Dante Gabriel Rossetti, An Illustrated Memorial of His Art and Life

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Rossetti Archive Textual Transcription

Document Title: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, An Illustrated Memorial of His Art and Life

Author: H. C. Marillier

Date of publication: 1899

Publisher: George Bell and Sons

Printer: Chiswick Press, Charles Whittingham and Co.

The full Rossetti Archive record for this transcribed document is available.

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Note: Text is printed in gold lettering with an inverted triangle of decorative foliage below it.

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI

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Note: Inside the front cover is a bookplate which reads “ex libris W. L. Phillips.”

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DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI

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“ IN AN ARTIST'S STUDIO”

BY CHRISTINA ROSSETTI

December, 1856

ONE face looks out from all his canvases,
One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans:
We found her hidden just behind those screens,
That mirror gave back all her loveliness.
A queen in opal or in ruby dress,
A nameless girl in freshest summer-greens,
A saint, an angel—every canvas means
The one same meaning, neither more nor less.
He feeds upon her face by day and night,
10 And she with true kind eyes looks back on him,
Fair as the moon and joyful as the light:
Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim;
Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright;
Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.

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G.F. Watts, pinxit. Swan Electric Engraving C ^o.

D G Rossetti

By permission of M ^r. Frederick Hollyer

Figure: Sepia tone half-length portrait of a mature Dante Gabriel Rossetti with his head turned slightly towards his right. Marillier reproduces a facsimile of DGR's autograph below this picture.

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Note: onion-skin page

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Note: Rossetti's name is printed in red ink.

DANTE GABRIEL

ROSSETTI

AN ILLUSTRATED MEMORIAL OF HIS

ART AND LIFE

by

H. C. MARILLIER

George Bell & Sons

Figure: Imprint of George Bell & Sons publishers.

LONDON

GEORGE BELL AND SONS

1899

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CHISWICK PRESS:—CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO.

TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.

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PREFACE

HAVING been asked more than once if I was compiling a life of Rossetti, I think it well to disclaim at the outset any such presumptuous intention. A life of Rossetti, in the full sense of the word, could only be written by one who was intimately and sympathetically associated with his work during the major portion of his career; and of the very few who could have undertaken the task some are no longer alive, whilst others have either abandoned or postponed it until too late. For this reason we can hardly expect now to have a life of this great and most original genius, written by anyone with enough knowledge to interpret his many-coloured personality, yet sufficiently disinterested to form a critical estimate of his true position and influence.

Biographical works and data there are in profusion. The admirably conscientious labours of Mr. William Michael Rossetti have resulted in placing before the public copious records of the painter's external life, and of his private life as well so far as it is revealed in letters to the members of his family. What these do not give us is the man in relation to his work, and what they do give us is not always strictly important. Nevertheless they constitute the most valuable body of materials yet published, and no biographer could affect to disregard them. They have been supplemented recently by the publication of Ruskin's letters to Rossetti and Rossetti's letters to William Allingham, both immensely interesting to students of the subject, but not by any means exhaustive of the periods they cover. The only other sources of information that seem to me worth mentioning are Mr. William Sharp's memoir, which would have been better had it been less hastily compiled; Mr. Joseph Knight's little volume in the “Great Writers” series, dealing chiefly with the poems; Mr. W. M. Rossetti's chronological record called “ Dante Gabriel Rossetti as Designer and Writer”; William Bell Scott's “ Autobiographical Notes,” compiled when the author

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was too much embittered to write fairly; and Mr. F. G. Stephens's handy monograph in the “Portfolio” series . In addition might be mentioned Mr. Watts-Dunton's article in the “Encyclopædia Brittanica.” There are of course many other books, and much periodical literature dealing with Rossetti, but, with the single exception of Mr. Holman Hunt's articles in the “Contemporary" of 1886 on the “Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood,” these are not of great account. One or two who claim to have written with intimate knowledge of their subject labour under the disadvantage of not having known Rossetti until the latter clouded years of his life, when his vigour and health were impaired, and he had apparently lost the power of personal discrimination.

Of the materials which I have mentioned it would be ungrateful to complain, seeing that as occasion demanded I have used or borrowed from most of them. I must, however, say that careful research has not always tended to confirm the information they afforded, and I may claim, I think, for this memoir that it will be found correct on many points where errors previously existed. Three of the above-named authorities, Mr. Sharp, Mr. Knight, and Mr. W. M. Rossetti, have published catalogues or lists of Rossetti's pictures, giving dates and a few other scanty particulars. Mr. Rossetti's list is certainly by far the best of these, though not itself complete, the two earlier ones being almost useless now for purposes of reference. I say this with no intention of disparagement, for Mr. Sharp's list was a wonderful one to have compiled in the time allowed him; and he had no previous data to work on, whereas I have had three lists to collate and check, and possibly better opportunities of acquiring information. In addition I have received much help with some of the more tangled problems both from Mr. Rossetti and from Mr. Fairfax Murray, the latter of whom is recognized as an expert in all matters connected with Rossetti's work. To Mr. Murray moreover I am indebted for kindly checking the list of works and dates which appears as an appendix to this volume, as well as for revising some of the proofs. What use I have made of the assistance so generously given is my own affair, and for this I alone am answerable. In acknowledging the benefit I do not wish to alienate the responsibility.

What I have aimed at chiefly is to interweave a simple account of the painter's life with a detailed chronological record of his artistic work. In this way, by following certain broad divisions, a fairly continuous narrative is made possible without jumbling up

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pictures and incidents too confusedly. In dealing with the pictures in the text I have followed a system which I think should be found useful, as I myself have found the lack of it in other books somewhat irritating; namely, I have grouped under the first, or sometimes under the most important version of any particular subject, a list of all the other versions and replicas which exist of it. These versions and replicas are then referred to again briefly or in detail as may be under the different years to which they belong. Some such system is absolutely necessary in dealing with Rossetti's work, for the multitude of replicas and variants is bewildering, and most of the errors which I have encountered have been due to confusion arising on this account. As an instance of the kind of tangle met with, who could foresee such a confusion of dates and pictures as exists in the case of the Proserpine subject, or (without personal knowledge of the facts) understand the complicated changes in the history of the Dante and Beatrice panels, given in this book, I believe, for the first time.

Whilst trying to compile a record of Rossetti's work which should be comprehensive, accurate, and useful as a work of reference, I have not forgotten that essentially it was a picture book that was wanted. In respect of the illustrations, moreover, I can speak with greater freedom; and first, it is pleasant to acknowlege that almost without exception the owners of Rossetti's pictures have courteously allowed them to be reproduced, and have given special facilities for photographing them. In some cases this was no ordinary politeness, but a very generous concession, involving a violation of fixed principles. Mr. Rae, it is well known, has for many years disapproved most strongly of indiscriminate reproduction, and has refused all applications to let his pictures be photographed for such a purpose, the only exceptions being when he allowed Mr. Quilter to reproduce The Blue Closet in “Preferences,” and Mr. Stephens to include a few small subjects in his already mentioned monograph done for “ The Portfolio.” I cannot, therefore, express my obligation to him sufficiently strongly for placing his magnificent collection at my disposal, and allowing me to reproduce eleven of his pictures; namely, The Beloved , Sibylla Palmifera , Monna Vanna , Venus Verticordia , The Damsel of the Sanc Grael (both the large oil and the little water-colour), The Blue Closet , The Wedding of St. George , The Tune of Seven Towers , the early pen-and-ink diptych of Il Saluto di Beatrice , and the beautiful crayon head of a Magdalen . Mr. Beresford Heaton, whose objections were almost

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equally invincible, has at the last moment allowed me to include the charming early water-colour Dante's Dream and The Vision of Rachel and Leah from his collection. Mr. Fairfax Murray has been not less generous in allowing his drawings to be reproduced than in helping me with facts, and though there are one or two treasures that he has withheld for special reasons, I am indebted to him for permission to include The Merciless Lady , Dr. Johnson at the Mitre , The Laboratory , Bonifazio's Mistress , with the pen-and-ink study , A Fight for a Woman , the early sketch called Genevieve , a pencil drawing for Mary in the House of John , and several minor items, including some designs for pictures never reproduced before. Mr. Watts-Dunton has allowed me to include The Spirit of the Rainbow , Rossetti's one nude figure, which has never before been given, as well as his Reverie , Pandora , and another drawing. Mr. Wells, R.A., has contributed two interesting portraits of Miss Siddal [portrait 1] [portrait 2] and the water-colour Beatrice denying the Salutation —the companion drawing to which (in point of date and history), viz., Giotto painting Dante's Portrait , has been lent by its present owner, Mr. John Aird, M.P. Other owners who have obligingly given me access to their pictures, and have in one or two cases even sent them to London to be photographed, are Mr. W. R. Moss, Mr. S. Pepys Cockerell, Mr. Francis Buxton, Mr. Charles Butler, Mrs. Jekyll, Lord Battersea and Overstrand, Mr. William Imrie, Mrs. Clarence Fry, Mr. Trist, Mrs. Coronio, Mr. Constantine Ionides, Mrs. A. Ionides, Sir Cuthbert Quilter, Prof. C. E. Norton, Mr. T. H. Leathart, Mr. F. J. Tennant, Mr. Russell Rea, Mr. S. E. Spring-Rice, Mr. A. T. Squarey, the Rev. S. A. Donaldson, Mr. William Dunlop, Mr. Charles Ricketts, Dr. Spence Watson, Mr. Arthur Severn, Mr. Cosmo Monkhouse, Mrs. Constance Churchill, the Hon. Percy Wyndham, Sir Henry Acland, Dr. H. A. Munro, and the Corporation Art Galleries of Birmingham, Manchester, and Liverpool. Mr. Rossetti has given me practically a free hand in the reproduction of family portraits and drawings belonging to him, and has also allowed me to use many of the negatives of pictures that were specially made for his brother, sometimes before alterations of a disastrous kind had been undertaken. To Mr. Frederick Hollyer, Mr. Caswall Smith, and the Autotype Company, I owe an expression of thanks for generously giving me the use of many of their copyright negatives, and to Messrs. Macmillan no less for the right to reproduce the five wood-blocks [block 1] [block 2] [block 3] [block 4] [block 5] done for Moxon's “Tennyson” and two others [plate 1] [plate 2] from Miss Christina Rossetti's books. Messrs.

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Sotheran, Mr. Duckworth, and the editor of the “Pall Mall Magazine” have kindly lent me various blocks or plates, and, finally, Messrs. Cassell have my thanks for allowing two pictures to be reproduced from the “Magazine of Art.”

With a few rare exceptions, owing to owners' refusals, or in the case of The Blue Bower and The Blessed Damozel from the pictures being held in trust, there is scarcely a work of individual importance by Rossetti which will not be found illustrated in this book or in some way represented. In general, moreover, where a choice existed, it is the best version of each particular subject from which the reproduction has been made, though there are cases where this was not possible, owing to the pictures having gone abroad or become untraceable. It would hardly be believed how difficult Rossetti's pictures are to find since their dispersal after the great Graham, Leyland, Turner, Ruston, and Leathart sales. Even with the kind help of Mr. Croal Thomson and Messrs. Agnew there are many that I have not located, though I have been fortunate in borrowing private photographs of some of these and published prints of others. No doubt the constantly increasing value of Rossetti's works is partly responsible for their restlessness, but there is something almost melancholy in the way that they seem perpetually to change hands. The Rae and Heaton collections are almost the only ones of importance that have remained intact. Mr. Ruskin, who at one time had quite a number of good water-colours, has parted with all but the unfinished Passover , and no one seems to know where some of them have gone. The Boyce collection has shared the same fate, though in this case the bulk of it has passed into the hands of Mr. Murray, who amid the maelstrom of flux and change has constituted himself a sort of natural vortex or harbour of refuge.

This is one of the circumstances which has made the illustration of a book on Rossetti not altogether easy, and which may have prevented its being undertaken before. Even now I am conscious of many omissions and failures, which mar the completeness of the work. But it is no part of an author's duty to specify these for his readers, most of whom will be ready enough to find them, and perfectly candid in pointing them out.

H. C. M.

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DESIGN FOR DANTIS AMOR, PAINTED BETWEEN THE DANTE AND BEATRICE PANELS, 1866. See page 89.

Figure: Pencil. Inscribed at top: "IX JVN: MCCXC." Inscribed at bottom: "QUOMODO SEDET SOLA CIVITAS." Oblong outline, framing the shape of the angels' wings and coming to a point above his head and beneath his feet. An angel, "Love," stands holding a clock and a down-turned torch.

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INDEX OF CHAPTERS.

INTRODUCTORY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1
THE PRE-RAPHAELITE BROTHERHOOD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
WORK, 1849-1853.—INFLUENCE OF BROWNING AND DANTE. . . . . . . . . . 32
FRIENDSHIP WITH RUSKIN.—MARRIAGE AND DEATH OF MRS. ROSSETTI . . . . 51
WORK FROM 1854 TO 1857 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
WORK FROM 1858 TO 1862 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
SETTLING AT CHELSEA. 1862 TO 1868. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .119
1869 TO 1872.—KELMSCOTT, 1872 TO 1874 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .151
CLOSE OF THE RECORD. 1874 TO 1882. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .179
DEATH, APRIL, 1882.—CONCLUSION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .204
SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES: EARLY DRAWINGS AND CARICATURES.—HAND-

WRITING.—NO. 16 CHEYNE WALK AND THE ANIMALS. . . . . . . . . . . 211

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

[ The Reproductions are the Work of the Swan Electric Engraving Company .]

