Mariana is an oil painting on a mahogany panel by the English artist John Everett Millais (1829–1896), completed in 1851. The image depicts the solitary Mariana from William Shakespeare’s play Measure for Measure, who has been abandoned by her fiancé, Angelo, after her dowry was lost in a shipwreck. It shows her pausing to stretch her back while working at her embroidery.^[1][2]

When the painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1851 it was accompanied by a quotation from Tennyson’s 1830 poem of the same name:^[1]

She only said, ‘My life is dreary,
He cometh not,’ she said;
She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary,’
I would that I were dead!’

The stained-glass windows in front of Mariana depict the Annunciation of the Virgin Mary, which Millais copied from the window of the Chapel of Merton College, Oxford. The heraldic design to her right, with the Latin motto In coelo quies, meaning “In Heaven there is rest”, reflects Mariana’s wish to be dead.^[1]

The painting was accepted by the UK government in lieu of inheritance tax payable on the estate of Roger Makins, 1st Baron Sherfield, who died in 1996. It was valued at £5 million, and was allocated to the Tate Gallery in 1999.^[2][3]