![Image of page [frontispiece]](http://www.rossettiarchive.org/img/thumbs_small/s173.r-1.s.jpg)
page: [frontispiece]
Venus Verticordia.
D.G. Rossetti, pinx.
Walter L. Colls. Ph. Sc.
Figure: Replica of
Venus Verticordia.
“Venus stands naked amongst a mass of
honeysuckle and cluster of pink roses ... in her hand an apple ... and
a dart .... Minor variation in the action of the dart and the pose of
the hands, also in the fall of the hair, here worn in a fringe on the
forehead; the butterflies on the halo omitted, but one is poised on
the apple.”
Surtees, p. 99-100
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI
By
F. G. STEPHENS
Author of
“Celebrated
Flemish and French Pictures”,
“Landseer”, etc.
Note: There is an insignia included which is oval in design with ornamental
laurel leaves surrounding it to form a rectangle. In the center is
the title of the series (of which this work is a part) and the name of the
editor, all surrounded by elaborate scrollwork. Below this are two
circular head and shoulders portraits in three-quarter profile. Text
in illustration: THE PORTFOLIO. Artistic Monographs Edited by
P. G. Hamerton. Raffaello / Sanzio, Rembrandt / Van Rym.
London
Seeley and Co. Limited, Essex Street, Strand
New York, Macmillan and Co.
1894
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI
PAINTER AND POET
NOWHERE in Time's vista, where the forms of great men gather
thickly, do we see many shapes of those who, as painters and as poets
have been alike illustrious. Among the few to whom, equally on
both accounts, conspicuous honours have been paid, none is superior to
Rossetti, of whose genius doubly exalted the artists say that in design he
was pre-eminent, while, on the other hand, the most distinguished poets
of our age place him in the first rank with themselves. As to this pro-
digious, if not unique, distinction, of which the present age has not yet,
perhaps, formed an adequate judgment, there can be no doubt that with
regard to the constructive portion of his genius Rossetti was better
equipped in verse than in design.
It is certain that our subject looked upon himself rather as a painter who wrote than as a verse-maker who painted. It is
probable
that the very facility, which, of course, had been won with enormous
pains, and was maintained with characteristic energy and constant
care, of his literary efforts led Rossetti to slightly undervalue the rare
gifts of which his pen was the instrument, while, as to painting, his
hard-won triumphs with design, colour, expression, form, and visible
beauty of all sorts seemed to him the aptest as well as the most successful
exponents of the passionate poetry it was, by one means or the other, his
object to make manifest. His mission was that of a poet in art as in
verse, and, by devoting the greater part of his life and all his more
arduous efforts to the former means, he made it plain that, notwithstanding all obstacles, the palette served his purpose
better than the pen.
I refer thus emphatically to Rossetti's genius in its double form as well as to the inevitable division of his energies which
attended that
circumstance, because, while I wonder at his achievements and know how
great were the powers he employed, I cannot help thinking that a less
complex nature than his would have done still more than, so far as time
and space allow, these pages have to report of and illustrate.
Gabriel Charles Dante was the elder son, and, his sister Maria
Francesca being his senior, the second child of Gabriele Rossetti and
Frances Mary Lavinia, his wife, born Polidori; she wrote some poems
and educational books of value, and died several years ago. William
Michael, third child of this union (born in 1829), is the still living
accomplished writer on poetry and art, and the tenant of a high post in
the Inland Revenue Department, Somerset House. The fourth child
is Miss Christina Georgina Rossetti (born 1830) whose
Goblin Market
attests her to be one of the most distinguished poetesses of this
century. Gabriele Rossetti was descended from an Italian family of
some renown, whose original name was Della Guardia, and he was
born in 1783 at Vasto d'Ammone, in the Abruzzi, the son of one
Domenico, who was connected with the iron trade of that town.
Gabriele, a man of culture, whose specialty was in profound studies of
Dante—whence one of the names of his elder son—removed to Naples,
and held an honourable office as custodian of antique bronzes in the
then Bourbon Museum of the capital. This post and all his other
possessions were forfeited in 1820, when he joined in revolutionary
movements against Ferdinand I., King of the Two Sicilies, which, by
the aid of the Austrians, were defeated and the chiefs proscribed. Among
them Rossetti took refuge at Malta in 1822, and, ultimately, in London,
where he arrived in 1825, and in the next year married the above-named
lady, who was a daughter of Signor Gaetano Polidori, a secretary of
Count Alfieri, the Italian poet and supposed second husband of Louisa
of Stolberg, Countess of Albany, wife and widow of Charles Edward
Stuart, the besotted Young Pretender. The wife of Signor Gaetano was
a Miss Pierce, an Englishwoman. Besides the lady who became Mrs.
Gabriele Rossetti, Gaetano had for his son Dr. Polidori, one of Lord
Byron's physicians, with whom his lordship fell foul in a certain
Epistle
from Mr. Murray
, and who, with other things in verse and prose,
wrote a sanguinary novelette called
The Vampire, which still retains its
shadow of a reputation. Arrived in London Gabriele Rossetti maintained
himself as a teacher of his native tongue, and succeeded so well in that
capacity that the Professorship of Italian in King's College was offered
to him and accepted in 1831.
As might be expected of one possessing so many accomplishments and
whose career had been marked by so much courage, the professor was a
man of striking character and aspect, so that when I was introduced to
him in 1848, and his grand climacteric was past, and, as with most
Italians, a life of studies told upon him heavily, I could not but be
struck by the noble energy of his face and by the high culture his
expression attested, while a sort of eager, almost passionate, resolution
seemed to glow in all he said and did. To a youngster, such as I was
then, he seemed much older than his years, and while seated reading at a
table with two candles behind him and, because his sight was failing,
with a wide shade over his eyes, he looked a very Rembrandt come to
life. The light was reflected from a manuscript placed close to his face,
and, in the shadow which covered them, made distinct all the fineness
and vigour of his sharply moulded features. It was half lost upon his
somewhat shrunken figure wrapped in a student's dressing-gown, and
shone fully upon the lean, bony, and delicate hands in which he held
the paper. He looked like an old and somewhat imperative prophet,
and his voice had a slightly rigorous ring speaking to his sons and
their visitors. Near his side, but beyond the radiant circle of the
candles—her erect, comely, and very English form, and face remarkable
for its noble and beautiful matronhood, and but half visible in the
flickering glow of the fire—sat Mrs. Rossetti, the mother of Dante
Gabriel. He too, leaning his elbows upon the table and holding his
face between both hands so that the long curling masses of his dark
brown hair fell forward, sat on the other side, his attenuated features
sharply outlined by the candle's light.
It is not certain whether the scene which thus impressed my
memory was presented at No. 38, Charlotte Street, Portland Place,
one of those then very “respectable,” but dull, and now much deteriorated
opposing lines of brick walls, with rectangular holes in them, which
Londoners call houses, where, on the 12th of May, 1828, our subject
was born, or whether No. 50 in the same street was thus signalised.