D. G. ROSSETTI, BY G. F. WATTS ( Photogravure) . . . . . . Frontispiece

( By permission of Mr. F. Hollyer.)
DESIGN FOR DANTIS AMOR, 1865-6 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . x

( By permission of Mr. C. F. Murray.)
GABRIELE ROSSETTI. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

( By permission of Mr. W. M. Rossetti.)
MRS. ROSSETTI. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

( By permission of Mr. W. M. Rossetti.)
D. G. ROSSETTI, 1847 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

( From a drawing in the National Portrait Gallery.)
CHRISTINA ROSSETTI, 1852 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

( By permission of Mr. W. M. Rossetti.)
THE GIRLHOOD OF MARY VIRGIN ( Photogravure) . . . . . facing 16

( From a photograph by F. Hollyer.)
LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCY ( Sketch). . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 17

( By permission of Mr. J. A. R. Munro.)
RETRO ME SATHANA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 17

( By permission of Dr. Munro.)
GENEVIEVE. FROM COLERIDGE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 22

( By permission of Mr. C. F. Murray.)
GRETCHEN AND MEPHISTOPHELES ( Two designs). . . . . . . . . facing 24 [design 1] [design 2]

( By permission of Dr. Munro.)
ECCE ANCILLA DOMINI. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 26

( From the picture in the National Gallery.)
“HIST! SAID KATE THE QUEEN”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 32

( By permission of Mr. S. E. Spring-Rice.)
HEAD FROM “KATE THE QUEEN” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34

( By permission of Mr. W. M. Rossetti.)

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THE LABORATORY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 34

( By permission of Mr. C. F. Murray.)
BENEDICK AND BEATRICE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36

( In the possession of the author.)
DANTE DRAWING THE ANGEL. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 36

( By permission of The Taylorian Museum.)
BEATRICE DENYING HER SALUTATION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 36

( By permission of Mr. H. T. Wells, R.A.)
MISS SIDDAL. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37

( By permission of Mr. H. T. Wells, R.A.)
BORGIA ( Photogravure) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 38

( By permission of Mr. L. Hacon.)
HOW THEY MET THEMSELVES. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 39

( By permission of Mr. S. Pepys Cockerell.)
GIOTTO PAINTING DANTE'S PORTRAIT ( Photogravure). . . . . . facing 40

( By permission of Mr. John Aird, M.P.)
HESTERNA ROSA. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 41

( By permission of Mr. W. M. Rossetti.)
GIRL PLAYING A LUTE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42

( By permission of Mrs. Constance Churchill.)
STUDY FOR “FOUND”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44

( By permission of Mr. C. F. Murray.)
“FOUND” ( Photogravure). . . . . . . . . . . . facing 44

( From a photograph by F. Hollyer.)
HEAD FOR “FOUND” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46

( From a photograph by The Autotype Company.)
SKETCH OF MISS SIDDAL. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49

( By permission of Mr. W. M. Rossetti.)
MISS SIDDAL. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 50

( From a drawing at South Kensington.)
ROBERT BROWNING. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 52

( By permission of Mr. C. F. Murray.)
THE QUEST OF THE GRAIL (BY MISS SIDDAL). . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56

( By permission of Mr. Arthur Severn.)
THE WOEFUL VICTORY (BY MISS SIDDAL) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57

( By permission of Mr. W. M. Rossetti.)
MISS SIDDAL BEFORE AN EASEL. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 58

( By permission of Mr. H. T. Wells, R.A.)

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Note: Typo in listing of "PAOLO AND FRANCESCO. Diptych": "FRANCESCO" should be "FRANCESCA." This illustration is properly marked in the body of the text.

ROSSETTI SITTING TO MISS SIDDAL. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59

( By permission of Mr. C. F. Murray.)
MISS SIDDAL, OCT. 1856 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60

( By permission of Mr. W. M. Rossetti.)
KING ARTHUR'S TOMB ( Photogravure) . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 60

( By permission of Mr. S. Pepys Cockerell.)
D. G. ROSSETTI, 1855 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61

( By permission of Mr. C. F. Murray.)
DESIGN FOR PICTURE—Unexecuted . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63

( By permission of Mr. C. F. Murray.)
DESIGN FOR PICTURE—Unexecuted . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64

( By permission of Mr. C. F. Murray.)
DESIGN FOR A BALLAD. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65

( By permission of Mr. J. P. Heseltine.)
PAOLO AND FRANCESCO. Diptych . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 66

( By permission of Mr. T. H. Leathart.)
DANTE'S VISION OF RACHEL AND LEAH. . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 66

( By permission of Mr. Beresford Heaton.)
STUDY FOR RACHEL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67

( By permission of Mr. W. M. Rossetti.)
TWO DESIGNS FOR THE PASSOVER. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 68 [design 1] [design 2]

( By permission of Sir Henry Acland, Bart.)
TENNYSON READING “MAUD” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69

( By permission of Mr. Cosmo Monkhouse.)
“THE MAIDS OF ELFEN-MERE” ( Woodcut). . . . . . . . . . . . facing 70

( From Allingham'sDay and Night Songs.)
DRAWING FOR “THE MAIDS OF ELFEN-MERE”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71

( By permission of Dr. Spence-Watson.)
FRA PACE ( Photogravure). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 72

( By permission of Mrs. Jekyll.)
DANTE'S DREAM ( Water-colour) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 73

( By permission of Mr. Beresford Heaton.)
FAUST AND MARGARET . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73

( By permission of Mr. Arthur Hughes.)
THE SEED OF DAVID—LLANDAFF TRIPTYCH. . . . . . . . . . . . facing 74

( From photographs by F. Hollyer.)
FIVE DESIGNS FOR MOXON'S TENNYSON ( Woodcuts). . . . . . . . 76,77,78 [design 1] [design 2] [design 3] [design 4] [design 5]

( By permission of Messrs. Macmillan, Ltd.)

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SIR GALAHAD AT THE SHRINE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 78

( By permission of The Birmingham Art Gallery.)
THE BLUE CLOSET ( Photogravure) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 78

( By permission of Mr. George Rae.)
THE TUNE OF SEVEN TOWERS ( Photogravure). . . . . . . . . . facing 80

( By permission of Mr. George Rae.)
THE DAMSEL OF THE SANC GRAEL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 81

( By permission of Mr. George Rae.)
THE GATE OF MEMORY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82

( From a photograph by F. Hollyer.)
THE WEDDING OF ST. GEORGE ( Photogravure) . . . . . . . . . facing 82

( By permission of Mr. George Rae.)
THE GARDEN BOWER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83

( From a photograph by F. Hollyer.)
A CHRISTMAS CAROL ( Photogravure) . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 84

( By permission of Mr. C. F. Murray. From a photograph by the Autotype

Company. )
“RED LION MARY”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85

( By permission of Mr. C. F. Murray.)
DESIGN FOR “DANTIS AMOR” 1859. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86

( By permission of Mr. W. M. Rossetti.)
THE SALUTATION OF BEATRICE ( Panels). . . . . . . . . . . . facing 86

( By permission of Mr. F. J. Tennant. From photographs by F. Hollyer. )
STUDY FOR SALUTATION OF BEATRICE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88

( By permission of Mr. W. Rothenstein.)
DESIGN FOR OXFORD UNION: LAUNCELOT AT THE SHRINE OF THE

SANC GRAEL (Copy by H. T. Dunn). . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 90

( By permission of Mr. T. Watts-Dunton.)
DESIGN FOR OXFORD UNION: SIR GALAHAD RECEIVING THE SANC GRAEL. . . 91

( From a drawing in the British Museum.)
STUDY FOR GRAIL MAIDEN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92

( By permission of Mr. C. F. Murray.)
STUDY FOR QUEEN GUENEVERE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 92

( By permission of Mr. W. M. Rossetti.)
STUDY FOR QUEEN GUENEVERE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93

( From a photograph by the Autotype Company.)
DESIGN FOR OXFORD UNION: LAUNCELOT ESCAPING FROM GUENEVERE'S

CHAMBER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94

( By permission of Mr. C. F. Murray.)

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Sig. c

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 94

( From a photograph by F. Hollyer.)
D. G. ROSSETTI (1861). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95

( From a photograph by the Autotype Company.)
HAMLET AND OPHELIA ( Photogravure). . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 96

( Plate lent by Messrs. H. Sotheran and Co.)
HAMLET AND OPHELIA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 97

( By permission of Mr. A. T. Squarey.)
DESIGN FOR MARY IN THE HOUSE OF JOHN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98

( By permission of Mr. C. F. Murray.)
MARY MAGDALENE AT THE DOOR OF SIMON ( Photogravure) . . . . facing 98

( By permission of Mr. C. Ricketts.)
BEFORE THE BATTLE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 100

( By permission of Prof. C. E. Norton.)
GOLDEN WATER, OR PRINCESS PARISADÉ. . . . . . . . . facing 100

( By permission of Mrs. Constance Churchill.)
DESIGN FOR “MY LADY GREENSLEEVES”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101

( By permission of Mr. C. F. Murray.)
“MY LADY GREENSLEEVES” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 102

( By permission of Rev. S. A. Donaldson.)
BONIFAZIO'S MISTRESS, AND SKETCH FOR SAME. . . . . . . . . facing 102 [sketch]

( By permission of Mr. C. F. Murray.)
DR. JOHNSON AND THE METHODISTS AT THE MITRE. . . . . . . . facing 104

( From a photograph by the Autotype Company.)
LUCRETIA BORGIA ( First design) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105

( From a photograph.)
LUCRETIA BORGIA. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 106

( From a photograph by F. Hollyer.)
LOVE'S GREETING. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 106

( From a photograph by the Autotype Company.)
DESIGN FOR “EARLY ITALIAN POETS” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
REGINA CORDIUM (MRS. D. G. ROSSETTI) . . . . . . . . . . . facing 108

( By permission of Mr. Arthur Severn.)
FAIR ROSAMUND. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 108

( From a photograph by F. Hollyer.)
ASPECTA MEDUSA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109

( By permission of Mrs. A. Ionides.)

page: xviii

CASSANDRA. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 110

( By permission of Mr. W. M. Rossetti.)
THE ANNUNCIATION ( Design for panel). . . . . . . . . . . . facing 110

( By permission of Mr. W. Dunlop.)
ADAM AND EVE: Two designs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112

( From windows at St. Martin's, Scarborough.)
ST. GEORGE AND THE DRAGON: ( Six designs) . . . . . . . . . facing 112 [design 1] [design 2] [design 3] [design 4] [design 5] [design 6]

( From photographs by F. Hollyer.)
TRISTRAM AND YSEULT DRINKING THE LOVE POTION . . . . . . . facing 114

( From a photograph by F. Hollyer.)
KING RENÉ'S HONEYMOON . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 114

( From a photograph by F. Hollyer.)
PAOLO AND FRANCESCA ( Photogravure) . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 116

( By permission of Mr. W. R. Moss.)
THE CRUCIFIXION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117

( Reproduced from “The Magazine of Art”. )
GOBLIN MARKET ( Woodcut). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118

( By permission of Messrs. Macmillan, Ltd.)
TITLE-PAGE FOR THE PRINCE'S PROGRESS ( Woodcut) . . . . . . facing 118

( By permission of Messrs. Macmillan, Ltd.)
D. G. ROSSETTI ( 1862). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119

( From a photograph by Downey.)
EXTERIOR: NO. 16, CHEYNE WALK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120

( From a drawing.)
THE GARDEN: NO. 16, CHEYNE WALK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121

( From a photograph.)
JOAN OF ARC. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125

( From a photograph by F. Hollyer.)
SKETCH FOR BEATA BEATRIX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126

( By permission of Mr. J. P. Heseltine.)
BEATA BEATRIX ( Photogravure) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 126

( From the picture in the National Gallery.)
PREDELLA FOR BEATA BEATRIX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129

( By permission of Mr. Russell Rea.)
HELEN OF TROY. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130
LADY LILITH. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 133

( By permission of Mr. W. M. Rossetti.)

page: xix

HEAD OF LILITH, after the retouching . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133

( From a photograph by J. Caswall Smith.)
VENUS VERTICORDIA ( Photogravure) . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 134

( By permission of Mr. George Rae.)
THE MADNESS OF OPHELIA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 136

( By permission of Mrs. C. E. Lees.)
THE MERCILESS LADY ( Photogravure). . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 138

( By permission of Mr. C. F. Murray.)
WASHING HANDS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 139

( By permission of Mr. W. M. Rossetti.)
IL RAMOSCELLO. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 139

( Reproduced from the “Magazine of Art”. )
A FIGHT FOR A WOMAN: STUDY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139

( By permission of Mr. C. F. Murray.)
THE BELOVED ( Photogravure) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 140

( By permission of Mr. George Rae.)
MONNA VANNA ( Photogravure) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 142

( By permission of Mr. George Rae.)
THE DANCING GIRL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144

( By permission of Mr. H. H. Trist.)
SIBYLLA PALMIFERA ( Photogravure) . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 144

( By permission of Mr. George Rae.)
MICHAEL SCOTT'S WOOING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 145

( By permission of Mr. H. H. Trist.)
MICHAEL SCOTT'S WOOING ( c. 1848) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145

