The Beggar Maid

Herbert Blaché: The Beggar Maid (1921) with Reginald Denny and Mary Astor. Photo: IMDb.

Advertisement for the American short drama film The Beggar Maid (1921), on page 6 of the November 26, 1921 Exhibitors Herald. The lower right side of the advertisement recreates the painting "King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid" by Edward Burne-Jones. Exhibitors Herald (Oct. - Dec. 1921) on the Internet Archive. From: Wikimedia Commons.

THE BEGGAR MAID (US 1921)
    Dir: Herbert Blaché; cast: Mary Astor (Peasant Girl / Beggar Maid), Reginald Denny (The Earl of Winston / King Cophetua); 35 mm, 570 m, 27’ (18 fps), tinted, Idaho Film Collection & Boise State University / AFI.
    English intertitles.
    Wrongly announced as The Wolf’s Brush starring Nell Shipman, the film was identified by DJ Turner during the screening at the Zancanaro.
    Triart Productions, Inc. presents. SC: Reginald Denny. AD: Legaren à Hiller.
    Grand piano: Tama Karena.
    Viewed at Teatro Zancanaro, Sacile, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto (GCM): Fuori quadro, 11 Oct 2004.

Jim Beaver (IMDb): "The painter Burne-Jones and his famed painting "The Beggar Maid" are depicted in this speculative drama about the creation of the painting. Burne-Jones plays matchmaker for a young British nobleman who has fallen in love with a servant girl on his estate. The artist shows that love can thrive between members of different classes by depicting on canvas a picture from Tennyson's poem about the love of King Cophetua for a beggar maid. As he relates the story of the poem in words and through his painting, the young earl sees the application to his own situation."
    —Jim Beaver
 
"The Beggar Maid. First of a series of twelve two reel pictures dramatizing the greatest masterpieces of art, created such a sensation at the Rivoli Theatre, New York City, where audiences considered it the feature attraction that it was held over for a second week at the Rialto Theatre". Exhibitors Herald, 26 Nov, 1921, p. 6.

AA: I declare that in my country "The Beggar Maid" is not a household word, nor is "Cophetua complex". I learn from the Wikipedia article "The King and the Beggar-maid" that it started from a 16th-century broadside ballad about the African king Cophetua and his love for the beggar maid Penelophon. Shakespeare alludes to the ballad in five of his plays.

Alfred Tennyson wrote his poem on the subject in 1833, and Edward Burne-Jones created his painting in 1884. The most famous photograph by Lewis Carroll was of Alice as Beggar-Maid (1858). Further references include: Hugo von Hofmannstahl, Ezra Pound, Julien Gracq, André Delvaux, G. B. Shaw, Agatha Christie, Graham Greene, James Reeves and Alice Munro (The Beggar Maid, 1978).

The story is a byword for love at first sight and a king falling in love with a beggar maid.

There is a long and different article, "Korol Cophetua i nishchenka" in the Russian Wikipedia. 

Herbert Blaché at this stage had hardly advanced from an early cinema approach to storytelling. In the previous year he had managed to make a boring film with Buster Keaton (The Saphead, 1920), Keaton's only boring silent film.

Mary Astor made her first films in this year, 1921, at age 15.