To the latter house the Rossetti family migrated about the time in
question. It is fortunate that a “Board” has not, as in many neigh-
bouring regions, changed the numbers of the houses in Charlotte Street,
and that its monkey-like activity has, for the present at least, spared
the record of a famous family. Nevertheless, the birthplace of the
Rossettis will, doubtless, some day be marked with an honourable white
stone. Certain it is that they were all born at No. 38, and that in
April, 1854, at No. 50, the ardent self-sacrificing patriotism of Pro-
fessor Gabriele Rossetti found its earthly close. Tennyson's “long
unlovely” Wimpole Street, where the Laureate was wont to stand waiting for the
- hand that can be clasped no more,
and which is close to our poet's birthplace, is not more “bald,” than that
which took its name from the ill-favoured wife of George III. Rossetti
was christened Charles after Mr. Charles Lyell, his godfather, of Kin-
norchy, Fife (whose more famous son wrote
The Principles of Geology),
Gabriel, after his father, and Dante after the illustrious poet. We know
that his first teaching was due to his mother, an accomplished and devoted
matron whose affection was, even to his latest days, ceaselessly acknow-
ledged by her son. Mr. Knight tells us the lad's first school was under
the Rev. Mr. Paul, in Foley Street, whence, in 1837, he was with his
brother, removed to King's College School, where he stayed till 1843,
and received all the advantages of that capital academy; these, however,
did not include what are now called “sports,” a circumstance which of
course had not a little influence on his character in after life.
1
Transcribed Footnote (page 8):
1 It has been said that Rossetti shared at least some of the athletic proclivities and aptitudes of British youth, and was
accustomed to enjoy energetic exercises. This is
quite a mistake, for, although he was in youth a tolerably good walker, he never excelled
in that respect. It was an error which has made him appear as a rower; indeed, I
remember when in my boat he proposed, because it was in his way, to throw over-
board one of the stretchers (!); he never cared to swim, and, if he rode at all, he could
not be called a rider. The fact is that, when he pleased, which, until his later days,
was both often and long, no one worked harder than Rossetti; but, as a glance at his
frame and face amply attested, his energy was not physical. In after life he deplored
his youthful neglect of school games and struggles of the more manly kind.
At King's College School the Italian professor's son acquired, as his
brother tells us, “an education in Latin, French, and the rudiments of
Greek.” Italian was, of course, his customary, if not his native tongue;
to these collectively considerable attainments must be added a “certain
knowledge of German,” which was more than enough to enable him to
read in that language. After some tentative and rather “boyish”
literary efforts, resulting in an experimental drama, and a prose romance
or two, one of which was printed by his grandfather, Mr. Gaetano
Polidori, Rossetti determined to become an artist. This was in the
autumn of 1843, a date which, however, must not be taken as that of
the youth's beginning to draw. Indeed, his brother tells us that our
subject was even then a member of a sketching club, and the same
authority still possesses some drawings made in ink to illustrate a
story of the designer's, called
Sorentino
, by means of which, by the way,
he even thus early appears in that double capacity of author and artist
which always obtained with him. The influence of Retzsch and his
once-famous
Outlines anent
Faust was manifest in all the productions of
this category by Rossetti, as well as all his colleagues of the P-R.B. who
could draw, that is six of the seven. Every one of these was accus-
tomed to make designs in this manner. Thus, some of the finest
“inventions” of Sir John Millais's most brilliant youth were, with
stringent care and delicacy, put upon paper. That influence is manifest
in the beautiful outlined design called
Genevieve
, which charms us
in this text, and has not been reproduced till now.
There is no doubt that Rossetti's systematic training as an artist was
begun in 1843, and at Mr. Cary's then well-known academy, which
stood at the south-east corner of Charlotte Street and Bainbridge Street,
Bloomsbury. It was a capital drill-ground for drawing from the
antique, beyond which step of his training Rossetti did not pass in that
place, including drawing from the human skeleton, but not painting.
Here, with frequent excursions into the realms of poetry proper, he
remained, I fear, in a somewhat desultory mood, rather less than three
years, during which period he prepared the drawing of a statue, then
demanded by the Royal Academy ere its tyros were admitted as
Probationers to the Antique School in Trafalgar Square. In July, 1846,
he was admitted a Student of the Academy. “I saw,” says a fellow
student, “Rossetti, whom Fame of a sort had preceded, enter the school
with a knot of Probationers, who, as if to keep each other in coun-
tenance, herded together. All their forerunners turned, as was natural,
to the door of the room, and noticed among the freshmen the saturnine,
thin, and for a youth of nearly eighteen, not well-developed tyro other
‘Caryites’ had talked of as a poet whose verses had been actually
printed, and whom they described as a clever sketcher of chivalric and
satiric subjects, who, in addition, did all sorts of things in all sorts of
unconventional ways. Thick, beautiful, and closely curled masses of
rich brown much-neglected hair, fell about an ample brow, and almost
to the wearer's shoulders; strong eyebrows marked with their dark
shadows a pair of rather sunken eyes, in which a sort of fire, instinct of
what may be called proud cynicism, burned with a furtive kind of energy,
and was distinctly, if somewhat luridly, glowing. His rather high cheek-
bones were the more observable because his cheeks were roseless and
hollow enough to indicate the waste of life and midnight oil to which the
youth was addicted; close shaving left bare his very full, not to say
sensuous, lips and square-cut masculine chin. Rather below the middle
height, and with a slightly rolling gait, Rossetti came forward among his
fellows with a jerky step, tossed the falling hair back from his
face, and, having both hands in his pockets, faced the student world
with an
insouciant air which savoured of defiance, mental pride and
thorough self-reliance. A bare throat, a falling, ill-kept collar, boots
not over familiar with brushes, black and well-worn habiliments,
including, not the ordinary frock or jacket “of the period,” but a very
loose dress-coat which had once been new—these were the outward and
visible signs of a mood which cared even less for appearances than the
art-student of those days was accustomed to care, which undoubtedly
was little enough. Apart from all these unconventionalities one saw at a
glance that the partial slovenliness of the newcomer was far from being a
sign of mere vanity affecting pride and, in contempt for others, seeking
to be singular.” It must be remembered that Rossetti had all his life been
accustomed to meet in his father's house poets, scholars, and patriots of
mark. When he entered the Academy he was by no means unknown,
many a “Caryite” had preceded him from Bloomsbury, and not a few
turned to welcome him to the Antique School.
In that school Rossetti worked somewhat less than was desirable,
intermittently, and as if without a serious intention to profit by it to the
utmost; nor did he ever pass to the higher grades of the Life and
Painting Schools. It is clear that literature, abundant reading and
writing poetry were his chief delights till about March, 1848, when,
much stirred by the vigorous and noble design of Madox Brown's
Parisina
, which he saw at the British Institution in 1845, and thus
strengthened impressions due to the same fine artist's contributions to
the Westminster Hall Exhibitions of 1844 and 1845,
1 and, above all,
to the pathos and originality of Brown's picture in the “Free Exhibition”
at Hyde Park Corner in 1848, he wrote to the latter expressing the
highest admiration of his works, and begged for lessons in painting, in the
technique of which our subject had, it is beyond question, made no con-
siderable progress. This appeal was made in such enthusiastic terms that
as, with a great deal of humour, Brown was wont to tell in after years, the
recipient fancied such compliments were not unlikely to cover an inten-
tion to “make fun” of him. Brown therefore, before calling on his
would-be pupil, provided himself with a thick stick and sallied forth,
intending to use it if need be. To Charlotte Street he went, and seeing
“Mr. Rossetti” on the doorplate was partly reassured, but held to the
cudgel until the young Rossetti's manifest sincerity disarmed all sus-
picion and, finally, impelled Brown so warmly that he then and there
undertook the office of a teacher, not for fees, but entirely for the love of
art, and in order to be helpful to one so anxious and so deeply moved.