( By permission of Mr. J. A. R. Munro.)
THE CHRISTMAS CAROL: STUDY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146

( By permission of Mrs. Aglaia Coronio.)
JOLI CŒUR. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 146

( From a photograph by F. Hollyer.)
MONNA ROSA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147
THE LOVING CUP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 148

( From a photograph by J. Caswall Smith.)
THE RETURN OF TIBULLUS TO DELIA. . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 148

( From a photograph by the Autotype Company.)
REVERIE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 150

( By permission of Mr. T. Watts-Dunton.)

page: xx

AUREA CATENA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 150

( By permission of Lord Battersea. From a photograph by F. Hollyer. )
MRS. STILLMAN (MISS MARIE SPARTALI). . . . . . . . . . . . facing 152

( By permission of Mrs. Stillman.)
PENELOPE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 152

( By permission of Mr. T. H. Leathart.)
THEODORE WATTS, 1874 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155

( By permission of Mr. T. Watts-Dunton.)
ROSA TRIPLEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156

( From a photograph by the Autotype Company.)
LA DONNA DELLA FIAMMA. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 156

( By permission of Mrs. C. E. Fry.)
SILENCE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157

( By permission of Mr. Chas. Rowley.)
THE ROSELEAF . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158

( By permission of Mr. W. M. Rossetti.)
MARIANA ( Photogravure) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 158

( From a photograph by the Autotype Company.)
LADY WITH THE FAN. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 159

( From a photograph by the Autotype Company.)
THE COUCH. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159

( By permission of Mr. T. Watts-Dunton.)
STUDY: LA DONNA DELLA FINESTRA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160

( By permission of Mr. W. M. Rossetti.)
STUDY FOR BEATRICE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 160

( By permission of Mrs. Aglaia Coronio.)
DESIGN FOR “TROY TOWN” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161

( By permission of the Hon. P. Wyndham.)
THE DEATH OF LADY MACBETH. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162

( By permission of Mr. W. M. Rossetti.)
PANDORA. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 162

( By permission of Mr. Charles Butler. From a photograph by the Autotype

Company. )
PANDORA, 1879. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164

( By permission of Mr. T. Watts-Dunton.)
WATER-WILLOW . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165

( In the possession of Mr. S. Bancroft, Jr.)
DANTE'S DREAM ( Photogravure) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 166

( By permission from the Walker Art Gallery.)

page: xxi

PREDELLAS FOR DANTE'S DREAM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .168

( By permission of Mr. W. Imrie.) [Predella 1] [Predella 2]
VERONICA VERONESE ( Photogravure) . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 168

( From a photograph by J. Caswall Smith.)
DESIGN FOR PÆTUS AND ARRIA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169

( By permission of Mr. W. M. Rossetti.)
THE BOWER MEADOW . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 170

( By permission of Mr. William Dunlop.)
LA GHIRLANDATA: STUDY. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 172

( From a photograph by the Autotype Company.)
PROSERPINE ( Photogravure). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 174

( By permission of Mr. Chas. Butler. From a photograph by the Autotype

Company. )
THE DAMSEL OF THE SANC GRAEL ( Photogravure). . . . . . . . facing 176

( By permission of Mr. George Rae.)
THE ROMAN WIDOW. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 177

( From a photograph by J. Caswall Smith.)
THE BOAT OF LOVE ( Grisaille) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177

( By permission from the Birmingham Art Gallery.)
CHRISTINA ROSSETTI, 1866 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 180

( By permission of Mr. W. M. Rossetti.)
MRS. AND MISS CHRISTINA ROSSETTI, 1877 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181

( From a drawing in the National Portrait Gallery.)
SUPPOSED DESIGN FOR “THE BRIDE'S PRELUDE”. . . . . . . . . . . . . 183

( By permission of Mr. W. M. Rossetti.)
LA BELLA MANO ( Photogravure) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 184

( By permission of Sir Cuthbert Quilter, Bart.)
THE QUESTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 186

( From a photograph by the Autotype Company.)
THE BLESSED DAMOZEL. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 188

( From a photograph by J. Caswall Smith.)
STUDIES FOR “LOVERS” ( Two Designs) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189

( From a photograph by the Autotype Company. ) [study 1] [study 2]
MNEMOSYNE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190

( From a photograph by J. Caswall Smith.)
THE BLESSED DAMOZEL: STUDY, 1875 ( Photogravure). . . . . . facing 190

( Plate lent by Mr. Duckworth.)
THE SPIRIT OF THE RAINBOW. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 191

( By permission of Mr. T. Watts-Dunton.)

page: xxii

HEAD OF A MAGDALEN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 192

( By permission of Mr. George Rae.)
ASTARTE SYRIACA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 192

( By permission from the Manchester Art Gallery.)
A VISION OF FIAMMETTA ( Photogravure) . . . . . . . . . . . facing 194

( By permission of Mr. Chas. Butler. From a photograph by the Autotype

Company. )
THE SEA SPELL. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 194

( From a photograph by J. Caswall Smith.)
DESDEMONA'S DEATH-SONG . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 196

( By permission of Mr. W. M. Rossetti.)
LA DONNA DELLA FINESTRA. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 196

( From a photograph by F. Hollyer.)
SANCTA LILIAS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198
THE DAY-DREAM ( Photogravure) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 198

( By permission of Mr. Constantine Ionides.)
DESIGN FOR THE SONNET. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 199

( By permission of Mr. W. M. Rossetti.)
THE SALUTATION OF BEATRICE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 200

( By permission of Sir J. C. Holder.)
THE SALUTATION OF BEATRICE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201

( By permission of Mr. Joseph Dixon.)
LA PIA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 202

( From a photograph by J. Caswall Smith.)
ROSSETTI'S GRAVE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 210
EARLY DRAWING: ROCKING-HORSE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211

( By permission of Mr. W. M. Rossetti.)
EARLY DRAWING: DORMOUSE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212

( By permission of Mr. W. M. Rossetti.)
EARLY DRAWING: ILLUSTRATIONS TO HOMER. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .212

( By permission of Mr. W. M. Rossetti.) [illustration 1] [illustration 2] [illustration 3]
EARLY DRAWING: ILLUSTRATIONS TO FOUR STORIES . . . . . . . . . . . 213

( By permission of Mr. W. M. Rossetti.)
EARLY DRAWING: ILLUSTRATION TO “SORRENTINO”. . . . . . . . . . . . 214

( By permission of Mr. W. M. Rossetti.)
EARLY LITHOGRAPH: JULIETTE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . facing 214

( By permission of Mr. W. M. Rossetti.)
EARLY LITHOGRAPH: TWO DESIGNS FOR PLAYING CARDS. . . . . . . . . .214 [design 1] [design 2]

( By permission of Mr. W. M. Rossetti.)

page: xxiii

EARLY DRAWING: CHAMBERMAID . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215

( By permission of Mr. W. M. Rossetti.)
CARICATURE: J. E. MILLAIS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 216

( By permission of Mr. W. M. Rossetti.)
CARICATURE: D. G. AND W. M. ROSSETTI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 216

( By permission of Mr. W. M. Rossetti.)
CARICATURE: THE RESULTS OF “UNCLE TOM'S CABIN”. . . . . . . . . . 218 [caricature 1] [caricature 2]

( By permission of Mr. W. M. Rossetti.)
CARICATURE: “STUNNER NO. 1”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219

( By permission of Mr. W. M. Rossetti.)
WRITING ON THE SAND. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219

( From a drawing in the British Museum.)
HUMOROUS SKETCH: DANTE AND HIS CIRCLE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220

( By permission of Mr. W. M. Rossetti.)
SPECIMENS OF HANDWRITING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .222-3 [specimen 1] [specimen 2] [specimen 3]
ROSSETTI'S STUDIO. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 224

( From a sketch by H. Treffry Dunn.)
THE DRAWING-ROOM: NO. 16, CHEYNE WALK. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225

( From a sketch by H. Treffry Dunn.)
ROSSETTI'S BED . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 226

( From a sketch by H. Treffry Dunn.)
ROSSETTI AND MR. THEODORE WATTS IN THE DINING-ROOM AT NO. 16,

CHEYNE WALK. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227

( From a sketch by H. Treffry Dunn.)
THE GREAT SEAL AT THE ZOO. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229

( By permission of Mr. W. M. Rossetti.)

page: [xxiv]

Note: blank page

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Sig. B

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY

DANTE GABRIEL, or, to give him his full christening name, Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti, was born on May 12th, 1828, at No. 38, Charlotte Street, Portland Place, and was the second of four children, all born in successive years. His

Gabriele Rossetti

Figure: Oil painting. Head and shoulders portrait of Gabriele Rossetti with his head turned slightly to his right.

parentage and family life have been so copiously dealt with already in the “ Memoir” compiled by his brother, Mr. William Michael Rossetti, that there is no need here to do more than recapitulate the main facts. Gabriele Rossetti, the father of Dante Gabriel, was a native of the city of Vasto, in the province of Abruzzi, on the Adriatic coast of what was once the kingdom of Naples. He was a man of superior literary ability and force of character, at one time custodian of bronzes at the Naples Museum, who made himself obnoxious to the Bourbon King Ferdinand during the suppression of the constitution in 1821, and was in consequence proscribed and obliged to fly for safety. Assisted by a British man-of-war in escaping to Malta, Gabriele Rossetti remained there for some time,

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practising as an instructor in his native language, until further annoyance drove him in 1824 to England. Here he settled, and some years later obtained an appointment as Professor of Italian at King's College. Meantime, in 1826, he had married a daughter of Gaetano Polidori, for some while secretary to the notable Count Alfieri, and father also of that strange being, Dr. John Polidori, who travelled with Byron as his physician, and committed suicide in 1821. Gaetano Polidori's wife, Rossetti's grandmother, was an Englishwoman, whose maiden name was Pierce. To his parentage the young Dante Gabriel was indebted for much, but especially to his

Mrs. Rossetti.

Figure: Chalk and pencil. Inscribed lower left: "Feb/62." Drawing of head and shoulders, nearly in profile to right, wearing a white pleated muslin bonnet; on either side a streamer falls forward over the shoulders.Surtees, 187

mother. One can judge to this day of the latter's quiet sensible character, and deep religious instincts, from the portraits left us by her son, of which one is reproduced here as typical. But, besides these qualities, she possessed good literary and artistic judgment, shrewd knowledge of human nature, and a fund of common sense which must have effectually prevented the somewhat mystical spirit pervading the thoughts of her young family from deteriorating into morbid and unhealthy channels. Between D. G. Rossetti and his mother the warmest and most affectionate relations prevailed, relations that were only severed by the former's untimely death on April 9th, 1882. Mrs. Rossetti survived her son exactly four years

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to the very day. Her husband had died in April, 1854, honoured as a patriot in his native land with a memorial statue ¹ and a medal commemorating his services. Their elder daughter, Maria, departed this life in 1876, and in December, 1894, Christina Rossetti also died, leaving as sole survivor of this brilliant family the younger son, William Michael, well known as a writer of critiques on art and as the biographer of his more famous brother.

Albeit English in its main external features, the environment of the Rossetti family in London remained essentially Italian during the lifetime of Gabriele Rossetti. Their house was the resort of all classes of Italians passing through or resident in town. Musicians and literary men met there with revolutionaries fresh from the wasting struggle for Italian liberty. A romantic odour of assassination hung round one at least of the regular habitués of the house, and added spice to the somewhat fusty atmosphere of the father's own particular studies. Gabriele Rossetti was a commentator on Dante, and himself a writer of verse, mainly in a politico-satirical vein. He had a gift for declamation and improvization, which is not so uncommon in men of his nationality as of ours; but the exposition of Dante was his chief occupation, as well as the one by which he is now best known. To the ears of the young Gabriel, familiarized by habit with the sonorous metres of the “Inferno” and “Paradiso,” the name of Dante for many years conjured up no very stimulating thoughts. It was not until he had begun himself in early life to read upon his own lines, that the pictorial richness and splendour of the Florentine dawned on him and seized him with its spell. There is a sketch by Rossetti of his father, engaged upon his labours of interpretation, and surrounded, as Mr. W. M. Rossetti has described him, by heavy folios in italic type, his “libri mistici,” full of the lore of Swedenborg, alchemy, and Brahminism, with the aid of which he is devotedly burying the poetry of his subject beneath unprofitable layers of teleological symbolism. “The ‘Convito,’ ” says his son, “was always a name of dread to us, as being the very essence of arid unreadableness,” an interesting fact to remember when dealing, as we shall presently have to do, with the influence which Dante was destined afterwards to exert upon two members at least of the family.

Before passing to the early life of Gabriel Rossetti, a pair of independent descriptions of the household and surroundings of No. 50, Charlotte Street, whither the family removed from No. 38 in

Transcribed Footnote (page 3):

¹The statue, I understand, has not yet been erected, but is still in contemplation.

page: 4

1836, may not be without interest, though to some they will not be new.

Mr. William Bell Scott, in his “Autobiographical Notes,” says, “I entered the small front parlour or dining-room of the house, and found an old gentleman sitting by the fire in a great chair, the table drawn close to his chair, with a thick MS. book open before him, and the largest snuff-box I ever saw beside it conveniently open. He had a black cap on his head furnished with a great peak or shade for the eyes, so that I only saw his face partially.” This description tallies in a remarkable way with the drawing of his father just mentioned, done by Dante Gabriel in 1853, though otherwise not remarkable for insight or fullness of detail. A more interesting picture is one by Mr. F. G. Stephens, Rossetti's early associate, quoted from his “ Portfolio” monograph:

“As might be expected of one possessing so many accomplishments, and whose career was marked by so much courage, the professor was a man of striking character and aspect. . . . To a youngster, such as I was, 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. . . . 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, 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 outlined by the candle's light.”

