Penelope sits beside the loom at dawn, after a night of undoing her own work.

In Homer’s Odyssey, she is surrounded by suitors who want her to accept that Odysseus is gone and choose a new husband. So she invents a delay. She promises to marry once she has finished weaving a burial shroud for Laertes. By day, she works at the loom. By night, she unravels it.

Thomas Seddon paints the moment after the secret labour. The room is heavy with tapestries, armour, sleeping figures and the early light outside the window. Penelope is not shown collapsing in grief. She is awake, thinking, holding time together with thread.

A literary mythology art print for bedrooms, studies, reading corners and gallery walls- for rooms that understand patience can be a form of resistance.