Rossetti himself was wont gleefully to tell his intimates that the first
result of Brown's teaching was dismay, because the subject set before
the pupil for accurate and stringent imitation was a group of jars,
such as pickle-pots, or some such things, in still life, the uncom-
promising prose of which did not suit the aspirations of the tyro.
Nevertheless, there can be no doubt whatever that to Brown's guidance
and example we owe the better part of Rossetti as a painter
per se,
although his will to study with tenacity, and thus command success,
might have been stiffened by the encouragement and example of Mr.
Holman Hunt, apart from which, I fear the latter-named student was not
Transcribed Footnote (page 11):
1 These were
The Body of
Harold brought to the Conqueror
, a cartoon, 1844, and
Justice, 1845.
the fittest guide for a genius like Rossetti, who very soon departed from
the uncompromising principles of the indomitable friend who had neverbeen, even for an hour, his model in art. Rather had
the brilliant and
happy power of Millais, one of the truest painters of the age and a
born artist, been as light before the subject of these pages. Rossetti
was considerably behind his friends. Brown was his senior by seven
years, and a thoroughly trained artist, who had exhibited in this country
in 1841; Millais was a Gold Medal Student in the Royal Academy
before the foundation of the P-R.B., and an exhibitor in 1846; while
Mr. Holman Hunt, an exhibitor from the last-named year, had passed
through ordeals of practice and training of the most self-exacting
stringency, far beyond what Rossetti, although he had never departed
from the conviction that his chief function was painting, and not poetry, had submitted to.
Desiring to become a thoroughly trained painter, Rossetti wrote to
Brown. It appears that, with greatly increased admiration of Brown's
skill and genius, Rossetti had seen besides
Parisina
, and other instances
at the British Institution, that artist's contribution to the “Free
Exhibition of Modern Art,”
1 which in the spring of 1848, was formed
near Hyde Park Corner. This noteworthy and epoch-marking instance was named
The First Translation of the Bible into English
, or, more aptly,
Wickliffe reading his Translation of the New Testament to Johnof Gaunt. Painted in 1847-8, it was No. 216 at the gallery in question, where it attracted much attention, aroused abundant controversies,
and, above all, allowing for the idiosyncrasies of the artist, was the first Pre-Raphaelite picture of the original stamp
ever produced. It
Transcribed Footnote (page 12):
1 This gallery was afterwards known as the Portland Gallery, and removed to Regent Street, where it survived till 1861. It
was originally held in the
ci-devant Chinese Gallery, Hyde Park Corner, and filled a long, well-lighted brick building standing on a site in the rear of the present
Alexandra Hotel, and originally constructed for the exhibition and sale of Chinese and Japanese
bric à brac. The time not being ripe for an adequate development of that cult of quaintness and strong colour which has culminated in
the wildest Impressionism, so-called, of which we are now witnessing the decline and fall, the Chinese Gallery, as an exhibition,
came to grief in a year or two. It gave way to the “Free Exhibition,” as it was humorously called, because there was nothing
free about it, the artists paying for their places, besides a percentage on the prices of their pictures when they sold them
there, while the public paid forthe privilege of seeing them as well as for the catalogues which described them.
was, of course, exhibited months before the foundation of the Brotherhood in the autumn of 1848, and undertaken while the
P-R.Bs. proper were still in their original darkness. A happy combination of Italian taste, and the technique of the Low Countries
of the pre-Rubensian epoch, the gravity, energy, high finish, and pure and brilliant coloration of this noble piece had, as
I said in the
Portfolio of 1893, p. 66, profound effects upon the painters of the Brotherhood.
It was in the autumn of 1848, that Rossetti, finding the accommodation of the paternal house in Charlotte Street too limited
for his purpose, joined Mr. Holman Hunt (with whom he had not previously been particularly intimate) in renting a studio at
the then No. 7 Cleveland Street, Fitzroy Square, a house which stood next to the south-west corner of Howland Street, before
one reaches the workhouse. It was, even then, a dismal place, the one big window of which looked to the east, and through
which, when neither smoke, fog, nor rain obscured the unlovely view, you could see the damp, orange-coloured piles of timber
a neighbouring dealer in that material had, within a few yards of the room, piled in monstrous heaps upon his backyard. In
this forlorn quarter Rossetti began his first picture in oil that deserved the name, although, as already intimated here,
certain tentative experiments in portraiture with that vehicle had exercised him with more severity than success. Nothing
could be more depressing than the large gaunt chamber where the young artist executed two memorable pictures and from which
posterity must perforce date the inception of Pre-Raphaelitism of the primitive and stringent, not to say hide-bound sort.
Except early in the morning, nothing like that fulness of light which painters now demand was obtainable where the dingy walls,
distempered of a dark maroon which dust and smoke stains had deepened, added a most undesirable gloom. The approach to it
was by a half-lighted staircase up which the fuss and clatter of a boys' school kept by the landlord of the house, and too
often dashed with sounds of chastisement and sorrow, frequently arose; add to these uncomely elements a dimly lighted hall,
surcharged by air of which the damp of the timber yard was not the only source of its mustiness, and a shabby out-at-elbows,
giving access from the street that, even then, was rapidly “going down in the world.” It was sliding so to say, to its present
zero of
rag and bottle shops, penny barbers, pawnbrokers and retailers of the smallest possible capital. Such was the place where
Mr. Holman Hunt, then in his twenty-first year, and Rossetti, who had not completed his second decade, met and began to work
out their destinies. The former, who on that occasion left his father's house, was the master of a good deal less than a hundred pounds, being
the price, or what remained of that sum, for which he had sold to a prize holder of the “Art Union,”
1 his noteworthy No. 804 in the Academy of 1848, entitled
The Flight of Madeline and Porphyro
, an illustration of Keats's
Eve of St. Agnes.
It was an excellent example which, without the least quality of Pre-Raphaelitism, attested the remarkable skill of the artist
and his rare sense of the picturesque in design. He had before this time painted, besides pot-boiling portraits, two or three
less ambitious works.