Reared in this studious atmosphere, it is not to be wondered at that the young Rossettis early took to literature. Before they were six years old they had made acquaintance with Shakespeare and Scott, in addition to the usual works of childhood, and were steeped in romance of a more lofty kind than is common at such an age. A healthy crudity of taste and strong boyish proclivities, together with the influence of his mother, prevented this precocity from developing into priggishness in the case of the youthful Gabriel, whose letters, even up to his sixteenth or seventeenth year, are as remarkable for naïve simplicity as for their rather florid style and sonorous diction. They are also marked by an early sense of humour. How many children of fourteen are there who possess the power of expression, to say nothing of the critical observation, shown by this juvenile specimen of Gabriel's domestic correspondence.

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“CHALFONT ST.-GILES,

“ Thursday, 1 Sept., 1842.

“MY DEAR MAMMA,

“We arrived safely at Chalfront at 12 o'clock yesterday. The village is larger than I expected. The first thing we did on our arrival was to demolish bread and butter, of which I at least was much in want. We then, with considerable difficulty, opened Uncle Henry's trunks, and after depositing a portion of their contents in a chest of drawers, sallied forth to reconnoitre. I saw Milton's house, which is unquestionably the ugliest and dirtiest building in the whole village. ¹ It is now occupied by a tailor. . . .

“Yesterday I commenced reading ‘The Infidel's Doom,’ by Dr. Birch, which work forms part and parcel of Uncle Henry's library. However, I have abandoned the task in despair. I then began ‘ The Castle of Otranto,’ which shared the same fate, and am now engaged on Defoe's ‘ History of the Plague.’ This morning we deposited Uncle Henry's books in a closet in Uncle Henry's bedroom, which, in common with all the other closets in this house, possesses a lock but no key.

“I do not think that I shall go to church on Sunday, for in the first place I do not know where I can sit, and in the second place I find we are so stared at wherever we go that I do not much relish the idea of sitting for two hours the loadstone of attraction in the very centre of the aborigines, on whose minds curiosity seems to have taken strong hold. . . . I ‘in longing expectation wait’ the appearance of my dinner; for which, however, I need not yet look, since it is now nearly three o'clock, which is the nominal dinner hour, but, the fire having gone out, Uncle Henry prophesies that it will not come till 4.

“I remain, dear Mamma,

“Your affectionate son,

“GABRIEL ROSSETTI”

Of Rossetti's early literary efforts it is sufficient to mention two: “ The Slave,” a bombastic drama in blank verse, which occupied his faculties at the age of five, and is chiefly remarkable in that connection (though the correctness of spelling and versification is extraordinary), and “ Sir Hugh the Heron”, a legendary poem

Transcribed Footnote (page 5):

¹For the credit of Chalfont it may be mentioned that Milton's house has, since the date of this letter, been acquired for the nation and put in proper order.

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founded on a tale by Allan Cunningham. The latter, a more ambitious effort, written when he was twelve, was privately printed by his grandfather, Gaetano Polidori, and a copy exists in the British Museum. This fact was in after years rather a source of dread to Rossetti, who feared that some meticulous compiler might light upon the curiosity and include it in his published works, as to which he was morbidly scrupulous. These two productions do not sum up the juvenile work of Rossetti, of which a record has been kept, but they are quite as much as it is fair to mention, and serve sufficiently to show the romantic drift of his earliest ideas. In art he was scarcely less precocious, a pretty story being told of a milkman, who came upon him in the passage sketching his rocking-horse, and who testified his surprise at having seen “a baby making a picture.”Drawings of this date exist, and also later ones done when he was in the habit of preparing illustrations for books he read and for his own romances. ¹ In point of quality, however, these juvenile sketches are not to be compared with those of many masters of the brush who began early, for example with those of Millais, a veritable infant prodigy, and are chiefly interesting in connection with a statement of his brother that “he could not remember any date at which it was not an understood thing in the family that Gabriel was to be a painter.”

In 1837, after a short preliminary training at a private school, Dante Gabriel and his brother were admitted to King's College, where their father was Italian professor. Here the former remained for four or five years, acquiring a fair knowledge of Latin and French, with a smattering of Greek. German he learnt just well enough to enter upon a study of the wonderful literature of that language, and Italian, of course, came naturally to him. The drawing-master at King's College was the celebrated Cotman, of Norwich, from whom, however, he derived little or no instruction.His artistic training did not begin until 1842, when he left school, ² and entered himself at a drawing academy known in those days as “Sass's,” and kept by Mr. F. S. Cary, son of the translator of Dante.

As a schoolboy, Dante Gabriel is described by those who knew him as a boy of gentle and affectionate nature, but singularly masterful as well. He himself confessed to recollections of a want of hardihood and a dislike for active games and exercise. The

Transcribed Footnote (page 6):

¹Several of these relics of his childish days will be found reproduced in a supplementary chapter at the end of the book.

Transcribed Footnote (page 6):

²This is the date usually given. Mr. W. M. Rossetti now thinks it should be 1841.

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latter defect haunted him through life. He took little exercise at any time but walking, and suffered in consequence, as he was prone to admit, from some of the physical and mental disadvantages attendant upon a sedentary habit.

To return to his artistic life, Gabriel Rossetti remained some four years at Cary's Academy, during which period he seems to have acquired the bare rudiments of his art and to have made a small reputation for eccentricity. In July, 1846, having sent in the requisite probation-drawings, he was admitted to the Antique School of the Royal Academy. His first appearance is thus graphically delineated by a fellow-student, whose observant eye has preserved for us a probably accurate conception of the fiery young enthusiast, impatient of ordinary considerations in the matter of attire, burning with zeal to paint his already vivid imaginings, yet scornful of the routine and drudgery by which it was supposed that masterhood must be acquired. The description, from which the following is an extract, has often been quoted before.

“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 with what may be called proud cynicism, burned with a furtive sort of energy. His rather high cheekbones 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 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 jacket of the period, but a 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.”

The clustering masses of hair are shown in the pencil sketch now at the National Portrait Gallery, drawn by himself at the age of nineteen, and reproduced here. The whole description is well

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borne out by Mr. Holman Hunt, in an independent description of Rossetti at about the same date, from which we get the additional particulars that he was of “decidedly foreign aspect;” that he had staring, dreamy eyes, and an aquiline but delicate nose, with a strongly marked depression at the frontal sinus; and that his singularity of gait depended upon the width of hip, which was unusual for a man. Mr. Holman Hunt also dwells upon Rossetti's loud voice and rather blustering manner, which seem at first to have jarred upon his retiring

D.G. Rossetti, 1847.

Figure: Chalk and pencil drawing of head and shoulders. A young D.G.R. with long curling hair faces forward, with his head turned slightly to his left.

disposition. He adds, however, that “anyone who has addressed him was struck with a sudden surprise to find his critical impressions dissipated; for his language was refined and polished, and he proved to be courteous, gentle, and winsome, generous in compliment, and in every respect, so far as could be shown by manner, a cultivated gentleman.” Those who have read Mr. Hunt's affecting account of his own early struggles in the pursuit of art, and realized the picture of himself there given, will easily perceive that there could have been but slight affinity at first, as far as externals were concerned, between

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himself and the buoyant Rossetti, bursting with animal spirits, and carried away by the power of fascination and mastery which he exerted over all who came into contact with him.

As a student in the dry atmosphere of the Academy Antique School Rossetti proved a failure, and never passed to the higher grades of the Life and Painting classes. Conventional methods of study were distasteful to him, and the traditions of the Academy were especially arid and cramping to the imagination. It will be necessary later on to give some description of the state into which the art of painting had fallen in England before the fresh minds of the young and romantic school, breaking away under Rossetti's leadership, caused such a turmoil and revolution; but in the meantime, at the period we are dealing with, it is probably correct to say that Rossetti grew tired of, rather than disapproved of, the teaching in the school, that he was full of ideas craving utterance on canvas, and that he wanted to paint before he could properly draw. This impatience caused him to take a momentous and curious step, which certainly entailed harm to him as a technical executant, though it may indirectly have furthered his career as an artist. He decided to throw up the Academy training, and wrote to a painter of whom not many people at that date had heard, but whose work he himself admired, asking to be admitted into his studio as a pupil. This was Ford Madox Brown, and for his own particular needs and line of thought Rossetti could have lighted upon no man more absolutely suitable. Madox Brown was only seven years Rossetti's senior, but he had studied abroad at Ghent, Antwerp, Paris, and Rome, and had exhibited during the early forties some fine cartoon designs for the decoration of the new House of Lords, which—especially the well-known one of Harold's body brought before William the Conqueror —Rossetti had marked out from the rest of the competitive drawings when they were shown to the public in Westminster Hall. The pictures by Brown which Rossetti had seen, and which he mentioned in writing, were the Giaour's Confession , exhibited at the Academy in 1841, Parisina (1845), Our Lady of Saturday Night , and Mary Queen of Scots , of which he remarked “if ever I do anything in art, it will certainly be attributable to a constant study of that work”. This, and other rather florid compliments of the same sort, may well have impressed Madox Brown, who was not accustomed to be complimented, with a shrewd idea that he was being made fun of; and the story has been told how, in a suspicious frame of mind, he armed himself with a stick and went forth to seek his unknown

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correspondent. On arriving at the house he was partly reassured by a door-plate; and the evident sincerity and enthusiasm of the boy himself, when they met, overcame his generous warm-heartedness, and made him agree to take Rossetti into his studio, and to teach him painting, not for a fee, which he declined, but for the sheer pleasure of encountering and training up a sympathetic spirit. So in March 1848, less than two years after his admission to the Antique School, and with a clear two years more ahead of him before he could possibly hope to learn painting by the ordinary course, Rossetti quitted his sicca nutrix, the Academy, and installed himself under Madox Brown's guidance at his studio not very far from the paternal roof in Charlotte Street.

Before following his fortunes further in this direction we must go back over the ground just traversed and note what Rossetti's activities in literature had amounted to during the same period. These are no less than astonishing. To take the greatest first, they include the bulk of the series of verse translations from the early Italian poets, first published in 1861, and afterwards republished under the altered title of “ Dante and his Circle.” Although worked on and revised from time to time, these translations remain in all essentials much as Rossetti compiled them between the years 1845 and 1849, and they rank among the very finest work of the kind in the English language, being no less remarkable for their high poetic qualities than for the subtle dexterity of phrase by which the sound and sense of the originals have been transplanted into a naturally colder tongue. Swinburne, most generous as well as most far-sighted of critics, has expended himself in admiration of these essays in an art in which he himself is so eminent; and they were mostly done by a boy not out of his teens, thrown off in the intervals of a more absorbing occupation, the study of painting. Rossetti's translation of the “Vita Nuova” alone might stand as a monument of industry in such a case, for it breathes a new spirit of language, a voluptuous and exotic style such as has never been excelled for conveying the emotional mysticism and introspective sentiment of a southern lover; but to this he added that great mass of verse translations and sonnets, involving many days and many hours previously spent over musty volumes at the British Museum in search of Italian poets. Even this was not all, for between the same years he began a translation in verse of the Nibelungenlied, the strong passion of which seized hold of him much as it seized hold upon Wagner, and finished a translation of Hartmann von Aue's“Arme Heinrich” , which has been

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thought worthy of a place amongst his collected works. Besides these, in 1847, before he was nineteen years old, he had written his best-known poem, “The Blessed Damozel”, together with several others, including “My Sister's Sleep”, “The Portrait”, and considerable portions of “Ave”, “A Last Confession”, and the “Bride's Prelude”. The performance of these literary efforts is so finished, the sentiment so profound and mature, that one can hardly understand the ambition which kept painting in the foremost place and made poetry the parergon. The ease with which versification came to Rossetti may have blinded him at first to the merits of his work in this art, as happened later in the case of William Morris; but that he was not altogether ignorant of its value is shown by the fact that when he was most in despair over his future he wrote to Leigh Hunt asking for advice on the question of taking up literature as his profession and inclosing some of his early poems. Leigh Hunt's reply is extant, and contains a warm and evidently spontaneous eulogy of Rossetti's poetry, especially of its thoughtful and imaginative qualities; but, it goes on to say, “I need not tell you that poetry, even the very best—nay, the best in this respect is apt to be the worst—is not a thing for a man to live upon while he is in the flesh, however immortal it may render him in spirit.” An inquiry made a little earlier into the prospects of railway telegraphy (!) had proved hardly more promising, though very interesting to record. Rossetti, therefore, was not encouraged to abandon painting as a means of livelihood, and having made the arrangement already described with Madox Brown, settled down with a characteristic mixture of enthusiasm and despair to the pursuit of art. Brown at this time was engaged upon his well-known picture of Wiclif and John of Gaunt . He was too conscientious a painter himself to suppose that anyone could acquire the power of painting without previous drudgery, and shattered any hopes that Rossetti might have cherished in this direction by coupling his permission to copy a picture with insistence on a study of still-life,—tradition says a row of pickle bottles.

