrand gives her one instruction — whatever happens, do not speak my name — and when she cries it out to save the youngest brother, the hesitation is enough to end him.

Out of a ballad with seven corpses in it, Burton painted a kiss on a sleeve. Their faces never meet. Nothing in the picture tells you either of them is about to die, except that every line of it — the descending stair, the turn of her body, the mail across his back — has them already moving in opposite directions.

The full story of the painting — the ballad, the vote, and the man who gave up painting at fifty-eight — is here.

Why you can almost never see it

The original is watercolour and gouache on paper, 95.5 × 60.8 cm, and it hangs in the National Gallery of Ireland as NGI.2358, bequeathed by Margaret McNair Stokes — Whitley's sister — in 1900. Gouache on paper fades, so the Gallery keeps it in a light-protective cabinet and brings it out for two hours a week: Thursdays from 11.30am and Sundays from 2pm, in Room 20, at lowered light.

Which is the strangest thing about the best-known painting in Ireland. Almost nobody has stood in front of it. In 2012 an RTÉ and An Post public vote made it Ireland's favourite painting — it took 22% and put Caravaggio's The Taking of Christ second — and most of the people who voted for it knew it from photographs. In 2026 it found a new audience on TikTok, and the Sunday queue now runs back out into the courtyard.

So most people who love this painting live with it in another form.

The print

Printed on 250gsm archival matte fine art paper with pigment inks — acid-free, uncoated, off-white. The tonal transitions in the blue of Hellelil's robe are the whole picture, and matte paper holds them; the mail and the stonework carry their detail at both sizes.

• 30 × 45 cm / 12 × 18″
• 60 × 90 cm / 24 × 36″
• Unframed, or framed in white, black or natural wood — solid FSC-certified timber, shatter-resistant glazing, delivered ready to hang

Also available on stretched canvas. More of Burton's work is in the Frederic William Burton collection, and the wider Irish art prints collection.

Every print is open edition, made to order and shipped worldwide free. There is no numbered run and no reason to hurry.

The original: Frederic William Burton (1816–1900), Hellelil and Hildebrand, the Meeting on the Turret Stairs, 1864. Watercolour and gouache on paper, 95.5 × 60.8 cm. National Gallery of Ireland, NGI.2358. Bequeathed, Margaret McNair Stokes, 1900.