Rossetti was yet, apart from the studio, a member of his father's family, and, unlike his comrade, still, being so young,
dependent upon his father, but resolutely devoted to art, that is to say to the expression of the poetry of his nature by
means of painting, rather than in verse. It is the more to his honour that, while his facility in verse was rare, brilliant,
and great, he had at this period to undergo agonies of toil and passionately to, so to say, tear himself to pieces, while
he became a painter according to the lofty standards of Madox Brown, Holman Hunt, and John Millais. These, as well as other
friends of his, witnessed the greatness of the struggle and honoured accordingly the
Transcribed Footnote (page 14):
1 This was the now deceased Mr. Charles Bridger, a well-known archæologist and antiquary, whose
Index to Printed Pedigrees has proved the value of his services. The prize was £60 or thereabouts, for the winner being a friend of mine, I negotiated
the business, but forget the exact sum in question.
Transcribed Footnote (page 14):
2 Millais, too, had exhibited at the Academy in 1846, his
Pizarro seizing the Inca of Peru, his
Elgiva (which he sold for £120) in 1847; his picture of
The Widow's Mite, which, with life-size figures, was at Westminster Hall in 1849, occupied this artist in 1848, so that he exhibited nothing
at the Academy in that year. There was no Pre-Raphaelitism in any of these instances, nor otherwise until the painters' contributions
to the Academy of 1849 marked their adherence to the newly pronounced principles of the Brotherhood. In March of this year
Rossetti's
Girlhood of Mary, Virgin
was shown at Hyde Park Corner, and by Brown, his splendid
King Lear
, which is now in the collection of Mr. Leathart, of Gateshead, and, as a powerful illustration of Pre-Raphaelitism a glory
of the English School, worthy to be compared with any masterpiece of Rossetti in his riper days, with
A Huguenot
, or
The Proscribed
Royalist
of Millais.
victor of that strenuous self-contest. Under these conditions, and in the studio here described Rossetti began to paint
The Girlhood of Mary, Virgin
, which is, so far as he was concerned, the first outcome of the Pre-Raphaelite views he had accepted. Whether he had adopted
them under the inspiration of one or more of his friends, or, as some have supposed, had invented them, matters little. That
he took an independent line in regard to art the work in question emphatically affirms; the truth seems to be that Brown's
influence predominated in his studies, while the mysticism of his own mind directed him where neither the dramatic intensity
of Millais and Brown, still less the stringent realism of
Mr. Holman Hunt, had any power. The design was certainly made rather early in 1848, probably before going to Cleveland Street.
How independent that line of thought and art had already become, that is how entirely free from impressions due to any of
those artists of power with whom he was then associated, I could not better demonstrate than by setting before the reader
a very sufficient, but much reduced transcript of Rossetti's design, made in fine outlines and exquisitely drawn, to illustrate
Coleridge's
Love, and having for its text the wooing of Genevieve—
- ;She lean'd against the armed man,
- The statue of the armed knight;
- She stood and listened to my lay,
- Amid the lingering light.
- I played a soft and doleful air,
- I sang an old and moving story—
- An old rude song, that suited well
- That ruin wild and hoary.
If ever pencil gave the tender pathos and suggested the moving
cadences of a poet's verse this lovely drawing, which has never been
reproduced before, does so entirely and sympathetically. Quoting his
brother's own record, a sort of diary, Mr. W. M. Rossetti tells us
that “On August 28 [1848] Rossetti sat up all night, and made,
from 11 p.m. till 6 a.m. an outline of Coleridge's
Genevieve, ‘certainly the best thing I have done.’”
1The drawing was, I believe, produced
Transcribed Footnote (page 15):
1 The choice instance is made in ink, with a very fine, probably crow-quill, pen, and bears, in a monogram, “G. C. D. R., August, 1848.” Not long after this the artist ceased
to use his name of Charles, and thenceforth adopted the style “Dante G. Rossetti,”
or a monogram, of which there is more than one version, comprising “D.G.R.” only.
as the artist's contribution to a rather ambitious body calling itself “The
Cyclographic Society,” according to the rules of
which each member
Genevieve
.
Rossetti's first complete Design. Lent by Sir E.
Burne-Jones.
Figure: Standing woman leans against a statue of a knight while
listening to a seated man play the lute.
furnished a design to be placed in a portfolio with others, circulated
and subjected to the criticism of all who chose to offer their
opinions. The design itself was given to Mr. Coventry Patmore who, not
long since, gave it to Sir E. Burne-Jones, to be exchanged for a
drawing by that master himself. It now belongs to Sir Edward, who
generously lent it to illustrate this sketch of his old friend's art.
To return to
The Girlhood of Mary,
Virgin
, the style, gravity, and grace of which are manifest
developments of the like qualities of
Genevieve
,
it is indispensable to illustrate the
leading facts in its history, as the first example of Rossetti as a
Pre-Raphaelite out of which naturally arises an account of the origin
of the Brotherhood bearing that name. Mr. Holman Hunt has in the
Fortnightly
Review
given a version of the
history of the body, which, though not quite complete, is, as far as
it goes, correct. It is to the effect that some time after the two
comrades settled in Cleveland Street, they encountered at Millais's
Sig. B
Note: The final sentence on this page ["In course of time
Collinson, having painted a a remarkable picture..."] contains
a typographic error: the article "a" is repeated.
house in Gower Street, a book of engravings from frescoes in the Campo
Santo of Pisa, that is to say from pictures, the purity, energy,
simplicity, and poetic veracity of which served as points of
crystallisation, or
nuclei of enthusiasm for the
till then somewhat nebulous ideals in art the three men severally and
independently of each other possessed. Then and there, or very shortly
afterwards, the friends determined to form what may be called a League
of Sincerity, with loftier aims than artists generally cared for, a
leading principle of which implied that each confessor should paint
his best with due reference to nature, without which there could be no
sincerity. There was no intention of following, much less copying the
modes and moods of the artists who preceded Raphael, nor of rejecting
anything which had been attained in art's service since the days of
that Prince of Painters. Each friend was to work in his own way, and,
if an edifying use could be made of the subject he chose for his art,
so much the better, yet nothing like a didactic, religious, or moral
purpose was insisted on by any Brother. The enthusiasm of Rossetti
prompted the idea of forming a “Brotherhood,” which in a
very few days was enlarged to include James Collinson, then a painter
of domestic
genre of conspicuous ability and great
promise; Thomas Woolner, a sculptor of rare gifts and prodigious
skill; the present writer, who was then in training as a painter, and
W. M. Rossetti, who acted as secretary to the society. In 1848 none of
these men, except Collinson and Woolner, was more than twenty-one
years of age. Naturally enough, Brown was solicited to become a
Brother, but he, chiefly because of a crude principle which, for a
time was adopted by the other painters, declined to join the
society. This principle was to the effect that when a member had found
a model whose aspect answered his ideas of what his subject required,
that model should be painted exactly, and so to say, to a hair. Such a
hide-bound rule was, of course, an absurdity, destructive of all art
and hopeless. It is not to be supposed that enthusiasm for the right
was the monopoly of the leading trio, or that during several years
after the date in question, any one of the Brotherhood turned aside
from his duty as a member. In course of time
Collinson, having painted a a remarkable picture to which much less
respect than is due has been
awarded, and, being sorely tried by religious influences and a wavering will, openly seceded.