Much as he owed to him in the way of instruction and sympathetic encouragement, Rossetti did not remain long in Brown's studio, at all events as a regular attendant, but left him after a few months to share a studio with Holman Hunt. The beginning of this intimacy was curious and typical. On the opening day of the Academy Exhibition (May 1848) Rossetti, says Mr. Hunt,came up boisterously and in loud tongue made me feel very

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confused by declaring that mine was the best picture of the year. The fact that it was from Keats (the picture was for The Eve of St. Agnes) made him extra-enthusiastic, for I think no painter had ever before painted from this wonderful poet, who then, it may scarcely be credited, was little known. Rossetti begged to be allowed to visit Hunt, for at the Academy schools they had barely been acquainted, and some time later called and poured out his trouble about the pickle jars. Hunt considered them sound, in the circumstances, but suggested as a compromise that Rossetti might try to paint one of his own designs, a subject recently contributed to a sketching society,

Christina Rossetti, 1852.

Figure: Pencil. Dated right: "Oct/52." 3/4 length oval drawing of Christina leaning her head on her right hand, seated in a chair reading a book on her lap. The sleeves are flounced at the elbows.Surtees, p. 184

and by way of practice might fill in all the still-life first. This proposal was accepted at once, and so with apparent, but probably not actual, fickleness Rossetti once more shifted his ground, and agreed to work for a time with Hunt, sharing for this purpose a studio which the latter had just taken in Cleveland Street, Fitzroy Square. Here (as well as later in a studio which he took for himself at 83 Newman Street) Brown, whose staunch, unalterable friendship continued to the end of Rossetti's life, visited him from time to time, and gave him the benefit of his advice; and here, amid what Mr. Hunt has described as the most dismal and dingy surroundings, Rossetti began to paint his first picture. Up to this time he had done little beyond studies and sketches, including a number of

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portraits, some of which show excellent work. The year 1848 marks his transition artistically from boyhood to adolescence, a gracious adolescence adorned by many qualities that we too often look for in vain in an age of tricky cleverness and pernicious skill; an adolescence in which depth of feeling and height of aspiration transcended the power of accomplishment, and no artificial or showy mannerisms obscured the honest endeavour and deep-set seriousness of purpose that characterized, not him alone, but the whole of the small band of workers with which he presently became associated. The formation of this band, and the painting of Rossetti's first picture, bring us to the story of the now famous Pre-Raphaelite movement, and will more properly serve to begin a new, than to end a preliminary chapter.

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CHAPTER II

THE “PRE-RAPHAELITE BROTHERHOOD”

IN relating afresh the history of the “Pre-Raphaelite” movement, one has many precedents to choose from. According to the point of view selected one may see in it the conscious expression of a great artistic revival, deliberately planned by a body of zealots, and based upon a structure of lofty principles; or one may go to the opposite extreme and regard it merely as an exuberant freak, an irresponsible outburst on the part of a few impulsive youths linked together for one brief moment by a mutual combination of enthusiasm and high spirits. For both of these points of view ample authority might be quoted, and the truth as usual lies somewhere safe between them. For the more emotional and serious aspect of the case we have to thank Mr. Ruskin, who, finding in the work of the men in question qualities and tentative aims such as he himself admired, forthwith, as his manner was, read into it all the high morality of purpose and principle that he conceived appropriate to ideal craftsmanship. On the other hand, there have never lacked writers who from personal dislike, or, it may be, a touch of jealousy, have tried to depreciate both Rossetti's work and his wonderful influence over others. The facts of the case are, it happens, abundantly in evidence. From Mr. Holman Hunt, Mr. F. G. Stephens, Mr. W. M. Rossetti, and from others, who, if not so intimately connected with the movement as these, were at all events in a good position to know about it, we have received separate, and on the whole confirmatory accounts of its origin and aims. No personal feeling or bias any longer obtrudes itself into the matter; we can see the truth, if we will, in a clear perspective, and nothing remains to obscure our vision but the amount of distortion that it may have contracted from impressions formed on writers of the above-mentioned divergent opinions, or from strongly developed artistic sympathies and prejudices.

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The tendency has been on the whole, not unnaturally, to exaggerate the significance, and to over-estimate the importance of the “Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood,” which after all was but the grain of mustard seed from which a great tree sprung. Looking upon the tree, some are apt to magnify the seed, forgetting what qualities of climate, soil, or accident may have assisted to promote its growth. Those who do so, however, must either not have passed through an impressionable youth themselves, or else have forgotten how naturally at such a budding age men form romantic coteries based upon common friendships, common ideals, and common habits of life. In such associations there is nearly always one dominant personality which gives the tone to the set. A craving for expression, and more particularly for expression in verse, is also a general characteristic. The intellectual standing of the members of such a group is, no doubt, a measure of the value of such expression, but not of its earnestness or motive power, its romantic affinities, or its influence upon the men so brought together. Dozens of “Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhoods” are formed every year, at the great schools and at the universities, tracing lineal human descent from the classical age which combined Platonic friendship with an enthusiasm for philosophy. That few or none of them rise to celebrity is not so wonderful as that one should have attained to such celebrity. Accident and circumstance, at least as much as the strong personal qualities of the members of the group, combined to bring this about; and if argument were needed to prove it, beyond the witness of the facts themselves, it would be found in the deprecatory manner in which the leading “Pre-Raphaelites,” and none more than Rossetti, were accustomed to look back on their turbulent, romantic, and on all accounts most interesting past.

The formation of the “Brotherhood” came about in the following way. We have noted the somewhat sudden alliance between Rossetti and Holman Hunt, and their plan of sharing a studio to carry out work in common. Through Hunt, Rossetti had become acquainted with Millais, and had joined, or helped to start, a “Cyclographic Society,” numbering several members, to wit, Thomas Woolner, F. G. Stephens, Walter Deverell, John Hancock the sculptor, James Collinson, William Dennis, J. B. Keene, and some four or five besides. The scheme was for members to contribute drawings to a portfolio which was sent round for all the rest to criticise. Like other institutions based upon mutual candour, this society enjoyed a very brief existence, and was mainly of service in weeding out those

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who had no sympathy with the new ideas which were ripening in Rossetti and his friends from those who had. The final development of these ideas was brought about by a meeting in Millais's home in Gower Street, where the three alighted upon a volume of engravings after the frescoes in the Campo Santo at Pisa. Ruskin has spoken scornfully of this work as “Lasinio's execrable engravings,” but whatever their quality they at least served to show that in the earlier men, who preceded Raphael, there was a feeling for earnest work, a striving after lofty expression, which was worth more as an inspiration than the rigidly mechanical fashion of painting stereotyped subjects which had come into vogue in England. Why this mechanical cult should ever have become grafted on to the ill-used name of Raphael, and shadowed by his stately fame, is a difficult matter to explain, and requires an excursus into the history of European art. Its effect on the teaching of the day, however, is summed up in the following incisive passage by Ruskin:

“We begin, in all probability, by telling the youth of fifteen or sixteen that Nature is full of faults, and that he is to improve her; but that Raphael is perfection, and that the more he copies Raphael the better; that after much copying of Raphael, he is to try what he can do himself in a Raphaelesque, but yet original, manner: that is to say, he is to try to do something very clever, all out of his own head, but yet this clever something is to be properly subjected to Raphaelesque rules, is to have a principal light occupying one-seventh of its space, and a principal shadow occupying one-third of the same; that no two people's heads in the picture are to be turned the same way, and that all the personages represented are to have ideal beauty of the highest order, which ideal beauty consists partly in a Greek outline of nose, partly in proportions expressible in decimal fractions between the lips and chin; but partly also in that degree of improvement which the youth of sixteen is to bestow upon God's work in general.”

This canting and misdirected worship of Raphael by men who had discarded his spirit, and the realization that before Raphael there were painters of lofty aim, may well have determined the title under which the three enthusiasts conspired to band themselves in revolt. From most points of view it was unfortunate. It meant very little in actual fact, it was misleading so far as it did mean anything, and it was responsible for much of the acrimony and abuse which the devoted trio afterwards brought down upon their most meritorious efforts. One curious feature

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The Girlhood of Mary Virgin

Swan Electric Engraving C ^o.

Figure: Oil. Signed and dated lower left corner: "Dante Gabriele Rossetti P.R.B. 1849." The young Mary, facing to the left and seated in front of her mother, St. Anne, embroiders a white lily on a piece of red cloth. The lily she copies is placed a few feet away atop a pile of books, and is held by a child angel. A trellis runs behind this scene, and behind it St. Joachim reaches upward to prune a running vine. A Dove and the lake of Galilee are behind him.

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Early Sketch: La Belle Dame Sans Mercy

Figure: Pen and sepia with pencil, arched top. Monogram and date lower left corner: "April/48." Two whole-length figures in a forest, facing to front. The man stands on the left, looking at the girl while leaning his left arm on the tree behind her. She looks to the front, with her long hair unbound. A dog sits to the man's left.

Retro Me Sathana!

Figure: Pen and ink, arched top. Inscription on shield: "Ex Nocte Dies." Initialled and dated lower right corner: "July 1848." Three full-length figures before a curtain. On the left, a priest gazes at a cross held in his right hand, raising his left hand in blessing above the head of a young woman, who also gazes downward at the cross. A shadowy figure with horns and a tail sneaks up behind them.

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of the matter is that they appear to have possessed between them at this time a comparatively slight acquaintance with pre-Raphaelite pictures, not more, perhaps, than the average intelligent visitor to the National Gallery to-day. Scarcely anywhere in their writings (we must except one article by Mr. F. G. Stephens) do we find praise, or even mention, of most of the great pre-Raphaelite painters. Nothing of Mantegna, Botticelli, Bellini, Orcagna, Fra Angelico, Melozzo, Lippo Lippi, or Piero della Francesca. At a slightly later date Rossetti visited Bruges, and fell in love with Memling; but his letters even then reveal some very crude preferences in art. Whatever was perceived or imagined in the work of the men they decided to follow must have been largely a matter of instinct, backed up by a strong sympathy for the naïve and simple charm of the few early Italian pictures which they had seen. Perhaps the fact that Keats too praised the early painters had something to do with it, for Keats was a beloved idol with all three, most of all with Rossetti, who had rediscovered him on his own account when his poetry was practically dead. In addition, a bond of sympathy may be traced in the fact that the ancient pre-Raphaelites, like these new ones who took their name, had established a revolt from the effete and degraded classicism into which Byzantine art had lapsed. They too had had to seek out nature afresh, by the light of their own genius, and to invent new laws and new styles as a protest against the mechanical system enforced upon them. The precedent showed to our reformers a golden age of painting, crowned with the names of glorious painters, not perhaps held so glorious then as they are to-day, when many persons outside the ranks of art have learnt to love their quaint simplicity and to draw from it the noblest inspirations. It is a mistake to suppose that what Rossetti and his companions admired or sought to imitate in these old masters was the mediæval and primitive style of painting. The mediæval quality proved infectious, no doubt, and may have influenced all more or less at first in the direction of angularity and awkward composition. But there were other causes which also contributed to this. Amongst them may be mentioned an idea that for every scene an actual unidealized room or landscape must be painted, and the figures grouped without reference to arrangement; as well as another that for each figure a definite model must be taken and followed even to the extent of blemishes. This counsel of perfection, if it was ever seriously accepted, was certainly not followed even from the first; but the fact of its proposal shows the austere lines upon which these

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youthful painters proceeded, and helps to explain what many people have found a stumbling-block, the lack of grace and harmony in some of their earliest compositions. What they sought to follow in the old Italian models, however, with all their archaism and immaturity of skill, was the honest striving after nature, sincerity of style, decorative simplicity, and, by no means least, the pious selection of worthy subjects. It is this last quality, exhibited alike by all the members of the Brotherhood, that more plainly than anything marks the cleavage between their “pre-Raphaelite” work and the commonplace painting of the day. They set themselves to paint great and ennobling subjects, often greater than they could achieve, out of their imagination, when the rest of the world (always excepting men like Madox Brown, who belonged to them in spirit) were painting what Ruskin calls “cattle-pieces,” and ‘sea-pieces,’ and ‘fruit-pieces,’ and ‘family pieces;’ the eternal brown cows in ditches, and white sails in squalls, and sliced lemons in saucers, and foolish faces in simpers.”

In the inauguration of the Brotherhood Rossetti took a specially active part, and the title itself was invented by him. One would not be far wrong in saying that the whole idea was his, and that the two companions who share the honour of its conception were dragged, enthusiastically enough without doubt, not for the first or last time at the glowing wheels of his fervid chariot. “Rossetti,” says one of them—Mr. Hunt, of course, for Millais was remarkably reticent about those early days—“Rossetti, with his spirit alike subtle and fiery, was essentially a proselytiser, sometimes to an almost absurd degree, but possessed, alike in his poetry and painting, with an appreciation of beauty of the most intense quality.” Millais is credited in the same sentence with a rare combination of artistic faculty and British common sense. “He was,” says Mr. Hunt, “beyond almost anyone with whom I have been acquainted, full of a generous quick enthusiasm; a spirit on fire with eagerness to seize whatever he saw was good, which shone in every line of his face, and made it, as Rossetti once said, look sometimes like the face of an angel.” His whole after-career shows how completely thisBrother was fascinated and dominated at the time by the imaginative natures round him, and with what wonderful results for art. Though younger than his companions in age, in painting he was already their superior, and his brilliant reputation as a student was invaluable in the hour of strife; but in imaginative and poetic qualities he was, compared with Rossetti, deficient, and such poetic

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charm as breathes from his early pictures, and from an occasional later one like The Vale of Rest , is unquestionably owing in part to the influences under which he fell, and to that “spirit on fire with eagerness to seize whatever he saw was good.” Of the third member of the trio, the writer of the foregoing appreciations, a fair impression can be got from the autobiographical sketch which he contributed to the “Contemporary Review” (April, May, June, 1886), in which with almost anatomical minuteness he lays bare the secrets of his early struggle to win a way betwixt art and commerce, and his heroic sacrifices for the former. At the time of the formation of theBrotherhood he was twenty-one years old, and practically out of his studenthood, his style being already formed on the almost painfully laborious lines from which it has never deviated. In the sense in which the “Brotherhood” professed to be pre-Raphaelite,i.e., in adherence to nature and in choice of great subjects, Holman Hunt was, if the phrase may be permitted, the most eminently pre-Raphaelite of them all. And he has remained so. The long series of journeys undertaken in the East for the purpose of acquiring the proper setting and the true local colour for his scriptural subjects prove that to him at least the profession of “seeking nature” in its extreme sense was a real one, and not a passing whim begotten of youthful enthusiasm. Mr. Hunt says, nevertheless, that the title of “Pre-Raphaelite” was adopted partly in a spirit of fun, and, like other names which have acquired honour, was originally a term of reproach invented by their enemies. On this account they prudently decided to keep it secret, and to let no outward symbol of their union appear beyond the mystic initials P.R.B., which were to be used on all their pictures and in private intercourse.

The next step was to enroll sympathetic fellow-members. Besides the three founders of the Brotherhood, four more or less active adherents were enlisted. Holman Hunt introduced Mr. F. G. Stephens, who at that time was a painter, but very soon abandoned art for criticism. Woolner, the afterwards well-known sculptor, whose contributions to the movement were mainly poetical, was introduced by Millais, or possibly Rossetti; and the latter certainly was responsible for the remaining two recruits, his brother and James Collinson. Collinson, a torpid member at the best, and elected apparently on the strength of one picture which Rossetti thought “stunning,” was mainly useful as a butt to the others, who used to make fun of his sleepy nature and drag him all reluctant from his bed to go for midnight walks. Shortly afterwards, being seized

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with religious propensities, he vacated his membership and retired to Stonyhurst. Several other intimates and associates have at one time or another been credited with membership of the “P.R.B.,” but erroneously, as the survivors declare. Two men who were much in sympathy with the movement, one of them its more than putative father—Madox Brown and William Bell Scott—might well have joined it; but the former disapproved of anything resembling an artistic clique, and the latter had somewhat similar reasons for not being personally associated with the organization.

For the doings of the Brotherhood, sane and otherwise; for their weekly meetings; their code of rules; the serious way in which they regarded their mission, and the jocular way in which they customarily discussed it: for these and many other interesting details of its career, including the gradual decline in enthusiasm for its maintenance as the individual qualities of the members began to develop upon divergent lines, the curious reader will do well to consult Mr. W. M. Rossetti's “ Memoir.” Mr. Rossetti, not being an artist, was himself elected secretary to the Brotherhood, and with businesslike care he has preserved in a diary all the daily and weekly occurrences that came under his notice. These have not yet been published in a complete form; but no doubt they will be some day, and then there will be nothing left to tell. Such particulars, however, do not properly come within the scope of this record, interesting as they may be from a personal point of view. It is sufficient to say that the weekly attendances of the Brethren, at first a constant source of pleasure and mutual help, had become very irregular by December, 1850, that an attempt was made to revive them in January, 1851, but without effect, and that Millais's election to the Academy in 1853 gave a final quietus to the organization, which for some time previously had ceased to exist save in name. The ranks of the Brotherhood had not even remained intact. In addition to Collinson, it had lost Woolner, who went to Australia when the emigration craze was at its height. To replace the former a young painter, Walter Howell Deverell, had been nominated, but his election was regarded by some as invalid. Deverell, whose painting of Viola and the Duke in Twelfth Night remains an almost solitary testimony to his genius, unhappily died young. He possessed many graces of appearance and manner, and was in all respects a fascinating personality. Behind the Brotherhood, and hitherto unmentioned, we seem to catch a glimpse of another very gracious, but very retiring figure, that of Rossetti's sister Christina, who in addition to her deeply

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religious and poetic gifts possessed a quiet fund of humour to be expended on the events that occurred within her little circle. The decay of the “P.R.B.” is thus recorded by her in a sonnet of appropriately irregular form.

“The P.R.B. is in its decadence:
For Woolner in Australia cooks his chops,
And Hunt is yearning for the land of Cheops;
D.G. Rossetti shuns the vulgar optic;
While William M. Rossetti merely lops
His B's in English disesteemed as Coptic.
Calm Stephens in the twilight smokes his pipe,
But long the dawning of his public day;
And he at last the champion great Millais,
Attaining Academic opulence,
Winds up his signature with A.R.A.
So rivers merge in the perpetual sea;
So luscious fruit must fall when over-ripe,
And so the consummated P.R.B.”

We left Rossetti, in order to describe the formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, at the point where he had just settled down in a joint studio with Holman Hunt to paint his first picture. In an enthusiasm for community of action, and a spirit of devotion to Keats, it had been proposed that each of the Brethren should illustrate, by an etching, a scene from that poet's “Isabella”. Hunt, however, was already engaged upon his picture of Rienzi swearing Revenge over his Brother's Corpse ; Millais had work of a less than Pre-Raphaelite character to finish off, and Rossetti himself was seized with desire to paint a subject which much commended itself to his intensely mystical and symbol-loving mind, The Girlhood of Mary Virgin . The only one of the three, eventually, who touched Keats that year (1848) was Millais, who achieved a real triumph with the striking picture, Lorenzo and Isabella . He had been engaged to the last minute upon his old work, when suddenly, in the graphic words of Mr. Hunt, about November, the whole atmosphere of his studio was changed, and the new white canvas was installed on the easel. Day by day advanced, at a pace beyond all calculation, the picture now known to the whole of England, which I venture to say is the most wonderful painting that any youth still under twenty years of age ever did in the world. Whether posterity will support so overwhelming a verdict as this may, without disrespect either to the critic or the picture, be questioned.

Rossetti's picture, as can well be imagined, gave him endless

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trouble, and was a source of the most violent fits of alternate depression and energy. During the painting of it his kindly mentor, Brown, frequently visited the studio occupied by the pair of Brothers, and assisted them impartially with advice and technical knowledge. At the same time, Brown's diary, a document full of dry sardonic humour and quaint touches, to say nothing for the moment of its pathos, contains many anecdotes of Rossetti's exasperating changefulness and want of consideration, which show that kindness did not blind the painter to his pupil's foibles. To Brown's description of Rossetti, “lying, howling, on his belly in my studio,” and, at another time, reduced by struggles with impossible drapery to an almost maudlin condition of profanity, we may add Hunt's description of how he had solemnly to take his companion out for a walk and explain that if the interruptions of temper and multiplication of difficulties did not cease, neither of them would have a picture finished to show alongside of Millais's—a remonstrance which he says was effectual and taken in perfect good part.

So by the following spring (1849) all three pictures were ready for exhibition, and were hung, Millais's and Hunt's in the Academy, and Rossetti's either from choice or necessity in the so-called Free Exhibition held in a gallery at Hyde Park Corner. Here it was bought for £80 by the Marchioness of Bath, in whose family an aunt of Rossetti's was acting as governess; and on her death it was bequeathed to her daughter, Lady Louisa Feilding. It is now in the possession of Mrs. Jekyll, one of the daughters of the late William Graham, by whose courtesy it is reproduced here.

The picture has lately become well known by its re-exhibition at the New Gallery, and is on many accounts a favourite one with lovers of Rossetti's work. For delicacy and charm of sentiment there are few to be preferred to it, even though the work, and especially the colouring, may not be in all respects of the strongest. Considering the painter's age and want of proper training, it is a masterly performance. The scene shown is a room in the Virgin's home, with an open carved balcony at which her father, St. Joachim, is tending a symbolically fruitful vine. On the right of the picture, shown against an olive-green curtain, are the figures of the Virgin and her mother, St. Anna, seated at an embroidery frame. The latter, clothed in dark green and brown, with a nun-like head-dress of dull red, sits watching with clasped hands the work before her, whilst the young girl, a most untypical Madonna, in simple grey dress with pale green at the wrists, pauses with the needle in her

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Genevieve: From Coleridge

Figure: Pen and ink, arched top. Inscribed lower left corner: "Genevieve." Monogram and date inscribed lower right: "August 1848." Two full-length figures near a statue of a praying knight and his hound. On the left, a young man seated before the statue plays a lute, gazing downward, while a young woman faces him, leaning her right side against the back of the statue's base while she listens to his song.

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hand, and gazes with a rapt ascetic look at the room before her, where, as if visible to her eyes, a child-angel is tending a tall white lily. Beneath the pot in which the lily grows are six large books in heavy bindings, bearing the names of the six cardinal virtues. These, and a white dove perching on the trellis, are amongst the peaceful symbols of the picture, whilst the tragedy also is foreshadowed in a figure of the cross formed by the young vine-tendrils and in some strips of palm and “seven-thorned briar” laid across the floor. Each of the figures, and the dove, bears a halo, the name being inscribed within it. Rossetti painted the calm face of his mother for St. Anna, and his sister Christina for the Virgin, giving her, however, in contravention of the rule mentioned above, golden instead of dark brown hair. The picture was signed with his name in full and the letters P.R.B. after it, and the frame bore as legend two sonnets, of which the first, the well-known one beginning

“This is that blessed Mary, pre-elect
God's Virgin.”

was printed in the catalogue. The sestet which follows is explanatory of the picture:

“So held she through her girlhood, as it were
An angel-watered lily that near God
Grows and is quiet; 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 her time was come.”

Coincidently with the picture of Mary's girlhood , Rossetti began and finished the oil portrait of his father, which is reproduced on page 1. He also drew, one night in 1848, sitting up till six in the morning to finish it, an exquisite outline design of a lute-player and his lady, from Coleridge's “Genevieve.” This was given to his friend, Coventry Patmore, who many years later exchanged it for some studies by Sir Edward Burne-Jones. On the death of the latter it was presented by Lady Burne-Jones to Mr. Fairfax Murray, in whose possession it remains. Other interesting drawings of about this date exist, among which may be mentioned a curious one done in pen and ink on green paper as an illustration to Edgar Allan Poe's “Ulalume.” This, which I have not seen mentioned or catalogued before, was sold at Foster's in 1888, under the somewhat misleading title of “Welcome,” an auctioneer's blunder for the real name, which is written on the drawing. Mr. Fairfax Murray

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bought, and is the owner of this rarity, as well as of another design for “The Raven.”

Two or three other pen-and-ink drawings of 1848 belong to Mr. J. A. R. Munro, having been originally given to Rossetti's friend, Alex. Munro, the sculptor. They include Gretchen in the Chapel , with Mephistopheles whispering in her ear, and The Sun may shine and we be cold , a sketch of a girl with clasped hands, crouching in the embrasure of a window, apparently a prisoner. Both of these were exhibited in 1883 at the Burlington Fine Arts Club.

Although 1848 is intrinsically the year of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, much of the work of the next two years comes within the scope of its influence. As an example may be given here the

Il Saluto di Beatrice

Figure: Pen and ink, three compartments. Text in left compartment: E cui saluta fa tremar lo core D.G.R. 1850. Text in center compartment: 9 Guigno 1290 Ita n'e Beatrice in alto ciel Ed ha lasciato Amor meco dolente. Text in right compartment: Guardami ben; ben son, ben son Beatrice D.G.R. 1850. A full-length Dantis Amor stands in the central compartment, holding a sundial and a down-turned torch. In the left compartment, Beatrice and two women pass through a portico, to the right of Dante and his servant. Beatrice and Dante look at one another. In the right compartment, Beatrice followed by two women meets Dante before a field of lilies. The women approach from the left and appear in profile, Dante faces 3/4 front towards Beatrice. An angel is seen in the distance.

important pen-and-ink drawing called Il Saluto di Beatrice , representing in two compartments the meeting of Dante and Beatrice, first in a street of Florence and secondly in Paradise. The left compartment (from the spectator's point of view) is dated 1849, and bears the legend from the “Vita Nuova”— E cui saluta fa tremar lo core. It represents Dante standing in the doorway of a cloister or portico, overcome by the sweetness of the salutation given him by his lady, who is passing with her arms linked in those of two girl-friends. In the background is a statue of a mænad with cymbals. At the feet of Dante is a slab carved with the outline of a mounted knight. In his hand the poet bears a volume of Virgil, and through the half-open doorway is caught a glimpse of frescoed walls. The second compartment is dated 1850, and shows Dante crowned with

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Gretchen and Mephistopheles in the Chapel. Two Designs

Figure: Pen and ink, rounded upper corners. Text in lower left corner: G.C.D.R. July 1848. Numerous background figures pray in church pews. In the foreground, a young woman facing forward kneels behind a short dias, her eyes closed in prayer. A child kneels the right of the dais, and a sword wrapped in a banner lies before them both. To the right behind this pair, a devil with horns crouches behind another dais, over which a woman leans, her hair unbound and her face concealed.