1
Rossetti gallantly began and carried out his beautiful though tentative
Girlhood of Mary,
Virgin
, which represents Mary and her mother, St. Anne, seated at an embroidery frame in a balcony and beneath a vine whose foliage
extended
over a lattice, through which is a view of a landscape without the chamber. In front of the group six books are piled, each
inscribed with the name of a Virtue, while near the volume stands a child-angel, who is watering a tall lily. Joseph is trimming
the vine, amid the leaves of which the Holy Dove is resting in a golden halo. The lily is
not only the Virgin's emblem, but serves as a model for the embroidery she is supposed to be devoutly engaged upon while her
mother tenderly and gravely regards her. The sonnet Rossetti printed in the catalogue of the Free Exhibition describes her
as being
- As it were
- An angel-watered lily, that near God
- Grows and is quiet.
This sentence sufficiently indicates the mystical
and allusive mood of the painter in 1848, as well
as illustrates the devout spirit which the
companionship of Mr. Holman Hunt tended to
strengthen while the counsel
Transcribed Footnote (page 18):
1 Walter Howell Deverell, a much beloved fellow-student,
with artistic gifts time could surely have
developed, was nominated, but not actually
elected, to fill the place of Collinson. He died
February 2nd, 1854, aged twenty-six. Collinson
became a member of the Society of British Artists,
which did not recognize Pre-Raphaelitism in any
of its forms, and, being well advanced in middle
life, died some years since. What Woolner was
expected to do as a Brother I do not exactly know,
but in Art and otherwise he lived a Knight of the
Order of Sincerity, became a Royal Academician
of great renown, and died October 7th, 1892. As
for myself, having been stringently trained in the
practice of Art, I found the experience thus won to
be of great value in the profession of an Art-critic,
into which “gentle craft” I gradually
drifted, and so remain. In the same profession Mr.
W. M. Rossetti has made a position of importance,
besides that to which he holds as a
littérateur.
Ford Madox Brown, whose death occurred October 6th,
1893, left a name we all honour as that of one in
the higher ranks of Art. It appears thus that of
seven young men and Brothers five have attained
eminent positions, four of them being pre-eminent,
although for years after the society was formed no
single member, whatever his position might be,
escaped insult, obloquy, and wicked and malicious
misrepresentation. The more conspicuous the Brother
was the more outrageously was he attacked.
of that artist and Madox Brown helped materially
the execution of the picture which, apart from its
prodigious merits and simply as the first work of a
painter whose training had been both brief and
interrupted, I never cease to look upon with
indescribable wonder. A little flat and gray, and
rather thin in painting, it is most carefully drawn
and soundly modelled, rich in good and pure
colouring; and in the brooding, dreamy pathos, full
of reverence and yet unconscious of “the time to
come,” which the Virgin's still and chaste face
expresses, there is a vein of poetry, the freshest
and most profound. Rossetti had no difficulty in
finding models whose aspects he could delineate
without scruple as fittest for his purpose; his sister
Christina sat for the Virgin, his mother for St.
Anne. The Child-angel was painted from a
younger sister of Mr. Woolner, whose features did,
perhaps, require a little modification. The artist's
descriptive sonnet, above quoted, continued with
the account of the Virgin's girlhood, which lasted
- Till one dawn, at home,
- She woke in her white bed, and had no fear
- At all, yet wept till sunshine, and felt awed;
- Because the fulness of the time was come.”
This passage distinctly points to the next picture of
Rossetti, the supremely beautiful
Ecce Ancilla Domini!
for the
Ancilla
in which the artist's sister again sat, and which again illustrates
the brooding, dreamy pathos of the painter's
mystical mood, as well as the virginal charm of the
lady who sat for its principal figure and face, a
charm to which
The Girlhood of Mary,
Virgin
, as well as the
Ecce Ancilla
Domini!
manifestly owe much, if it was not
actually the prompting
raison
d'être
of
both the works. There is an excellent reproduction
of the latter in the
Portfolio for 1888, with
an illustrative note by the present writer.
1
On that occasion it was said that this small
picture on panel—it measures only twenty-eight by
sixteen inches—is the one perfect outcome of the
original motive of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
by its representative and typical member. It is not
correct, nor would
Transcribed Footnote (page 19):
1 It was priced at the gallery at £80, and
sold, I believe, to the Marchioness of Bath for that
price. It now belongs to her daughter, the Lady
Louisa Feilding, who lent it, as No. 286, to the
Academy in 1883. There is an amusing note on the
selling of this picture in the
Art Journal,
1884, p. 150.
Ecce Ancilla Domini!
Figure: Angel, standing,
presenting a lily to the virgin, who is seated on a bed.
Window frames the angel's head
Note: The fourth complete sentence on page 21 ["A scanty
blue curtain ..."] contains a typographical error: a premature period (.)
following the word "chambers."
it be just to say more of his influence on that much
misrepresented company than admits his leadership
in regard to the pathetic expression of a
religious ideal. Each of the three distinguished
painters whom the world now recognizes (at the
time
Ecce Ancilla Domini!
was in hand
James Collinson had to be reckoned with), so
completely followed his own devices, that after a
year or two, Rossetti was Rossetti alone, and
hardly any traces of his genius are to be found
except on his own canvases. Millais, at least, gave
the painter some help in working out the highly
spiritualised ideal, which may be described as
follows. In a chamber, whose pure white sides and
floor exhibit an intensity of soft morning light, the
couch of Mary, itself almost entirely white, is
placed close to the wall where dawn would strike
its earliest rays, and with its head towards the
window. A scanty blue curtain shaded the face of
the sleeper; behind, attached to the wall, a lamp
(such as in antique chambers. was rarely
extinguished, and supposed efficacious against evil
spirits) is still alight, although it is broad day
without, and the sun reveals the tree growing close
to the opening. At the foot of the couch, Mary's
embroidery frame, with a lily unfinished on the
bright red cloth which was the sole piece of strong
colour in the picture, bespeaks one of those
domestic occupations painters have agreed to
ascribe to the Maiden Mother. As the subjective
incident of the work is the Annunciation, Rossetti
intends us to suppose that the Virgin was aroused
from sleep, if not from prayer, when the gentlest of
the archangels appeared, the light of Heaven filled
the room, and the words “
Ecce Ancilla
Domini!
” were uttered by Mary in submission
to her lot; for it is manifest that
The Girlhood
of Mary, Virgin
, was intended to show her in a
state of mystical pre-cognition, as became the
sequence of the subjects.
How original were the views of Rossetti in
respect to the treatment of this wonderfully
difficult theme will appear when we remember
how other masters had treated it. The Virgins
Annunciate of Angelico, Memmi, Taddeo Bartoli,
Fra Bartolommeo and others, were, as the
Portfolio has already pointed out, generally
handsomely clad, if not crowned and jewelled, and
most of them are enthroned under arched canopies,
adorned with sculptures. The Flemings and
Germans went beyond this, and expended all the
resources of their skill on Mary's
Note: The third complete sentence on page 22 ["It suited
Rossetti's views ..."] contains a typographic error: there is no
final punctuation mark.
brocade, precious stones, goldsmithery, and even
the illuminations of the sumptuous breviary they
bestowed upon her. Rossetti gave her no
ornaments, except the gilded nimbus, which, as in
other pictures, glows round her hair and was
kindled as the angel spoke. She is covered from
head to foot-heel by a simple robe of lawn, leaving
her arms bare, and her dark auburn tresses fall on
her shoulders, and, like the contour of her bust and
limbs, have not the amplitude of womanhood. It
suited Rossetti's views of his subject that the
Virgin, who is almost girlish in her slenderness,
should have but lately passed out of the adolescent
state into a riper one Fra Angelico, whose designs
of the
Rosa
Mystica
are the chastest and
most original of all, witness the lovely
Annunciation of St. Marco's convent and
that other which Sir F. Burton has lately acquired
for the National Gallery, never produced a maiden
more passionless than this; her earnest and
reverent eyes brood, not without knowledge of the
pain to come (a point which had been made of
yore), upon the meaning of Gabriel's salutation;
while awestruck, but not over-powered, she shrinks against the wall, whose whiteness
differentiates the candour of her raiment, and
contrasts with the lustrous aureole of metallic gold
which incloses the dark warmth of her tresses—the
unbound condition of which has, of course, a
meaning all readers recognize in relation to the
Dove which, as in all early pictures of the
Annunciation, descends from above, hovers
towards Mary, and is indicated by the declaration
of the Angelic harbinger. Nearly all the more
ancient pictures of the Italian, German, and Low
Country Schools, not less than cognate sculptured
representations of this subject, give magnificent if
not royal habiliments—sometimes even (as if the
gentle Gabriel were the warlike Michael)
archangelic coronets, armour, and weapons to the
harbinger of Heaven when appearing to Mary. He
is usually winged, and his vast pinions, glittering in
gold, azure and vermilion, and
semée
with stars, reach from his superb tiara to the
floor. A stupendous design by Holbein gives a
Gabriel all glorious to behold, with pinions such as
we seem to hear rustling; while in a voice mighty
but subdued, he, robed like the Kaiser and
grasping the sceptre of his Archangelhood, delivers
his message to a round-eyed and plump Jungfrau
very different from Rossetti's, while the fattest of
doves appears between the imperial angel and the
ponderous maiden. These
figures indicate a motive quite other than that here
in question, in which the stalwart, wingless
harbinger, who is simply clad in white from
radiant head to fiery feet, and holds the lily—an
emblem and a sceptre in one—which it is his duty
to deliver to Mary, approaches her with a calm and
passionless face, which assorts with his noble,
unmoved, and undemonstrative air, as he stands
erect, and—unlike the Gabriels of Angelico,
Memmi, Dürer, Del Sarto, Raphael,
Giovanni Santi, Tintoret and Rembrandt—makes
no obeisance to Mary, not yet crowned Queen of
Heaven. In Tintoret's picture Gabriel rushes into
the stately chamber of the Virgin as if on the wings
of a whirlwind, and a host of angels follow him to
witness the event. There is a second superb design
of Holbein (now in the collection of Mr. Fisher of
Midhurst) in which the grand angel, with a world
of draperies flying in his haste, enters before the
kneeling and tremulous Virgin, while his sword-like
pinions are fully displayed as he grasps a long
sceptre with one hand, and, with the other
extended in a minatory way, speaks as in a voice of
thunder.
This picture was begun and finished in the
squalid Cleveland Street studio. The face of Mary
was a just and true likeness of Rossetti's sister, and
was painted with hardly any alteration of her
features or expression. The face of Gabriel was
mostly founded on that of Woolner, whose hair
supplied the characteristic form and colour of the
archangel's. The nimbus of the archangel is
proper to Rossetti's masterpiece like the other
emblematic lustres of the design, while there is
special significance in the fiery feet of the
Messenger of God. The idea of the Annunciation
as a mystery, thus illustrated by the namesake of
the Harbinger is imperfectly appreciated without
recognition of the character of the fire
streaming from the feet of the Messenger of Peace
as he approached the earth.
While—not without struggles and efforts
innumerable and gallant, for Rossetti's technique
was, in 1849, in a somewhat uncertain and
tentative condition—this picture was in progress,
the
Germ
was concocted and put forth.
The first number of that amazing publication
appeared on “Magazine Day” of December, 1849.
The last number (4) was issued soon after he wrote
on
Ecce
Ancilla Domini!
the date, March, 1850. In this year the picture was No. 225 in the
Portland
Gallery, 316 Regent Street, to which place the
tenants of the Hyde Park Gallery had removed
their exhibition.
Ecce Ancilla Domini!
was
priced in the catalogue at £50. It was
returned unsold and remained on the painter's easel
till January 1853, when Mr. McCracken, a packing
agent of Belfast, who, Mr. W. Rossetti tells us, had
never seen the picture, bought it for the original
price; after his death it changed hands more than
once, including those of Mr. Heugh, with whose
collection it was in 1874 sold; for £388
10
s. it passed to the collection of Mr.
William Graham, who soon after Rossetti's death
lent it to the Academy Winter Exhibition of 1883;
at his sale in 1886 it was bought (price
£840) for the National Gallery out of a fund
bequeathed by the late Mr. John Lucas Walker. It is now No. 1210 in the Gallery.
1
It has been etched not quite successfully by M. Gaujean.
Simultaneously with the execution of
The
Girlhood of Mary, Virgin
, and in the same
dismal Cleveland Street studio above described,
Mr. Holman Hunt painted his famous
Death of
Rienzi's Brother
, which only concerns us here
because, in the rather grotesque (a term I use not
depreciatingly) face of Rienzi vowing to be
revenged on the boy's murderers, we have that
which is by much the truest portrait of D. G.
Rossetti as he appeared at that time. The pallor of
his carnations was exaggerated and made more
adust to suit the passion of the incident; but the
large, dark eyes, strongly marked dark eyebrows,
bold, dome-like forehead, the abundant long and
curling hair falling on each side of the face, and
especially the full red lips conspicuous in the
picture are, or rather were, of Rossetti to the life.
This fine and important painting having
deteriorated in a deplorable manner, has been so
much retouched as to have parted with nine-tenths
of its historical and artistic value.
Not long before it was completed Madox Brown painted a much
less startling version of Rossetti's head in his
Transcribed Footnote (page 24):
1 Here is Rossetti's opinion of his own work as
communicated to Mr. W. Bell Scott in a letter
dated “Kelmscott, June 17th, 1874. My dear
Scotus,—A little early thing of my own,
Annunciation
[this title the painter
preferred for his picture when he sold it to Mr.
McCracken], painted when I was twenty-one—sold
to Agnew at Christie's the other day (to my vast
surprise) for nearly £400. Graham has
since bought it of Agnew, and has sent it to me for
possible revision, but it is best left alone, except
just for a touch or two. Indeed my impression on
seeing it was that I couldn't do quite so well now!”
picture of
Chaucer reading the Legend of
Custance to Edward III.
, and to the present
writer described his doing so in a letter
1
dated November 21st, 1882.
The latter part of the year 1849 was not only
signalised in the manner above stated, but by the
inception of and preparation for the publication of
the
Germ
. With W. M. Rossetti for the
editor the first number comprised of Dante
Rossetti's writing
Songs of Our Household, No.