Figure: Pen and ink. Text in lower left corner: Dante G. Rossetti 1848. Numerous background figures in church pews pray facing backward, while in the foreground a young woman slouches over a small dais, and a man with horns stands behind her, bending down towards her ear. To the right, a second man kneeling behind another dais leans forward, looking at the woman. The scene is enclosed within an arched architectural frame, on the outside of which two half-length male figures watch the scene, one in each of the upper corners.

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Sig. E6

laurel advancing to meet the forms of Beatrice and her two maidens in the garden of Paradise. The latter are carrying instruments of music. Behind the group is a field of swaying lilies, and in the distance a flying angel is seen. Between the two compartments is a winged figure of Love, with bow and quiver slung behind his back and a down-turned torch in his hand. Above this figure is inscribed: “ Ita n' è BEATRICE in alto cielo ;” and below: “ Ed ha lasciato AMOR meco dolente .” The title as given is inscribed at the bottom of the drawing. The whole composition was repeated in oil in 1859, and the meeting in Paradise formed the subject of more than one separate drawing. In all of these later versions the direction of the two groups was reversed, and the central figure of Dantis Amor underwent very considerable changes. A full account of these changes, as well as of the different versions of the subject and their history, will be found in a later chapter, under 1859. The pen-and-ink drawing, reproduced here, which is the earliest design of all, belongs to Mr. George Rae, of Birkenhead.

The cream of Rossetti's Pre-Raphaelite work, however, during the two years subsequent to 1848, is the Ecce Ancilla Domini , a sequel in sentiment to Rossetti's picture of the previous year, and the realization on canvas of the last lines of the sonnet.This is so well known to frequenters of the National Gallery ¹ that to describe it would be superfluous. It was exhibited in 1850 under the same auspices as its predecessor (though the gallery this year was moved to Portland Place), and was priced at £50. Its appearance was the signal for a storm of abuse and raillery, which descended with impartial violence also upon the pictures of the other Pre-Raphaelite brothers exhibited at the Academy, and which pursued them relentlessly until time and success finally established their position. Munro, the sculptor, just mentioned, had incautiously published the meaning of the mystic letters P.R.B., and no peace or quarter was vouchsafed to those who dared to stand up against traditional authority.

We are not so conventional now that a new idea or a new style in art could shock us. The tendency in fact is towards the other extreme. It is consequently difficult for anyone of this generation to see what in the quiet, shrinking, girl-like figure of Rossetti's Virgin, in the handsome human-looking angel, or the simple entourage of that Eastern room, could infuriate and outrage the so-called critical opinions of the mid-Victorian age. To us, as to

Transcribed Footnote (page 25):

¹ Ecce Ancilla is now hung in the Tate Gallery at Millbank.

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Ruskin, whose great mind was ever alive to beauty of thought, however expressed, there seems an especial charm in this new conception of the oft-depicted scene: the angel, not as usual gay with peacock wings and trappings, but grave and simply clad; the Virgin, not raised triumphant on a throne, nor impossibly bedecked with jewels, but waked from slumber in the early dawn, and crouching half in fear and awe upon a pallet couch. The white painting, too, is a masterpiece, skilfully relieved by touches of bright colour, the red embroidery at the bed foot, the soft blue curtain at the Virgin's head, and through the open window the blue sky and bright sun of a Syrian morning streaming into the room. Harmless enough, one might have thought it, even for those who preferred the more garish sumptuousness of the conventional type; but critics were on the alert to find fault, and with a unanimity rarely discoverable in art circles they emphatically found it. Millais's picture of the boy Christ in his father's carpenter's shop was perhaps the best abused of the three, Hunt's picture being the somewhat unprepossessing Christian Missionary . Millais, however, sold his picture; whilst the other two, who needed the money more, had the mortification, owing to the dead-set made against them, of receiving their pictures back.

Ancient injustice is an inspiring, but hardly a fruitful theme, and it would serve no purpose to go again and at length into the nature of the attack made upon the devoted band of Pre-Raphaelites. Charles Dickens and many other great men lent their names to it, and the Brethren were compelled to face evil days in consequence. But in the darkest hour a saviour appeared. Ruskin, who before the outcry hardly knew of the existence of the school, had his attention drawn to it by Coventry Patmore, and with characteristic fearlessness and energy plunged into the fray. A series of letters to the “Times” pointing out the high qualities of the works impugned, and rounding on their detractors, had the desired result of checking the stream of invective. Ruskin defended the artists, at all points, from the charge of being ignorant copyists and realists, the accusation that they could not draw, the alleged conspiracy against Raphael, and finally from the subtlest insinuation of all, because it sounded so professional, the charge that they knew not the laws of perspective. This ardent championship had one curious effect. In his warmth of defence Ruskin had not only combatted the statement of faults, but had revelled in laying down an elaborate statement of principles. Thus it came about that the original ideas out of which the Brother-

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ECCE ANCILLA DOMINI!

Figure: Oil on canvas mounted on panel. Text in lower left corner: DGR March 1850. A seated virgin in a loose white robe slumps on a bed, gazing at a lily held by the angel Gabriel. The angel floats to the left of her bed with flames at his feet, facing the virgin and holding a lily out toward her. At the foot of the bed a crimson cloth embroidered with lilies is displayed.

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hood had grown, ideas of a broad and possibly nebulous character, became transmuted into hard and fast rules of conduct and of practice, which the Brotherhood more or less had to accept, partly perhaps out of gratitude to their benefactor, partly because they agreed with them in theory, and partly because they may not have seen how far or how forcefully they led.

On the other hand, if we are not to credit the “Pre-Raphaelites” with all the fine sentiments attributed to them in Ruskin's inspired defence, it is absurd to imagine, as some have done, that they failed to take themselves or their work seriously because Rossetti in his family letters used to speak flippantly of his unlucky little picture, which, like a curse, had come home to roost. Men often enough speak lightly to friends of things which have lain at the heart; and if Rossetti joked to his brother about “the blessed white eyesore” and “the blessed white daub,” it is none the less true that he had striven to put all his thoughts and all his knowledge into it, with such success that it reveals to us to-day an intensity of feeling and reverence which few modern painters have emulated, and to which Rossetti in his later work did not always attain.

A characteristic of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood which has not yet been touched on, and which here calls for digression, was its remarkable literary strength. Of the seven original members, two— W. M. Rossetti and F. G. Stephens—were writers by preference. The former did not paint at all. Gabriel Rossetti was, as we have seen, a poet before he could be called a painter, and a poet of the first order. Woolner also was a poet, and in this capacity alone belonged to the movement. Collinson made a third; Deverell a weak fourth. Millais and Hunt showed no inclination this way; but, besides those mentioned, the coterie included Christina Rossetti, William Bell Scott, Coventry Patmore, and Madox Brown, who wrote occasionally in verse. Even without the need of a propaganda such a body was almost bound in the nature of things to produce a school of literary thought allied in sentiment with its artistic ideas and aims. Hence came about the “ Germ,” that much-prized periodical, which had its origin in the fertile brain of Rossetti, and which was ostensibly formed to be the organ of the P.R.B., and to spread its opinions. Rossetti's letters of the period show him actively engaged in beating up recruits, forcing all with whom he came in contact to turn journalist, just as later on he tried to force everyone to be a painter—because he was one—or else a buyer of pictures. It speaks well for his persuasive powers that he was able

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to float the venture at all, for its financial prospects were never tempting. As it was, he, with his brother as editor, and his sister, formed the mainstay of the magazine, which ran to four numbers, and then flickered out, leaving the usual monetary deficit behind.

The title originally proposed for the “ Germ” was “Monthly Thoughts in Literature, Poetry, and Art;” but at a formal meeting held in Rossetti's studio, 72, Newman Street, in December, 1849, just as the first number was ready to appear, this tremendous appellation was rejected, and the simple monosyllable, put forward by Mr. Cave Thomas, an intimate friend of the group, was substituted for it, with the added sub-title “Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature, and Art.” The first number contained “My Sister's Sleep” and the prose romance, “Hand and Soul”, by Rossetti; Woolner's poem, “My Beautiful Lady”, illustrated by a double etching , the work of Mr. Holman Hunt; a sonnet on “ The Love of Beauty” by Madox Brown; the first instalment of a paper on “ The Subject in Art” by J. L. Tupper; a small poem by Coventry Patmore, called “ The Seasons;” “ Dream Land” and “An End” by Christina Rossetti; a sonnet and a review of Clough's “Bothie” by W. M. Rossetti, and one other poem. Subsequent numbers contained “The Blessed Damozel”, “The Carillon”, “Sea Limits” (under its first title of “From the Cliffs”), and six or seven sonnets by Rossetti; [sonnet 1] [sonnet 2] [sonnet 3] [sonnet 4] [sonnets 5 and 6] a few sonnets and a prose dialogue by Deverell;

Note: Marillier misidentifies Deverell's contributions to the Germ . Deverell contributed “The Sight Beyond” (misprinted as “The Light Beyond”) and “A Modern Idyl” to numbers 3 and 4, respectively.

William Bell Scott's “Morning Sleep” and “Early Aspirations”; and an interesting paper on “The Purpose and Tendency of Early Italian Art” by F. G. Stephens, under the pseudonym of John Seward. Of the four numbers published of the magazine the first two only were called “ The Germ,” the title in the third and fourth numbers being altered to “ Art and Poetry” at the suggestion of the Tuppers, who as printers of the magazine had taken over the responsibility on generous terms.

Our interest here is rather with the purpose than with the contents of the “ Germ.” In it, if anywhere, one would look for a clear exposition of the views of the young painters, and for their new doctrine of art; but this, so far as it can be found at all, must be admitted to lack sufficiency. Discounting the rambling paper by J. L. Tupper, there is little that can be called doctrinal in any sense beyond the sonnet by W. M. Rossetti which appeared on each cover, and a short exordium on the back. The latter was re-written when the magazine changed its name, and it is matter for some doubt in

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which form it is more obscure and worse in regard to style. As Rossetti was held to have been mainly responsible for the original draft, I will quote it. The first two paragraphs deal solely with the contents, and with the prominence given to Poetry. The third runs as follows:

“The endeavour held in view throughout the writings on Art will be to encourage and enforce an entire adherence to the simplicity of nature [Nature, in the re-draft, was honoured with a capital N]; and also to direct attention, as an auxiliary medium, to the comparatively few works which Art has yet produced in this spirit. It need scarcely be added that the chief object of the etched designs will be to illustrate this aim practically, as far as the method of execution will permit; in which purpose they will be produced with the utmost care and completeness.”

On the whole, the announcement in “ Art and Poetry” is worse than this. It contains the following paragraph:

“With a view to obtain the thoughts of Artists, upon Nature as evolved in Art, in another language besides their own proper one, this Periodical has been established. Thus, then, it is not open to the conflicting opinions of all who handle the brush and palette, nor is it restricted to actual practitioners; but is intended to enunciate the principles of those who, in the true spirit of Art, enforce a rigid adherence to the simplicity of Nature either in Art or Poetry, and consequently regardless (sic) whether emanating from practical Artists, or from those who have studied Nature in the Artist's School.”

These two quotations may help to justify the observation already made, certainly not in a disparaging spirit, that the doctrines of the Pre-Raphaelites took substance and colour from Ruskin's idealism, and that prior to his defence they were rather without form and possibly void. The sonnet by W. M. Rossetti, which was referred to as figuring on the cover of all four numbers, does not greatly help to clarify or crystallize the ideas of the P.R.B. so far as they existed at that time. It is as follows:

“ When whoso merely hath a little thought
Will plainly think the thought which is in him—
Not imaging another's bright or dim,
Not mangling with new words what others taught;
When whoso speaks, from having either sought
Or only found,—will speak, not just to skim
A shallow surface with words made and trim,
But in that very speech the matter brought:

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“ Be not too keen to cry—‘So this is all!—
A thing I might myself have thought as well,
But would not say it, for it was not worth!’
Ask: ‘Is this truth?’ For is it still to tell
That, be the theme a point or the whole earth,
Truth is a circle, perfect, great or small. ”

The “ Germ,” as its brief career sufficiently denotes, fell almost stillborn upon an ungrateful world; but amongst a small class of artists and admirers it undoubtedly served to strengthen Rossetti's reputation. There was nothing feeble or immature about the poetical ideas expressed in it, and one may even be surprised that such an original piece of work as the “Blessed Damozel” did not attract greater attention, imperfect as it now seems compared with the revised and later versions. Both this and “Hand and Soul” have frequently been reprinted. The latter is valuable, in addition to its literary qualities, for the light it throws upon Rossetti's mediæval and mystical mind. To some extent it is no doubt an autobiographical record, a memory of mental perturbations and experiences which beset the young painter, striving to preserve and foster the spiritual side of his nature at the expense of more than commonly strong bodily inclinations. From an abstraction like this story of the mythical young painter Chiaro dell' Erma, we may feel we get one truer glimpse of the real Rossetti than any number of life-histories, overlaid with trivial incidents which obscure rather than reveal his personality, can give us.