1
, a poem, and the first version of
Hand and
Soul
, a prose romance in which it is impossible to
avoid recognising the
quasi-nuptial and
deeply devout motives of
The Girlhood of
Mary, Virgin
, and
Ecce Ancilla
Domini!
as they clothed themselves anew in
words. They are both the prototypes of those
legions of poems and novelettes of which the prose
and verse romances of Mr. William Morris are the
most fortunate examples.
2
Note: The first sentence in the second footnote contains a
typographic error: it reads "The Oxford and Cambriage Magazine, ..."
Transcribed Footnote (page 25):
1 Here is part of the letter in question:
“The
Chaucer
was exhibited at the Royal Academy.
50 [No. 380, 1851], at Liverpool,
where it won the £50 prize, in 1859; at my
own exhibition [in 1865, in Pall Mall], and bought
for the public gallery at Sydney, N.S.W. When at
Liverpool it belonged to David Thomas White,
who wished to cut it up (!); so I got it back from
him in exchange for smaller work. Deverell, as you
rightly remember, sat for the page [sitting in front,
an admirable likeness of our dear boy-friend]; W.
M. Rossetti, who then had his hair [
i.e.
previous to his becoming bald], for the troubadour;
John Marshall, the great surgeon, sat for the jester.
I remember his mother's and sister's surprise! D.
G. Rossetti sat for Chaucer himself, and was the
very image of Occleve's little portrait. I began the
head of Chaucer (Rossetti and I both at the top of a
high scaffolding [in a large studio at No. 17
Newman Street, where Rossetti worked under
Brown, as before stated], he reading to me), at 11
P.M., and finished it by 4 A.M. next
morning; when daylight came it looked all right, so I
never touched it again.”
Transcribed Footnote (page 25):
2
The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine
, a
sort of reflection of the
Germ
, published a
few years later, abounds in proofs of Rossetti's
influence on Messrs. Morris and his
entourage. The first number of the
Germ
contained, besides the above, in
“
The
Seasons
”, a lovely lyric by Mr. Coventry
Patmore; Miss Christina Rossetti's versed dirge,
called “
Dream
Land
”, as well as “
An
End
” by the same; a sonnet and a review by her younger
brother; a delightfully fresh “
Sketch from Nature,”
by John L. Tupper, and Woolner's “
My Beautiful
Lady
.” In “
Hand and
Soul
”
it is easy for his
intimates to recognise the outpourings, protests,
and introspective lamentations, the doubts, self-
fears, and partial despair of his future of the author
himself, then struggling with himself to attain
means and powers sufficient for his devotion, his
hopes, and his ambition. In No. 2 of the
Germ
we
find the first version of “
The
Blessed Damosel
,” a poem which in after years
supplied a theme and subject for one of Rossetti's
most important pictures. In No. 3 he contributed
“
The
Carillon
,”
one of the fruits of a journey to
Paris and the Low Countries, and “
From the
Cliffs
,” a poem. In No. 4 his contributions were
“
Pax
Vobis
,” and “
Six Sonnets for
Pictures
“ in the Louvre and Luxembourg at Paris,
and in the Academy at Bruges.
It is time to set forth the prodigious influence
exercised in 1841 and later by the then hardly
recognized poetry of Robert Browning upon
Rossetti and the more imaginative members of that
circle of which he had already become the leader.
This could not be better illustrated than
The Laboratory.
Figure: A man and woman lean over a laboratory table. Flasks and burners visible in
foreground.
by the cut which, thanks to the courtesy of Mr.
Fairfax Murray, is now before us and entitled
The Laboratory
,
1
of which the story is that a
Transcribed Footnote (page 26):
1 The subject for this work Rossetti appears to
have found during abundant reading at the British
Museum, which, among other results, led to his
introducing himself to the author of
Paracelsus and
Sordello,
by means
of a letter expressing the highest admiration and
keenest appreciation for that poet's works, then
collected under the title of
Bells and
Pomegranates
. “
The Laboratory originally
appeared in
Hood's
Magazine
in 1844, and
was reprinted in No. VII. of
Bells and
Pomegranates
, 1845, where, no doubt, Rossetti
first met with it and numerous other pieces which
he and all his company took the highest delight in
reading, and in assimilating to their hearts' content
the “scraps of thund'rous epic lilted out” by the
painter-poet. It was with regard to poems of
Browning's that, at the time in view here, Rossetti
chiefly exercised his unrivalled power of reading
aloud and the gigantic resources of his memory.
Nearly all the P-R.B., except perhaps Collinson,
were sympathetic adepts in reading aloud, but none
of them approached Rossetti, whose musical,
modulated, and sonorous voice still rings in the
ears of those who remember with what vigour,
spirit, and poetic appreciation the dear comrade of
those days took his part in reading thus. As to his
memory of poems, that seemed inexhaustible,
when nothing was missed in the recital of a
Lay
of Ancient Rome
, a longish poem of
Tennyson, sections of Henry Taylor's
Philip
van Artevelde
, sequences of a dozen pages
each from
Paracelsus or
Sordello,
passages of Dante and other Italians faultlessly
quoted, and other poetic jewellery borrowed from
Leigh Hunt, Landor, Wordsworth, Chaucer, and
Spenser, and stored in the prodigious mind of the
poet who recited them, and was destined to add to
the wonders of English verse such treasures as
Sister
Helen
,
Jenny
, and
The
Burthen of Nineveh
. All his life Rossetti was
great in reading and reciting aloud, and continued
the practices to the last.
Court-lady of the
ancien
régime
, who had
been jilted, and become maddened by love and
furiously jealous of a fairer rival, visited in his
“devil's smithy” a lean old chemist and
poison-monger like the apothecary in Romeo and
Juliet, and by the gift of all her jewels, nay,
the kisses of her mouth, bribed that gaunt villain to
concoct a “drop.”
When he had finished the dire compound, she
cried to him as in the picture
- Is it done? Take my mask off! Nay, be not morose,
- It kills her, and this prevents seeing it close:
- The delicate droplet, my whole fortune's fee—
- If it hurts her; beside, can it ever hurt me?”
The original of this cut is noteworthy as the first
of Rossetti's completed works in water-colours,
materials which he had not, except tentatively, till
then employed, and because it has such a bold and
original design, and is painted in such brilliant and
strong colours that no one can regard it without surprise.
Apart from the voluptuous suggestiveness—which
was quite new from Rossetti—of the design,
the snake-like virulence of the lady's
face, the deadly passion of her clenched hand, the
eager wrath of her sudden uprising, the lovely
brilliance of her carnations—a little paled by rage
and envy, the sumptuousness of her bust, and the
livid coloration of this striking little work attest the
development of the artist in a way his biographers
have failed to observe, although these
elements are noteworthy in the highest degree.
They mark the opening of his second period,
they excel in movement as in ardour of all kinds,
remind us of Madox Brown, his true master, and,
as it appears to me,
Pages Quarrelling.
Figure: “Two young men facing each other and sparring.”
Surtees p. 220
owe much to what the designer had learnt during
a visit made in the autumn of 1849 to Paris
and the Low Countries, part of the outcome of
which were the
sonnets published in the
Germ
of 1850, that with rare poetic force
and skill commented on several masterpieces of
old art which Rossetti had studied in the Louvre
and at Bruges.
1
The
Laboratory
distinctly reflects the
intense illuminations and pure colour of Memlinc's
and Giorgione's (so-called) pictures at those places,
to which the painter had addressed the sonnets of 1849.
In the early part of the next year, he, by way of
continuing his share in the
Germ
, wrote a
tale of unhappy love intended for the fifth, or April
number thereof, but which never appeared, although
Millais etched his first plate to illustrate
Rossetti's text with the design of a lady dying while
sitting for her portrait. Neither the tale, which was
called
St. Agnes of
Intercession
, nor the
etching was finished, and the latter is now one of the
Transcribed Footnote (page 28):
1 Although it is in many respects the most
important of Rossetti's illustrations to Browning,
The Laboratory
is not the first of them.
Previous to this he had begun in pen and ink a very
elaborate and characteristic illustration to
Pippa
Passes
, in three compartments, the central one
of which, representing
“Hist!” said Kate the
Queen
, seems to have gone astray. The part
particularized was the original of a water-
colour drawing lent by Mrs. Spring Rice, as No. 12, to the
Burlington Club in 1883, and of a portion of an
unfinished picture in oil, called
The Two
Mothers
, which Mr. Hutton lent to the same
exhibition. About 1852 Rossetti drew in ink, and
gave as a keepsake to the present writer,
Taurello's first Sight of
Fortune
, Burlington
Club, No. 21, where it was wrongly dated “C.
1848.” This work derives its origin from
Sordello, and is the sole illustration to that
poem; it was designed to commemorate the giver's
and the receiver's ardent studies anent “Sordello's
delicate spirit all unstrung”.
scarcest of its kind. Rossetti, too, began
an etching to illustrate his own narrative,
but it was soon put aside. It was about this
time, or a little later, that, wanting to
improve his knowledge of perspective, a
subject of the Royal Academy curriculum to
which he had never addressed himself, he came
to me to be helped in that respect. That
D.G. Rossetti.
Figure: Head and shoulders self-portrait of Rossetti as a young man drawn
in pen and ink, almost in profile to left with eyes downcast.
he was a perfectly intelligent, but not a very
diligent learner is shown by the rough sketch
of two medieval pages quarrelling here
reproduced from among a score of such
remaining on sheets of his exercises in the
little science. Assuming the airs of a
teacher, I had complained that he neglected
his work. His reply was this sketch, intended
to show what I should incur by continuing to
grumble. The oblique lines athwart the feet
of the figures are parts of the diagram.
1
Still later, but of the same period, is
the
profile portrait of
himself
, drawn with a
pen, and here reduced from a sketch which
Rossetti gave to our friend Arthur Hughes,
whose picture of
April
Love
is one
Transcribed Footnote (page 29):
1 Rossetti had so much humour that he cared
little who, if good-naturedly, caricatured
him, and he often sketched himself in odd
circumstances and conditions. One of these
sketches, made in 1849, lies before me now,
and is ludicrously like in all its
exaggerations of a huge head clothed by masses of
dark, unkempt, curling hair, and inclosing gaunt
features, a short beard and moustache,
large, hollow and “detached”-looking
eyes; the head is set upon sloping shoulders
rounded by a slight habitual stoop, and
carried forward in an eager sort of way,
which is true to the life; the chest is
narrow, the hips are wide. The
artist's attire is the above-mentioned
long-tailed dress coat, a loose dress
waistcoat, and loose trousers. The sketch
attests Rossetti's manner of gripping with
his half-clenched fingers the cuff of his
coat—a spasmodic habit which was highly
characteristic of his nervous,
self-concentrated temperament. Much the best
description of Rossetti at this period is Mr.
Holman Hunt's account of himself and “The
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood”, printed in the
Contemporary
Review
, vol. xlix., p.
737; the best portrait of him, apart from the
already-mentioned and somewhat exaggerated
head of Rienzi, is that of the guest, who in
Millais'
Lorenzo and
Isabella
is
drinking from a wine-glass; here the pallor
of the sitter's face is overdone, but the
likeness is otherwise perfect. Mr. W. M.
Rossetti sat for Lorenzo in this picture.
of the most tender-hearted and subtle
love-poems in the world, an idyl of ineffable
pathos and sweetness.
In 1850 Rossetti completed the famous
drawing in ink with a pen, entitled
Hesterna
Rosa
, which illustrates the song, pregnant
of sorrow and shame, of Elena, the mistress of
Philip van Artevelde, in Sir Henry Taylor's
noble drama. The motto of
Hesterna Rosa
is:—
- Quoth tongue of neither maid nor wife
- To heart of neither wife nor maid,
- “Lead we not here a jolly life
- Betwixt the shine and shade?”
- Quoth heart of neither maid nor wife
- To tongue of neither wife nor maid,
- “Thou wag'st, but I am worn with strife,
- And feel like flowers that fade!”
The scene is a tent pitched in a
pleasaunce and, though a pallid dawn gathers
force among the trees, still lit by lamps
from within, so that the gaunt and ghostlike
shadows of a party of revellers seated in
front of the design flicker and start
ominously upon the canvas walls. One gambler
is seated on a couch and throwing dice upon a
stool placed before the group, while his
companion kneels opposite and, with a
goat-like action, draws between his lips the
finger of his mistress, the singer, and
Hesterna Rosa
of the design, who, half
hiding her face with her disengaged hand,
sits behind him. He is waiting the cast of
his companion's dice and will, in turn, throw
his own dice upon the stool. Another girl,
the mistress of the former, sits above him on
the couch, and while she seems to be chanting
a merry, perhaps ribald, song, has thrown her
bare and beautiful arms about his neck. Near
them, on our left, is a young girl holding to
her ear, as if to catch the lowest throbbing
of its notes, a sort of lute, while on the
other side is a huge ape, grossly scratching
himself, and thus intended to repeat the
sensual half of the
motif of the
design, just as the lute-player repeats the
sadder, less degraded pathos of the other
half.
IN 1851 we find Rossetti removed
to a studio on the first floor at No. 72, Newman
Street, and in his art likewise removed from
those hide-binding influences which
inexperience forced upon him in Cleveland
Street. The
Germ
having changed its
name with the third number to
Art and
Poetry
, had come to an end, and with it
the central point, so to say, of our subject's
life had shifted from the religious and
mystical purposes of his first period to
those intensely dramatic and romantic, and
sometimes voluptuous, impulses which
The
Laboratory
heralded and illustrated. The
last-named year produced, besides smaller
examples of less account, a fine and
masculine drawing in ink, now the property of
Mr. Coventry Patmore and called
The
Parable Of Love
, where a lady sits at an
easel painting her own portrait, while her
lover, stooping over her, guides her hand
with his own. The motives and style of this
example, which has never been engraved or
copied, have even more fibre than those of
The La 