Biographical facts are concrete, intelligible, and common to all men. Their record tends in general to level genius to the limits of ordinary comprehension. An imaginative work of genius like “Hand and Soul”, with its semi-confession of faith, suggests the “something not ourselves” so subtly that though we cannot grasp it we feel that it is there, like worshippers at a darkened shrine, which, in all likelihood, were it flooded with light, would to duller senses appear empty. In Rossetti's case, almost beyond all others, one does not want to get to the very bottom of things. He had the seer's eye before he was out of his teens. His curious three-parts-alien birth stamped him with qualities that no fixed northern type of mind can adequately appreciate or define. The more one tries, by accumulation of facts, to realize, approfondir, these qualities, the more one is likely to fail, and to be brought up by a dead wall of what we can only regard in our limited way as inconsistencies, vagaries, and occasional moral deficiencies. As he advanced in age this became more and more the case. His biographers have felt the

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difficulty, but have not always surmounted it; and so, according to personal bias, they have mostly presented him either as an angel of generosity or a devil of selfishness, an enthusiastic friend or an unamiable recluse, a romantic lover or a hardened sensualist. They have tried to reconcile facts unexplainable in themselves and mutually incompatible. They have, in a word, sought for motives where they had only to make allowance for moods; they have tried to impress single-mindedness on a varied, ever-changing, and kaleidoscopic nature.

Let us be frank, and not try to understand Rossetti. He probably did not fully understand himself, if he even ever sought to. He has written poems and painted pictures that charm us by their infinite light and shade, their suggestiveness, their harmony, their music, their colour, and a hundred subtle qualities not to be described. Why should we cavil at accents, at occasional faults of drawing, when there is so much beyond that lies outside of us and above our commonplace? The art of modern journalism is gradually subjecting all great men and all great things to the insult of our understanding. Is not this sufficient reason why we should give thanks to Heaven for one revelation that is cryptic, one man of passion and genius whom not even biographies as yet have entirely reduced to common terms?

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CHAPTER III

WORK 1849 TO 1853

INFLUENCE OF BROWNING AND DANTE

BEFORE the first number of the “ Germ” had appeared, and while it was in progress, Rossetti, accompanied by Holman Hunt, paid a short and hurried visit to Paris and Belgium. A rhyming diary and a series of jocular sonnets, interspersed with a few serious ones, recall the vigour of his first impressions. A large proportion of the time was spent at the Louvre and other galleries, rushing through Old Masters at a furious rate. A sonnet marked each stop. Giorgione's Venetian Pastoral evoked the fine one beginning “Water, for anguish of the solstice,” Ingres's Ruggiero and Angelica afforded material for a second, being, as Rossetti writes, “unsurpassed for exquisite perfection by anything I have ever seen.” This slightly premature pronouncement was accompanied by another, which serves to show that Rossetti's taste in art was still an unfixed and indefinite quantity: “Now for the best,” he writes, “Hunt and I solemnly decided that the most perfect works, takenin toto, that we have seen in our lives are two pictures by Hippolyte Flandrin, in the Church of St. Germain des Près. Wonderful! wonderful!! wonderful!!!”

Correspondingly emphatic, but abusive, were his comments on the work of “Rubens, Correggio, et hoc genus omne,”

“Because, dear God! the flesh thou madest smooth
These carked and fretted, that it seemed to run
With ulcers; and the daylight of thy sun
They parcelled into blots and glares, uncouth
With stagnant grouts of paint.”

The monosyllable “slosh,” antithesis in his vocabulary of “stunning,” and expressive of all qualities condemned by the P.R.B., was in frequent requisition during this visit, and satisfac-

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“Hist! Said Kate the Queen”

Figure: Oil. The left half of the painting depicts a room filled with women sewing and tending the queen, who sits in the right foreground, having her hair brushed as she listens to one of the ladies reading. Behind the women, a high portico reveals amorous male revelers. To the right, another portico reveals a young page on a balcony, reclining on a railing as he sings to his beloved.

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torily disposed of most of the pictures seen. As Rossetti remarked, it did away with the necessity for detailed criticism.

His own affairs were by no means so easy of disposition.The failure of the Ecce Ancilla to find a purchaser at once ¹ (it was not sold until June, 1853), and the storm of unfavourable comment it provoked, caused him frankly to abandon as unprofitable the mine of semi-religious, semi-mystical feeling which he had begun to work, and it was some time before he could settle down to find another. Canvas after canvas was begun, we are told, and rejected in despair, either because the subjects ceased to appeal, or because the technique became unmanageable. In their ardour for “Pre-Raphaelite” principles, Rossetti and Holman Hunt went down for a few weeks to Sevenoaks to paint natural scenery. ² The experiment was a failure in Rossetti's case, so far as immediate outcome was concerned. Feeling his way pictorially towards the field of romance in which his thoughts wandered, he began to undertake subjects from this class of literature, from Browning, Dante, Keats, and later from the “Morte Darthur” of Malory. His first experiment was a large canvas illustrating the page's song in “Pippa Passes,” which soon became

Transcribed Footnote (page 33):

¹The purchaser was Mr. MacCracken, a Belfast packing agent, who figures largely in Rossetti's early correspondence as a patron of all the Pre-Raphaelites. He was not always a generous or wealthy customer, and had an annoying way of paying for pictures in kind, i.e., with other pictures. Still, his connection was a useful one in several ways. Mr. MacCracken depended for his artistic preferences largely on the judgment of Ruskin, whom he referred to habitually as “the Graduate.” One of the earliest references to him occurs in a letter written by Rossetti to Madox Brown: “MacCracken sent my drawing (water-colour of Dante drawing the Angel ) to Ruskin, who the other day wrote me an incredible letter about it, remaining mine respectfully (!!) and wanting to call. I of course stroked him down in my answer, and yesterday he called. His manner was more agreeable than I had expected. . . . He seems in a mood to make my fortune.” Rossetti altered the title of Ecce Ancilla to The Annunciation on selling the picture to Mr. MacCracken, as he thought the former might smell of Popery to an unenlightened purchaser. The picture changed hands several times after Mr. MacCracken's death. In 1874 it was bought by Agnews at the sale of Mr. Heugh's collection, and sold by them to Mr. William Graham, who sent it to Rossetti to see if he cared to touch it up. Rossetti writes about it thus in a letter to William Bell Scott: “Dear Scotus—A little early thing of my own, Annunciation , 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.” Mr. W. M. Rossetti thinks that the lily held by the angel may have been an addition of this date. Of the Girlhood of Mary Virgin , which came back to him in similar circumstances, he wrote: “It quite surprised me (and shamed me a little) to see what I did fifteen years ago.”

Transcribed Footnote (page 33):

² This background, according to Mr. Stephens, was intended for a large picture of Il Saluto di Beatrice , corresponding to the left side of the pen-and-ink diptych on page 24. It was used for The Bower Meadow in 1872.

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impossible and had to be dropped. The composition of it remains, however, in a little painting called Hist, said Kate the Queen , dated 1851, which belongs to Mr. S. E. Spring Rice. The queen is dressed in lavender grey, and is seated on a chair having her golden hair combed by attendant ladies. At her feet sits an older lady reading aloud from Boccaccio, whilst down the room is ranged a row of maidens working at a long embroidery or seam. An arched window with twisted pillars yields a view of a group playing ball outside, and to the right of the picture, sitting on a balcony unseen from the room, his hawk on his wrist, is the love-sick page leaning back and carolling. The large unfinished canvas remained by Rossetti for some years in his studio, and was eventually cut up, one portion of it (including the woman reading) being preserved in the

Head of Maid. From “Kate the Queen.”

Figure: Oil. According to Marillier, this is a detail of an original "Hist! Said Kate the Queen," which was never finished and was later cut up. Marillier isolates the head of a young woman in a medieval veil and headress with dark curls. She gazes slightly downward and to her left.

form of a small picture entitled Two Mothers , whilst a little head of one of the attendants, reproduced here, survives in the possession of Mr. W. M. Rossetti. Mr. Stephens (“ Portfolio Monograph,” p. 28) states that the design of Kate the Queen originally formed the centre of an illustration in three parts, executed in pen-and-ink at an earlier date. I cannot find any verification of this; but a charming pen-and-ink drawing of Pippa by the lady who was afterwards Rossetti's wife, dated 1854, exists, and was reproduced in the “Letters to William Allingham” (Fisher Unwin, 1897).

Two other designs from Browning which were carried out at this time are the pen-and-ink drawing from “Sordello” entitled Taurello's first sight of Fortune , and The Laboratory . In the first, which represents a scene upon the ramparts of the castle at Messina, the young Salinguerra is being invested by his host, the noble

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The Laboratory.

Figure: Water color over pen and ink. A man seated behind a laboratory table shows a piece of metal to a young woman, who leans over the table to look at it. Books and laboratory apparatus are strewn about.

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King of the Romans, with “the silk glove of Constance,” which the queen is drawing off. Other characters in the poem are grouped round. The design was presented by “his P.R. Brother, Dante G. Rossetti” to Mr. F. G. Stephens, who owns it still.

The Laboratory was, in all probability, Rossetti's first attempt at water-colour (it is painted over a pen-and-ink drawing, as several of his early ones were), and bears but slight resemblance either in thought or execution to the work by which he is popularly known. The picture bears the legend:

“In this devil's smithy
Where is the poison to poison her, prithee?”

and illustrates the scene described by Browning as typical of the “ancien régime.” The lady of the poem, with passion in her eyes and clenched hand, rises to take the tiny phial which the alchemist has prepared for her, and is depositing her jewels and offering the old man her mouth to “kiss if he will,” before going on to the ball where she is to meet her rival. The brilliant and striking colour, and the movement of this drawing are much commented on by Mr. Stephens, and besides reflecting, according to his judgment, the teaching of Madox Brown and the influences of the Flemish and Italian pictures just visited, mark the decided opening of Rossetti's second period.

In addition to these three subjects, chosen, as he put it with a certain wayward affectation of insincerity, “on account of their presumptive saleableness,” but also out of his deep admiration for Browning, ¹ Rossetti drew or painted in the years 1849-50 other themes of a romantic and mediæval nature. Amongst them was his first illustration to Shakespeare, a scene from “Much Ado about Nothing,” representing the happy lovers, Benedick and Beatrice , receiving the felicitations of those who had plotted their match. Rossetti wrote to his brother on September 3rd, 1850, describing the subject and announcing his intention of painting it. The water-colour was never executed, but the author possesses the pencil design, reproduced on the next page, which shows the composition and grouping of the characters.

From the “ Vita Nuova” Rossetti took the incident of Dante

Transcribed Footnote (page 35):

¹The story is too well known to need more than passing mention, how Rossetti, being one day at the British Museum, and chancing upon “Pauline, recognized it as being Browning's work, very little of which he had then seen. He copied the poem out at length, and wrote to Browning, who in reply admitted the authorship. The two met several times later, and in 1855 Rossetti painted the water-colour portrait of Browning which forms a companion picture to his Swinburne.

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drawing an Angel on the Anniversary of Beatrice's Death , executed first in pen-and-ink, and originally given to Millais. Mr. Fairfax Murray now owns this highly interesting and most “Pre-Raphaelite” drawing, the water-colour reproduced here being of later date, 1853. The latter was bought by Mr. Thomas Combe, of the Oxford University Press, and was bequeathed by his widow to the Taylorian Museum, where it remains. Both versions represent the following passage from Rossetti's own translation:

“On that day which fulfilled the year since my lady had been

Benedick and Beatrice. From Much Ado About Nothing.

Figure: Pencil. Depicts the various pairs of lovers onstage at the end of Shakespeare's play. In the foreground, Benedick stands behind Beatrice, embracing her.

made of the citizens of eternal life, remembering me of her as I sat alone, I betook myself to draw the resemblance of an angel upon certain tablets. And while I did thus, chancing to turn my head, I perceived that some were standing beside me to whom I should have given courteous welcome, and that they were observing what I did. Also I learned afterwards that they had been there a while before I perceived them. Perceiving whom, I arose for salutation, and said:‘Another was with me.’ ”

The “ Vita Nuova” also furnished the subject of a small water-colour belonging to Mr. H. T. Wells, R.A., and attributed to 1849. This represents Beatrice at the Wedding Feast denying her Saluta-

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Dante Drawing the Angel

Figure: Water color. Text in lower right corner: D.G.R. 1853. Inside of Dante's studio, at the picture's right, the artist kneels next to a window, holding a small sketch. To the left and rear are three visitors, at whom he looks over his right shoulder. Glaring sunlight pours in from the open window and doorway.

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Beatrice at the Wedding-Feast Denying her Salutation to Dante

Figure: Water color. Dante and his servant stand in profile next to a wall on the right, as Beatrice and other members of a wedding party descend a staircase and walk past him on the left.

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tion to Dante, who, with a friend grasping his arm as if to restrain him, stands watching a procession of figures clad in blue and green, and adorned with roses in their hair. A replica was painted for Mr. Ruskin in 1855 (see page 53, and note). This is a different subject entirely from the Saluto di Beatrice described and illustrated in the last chapter. The central figure of the bridal procession is a portrait, easy to recognize, of Miss Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal, who first came into Rossetti's life at about this date. She,

Miss Siddal, 1861.

Figure: Water color. Head and shoulders of Elizabeth Siddal in profile, facing right. Her left cheek rests on her folded hands.

as one almost fears to repeat, so hackneyed is the story, was the daughter of a Sheffield cutler, and was employed in a milliner's shop off Leicester Square, where Walter Deverell discovered her one day when shopping with his mother. She was persuaded to sit to Deverell for his Viola , and later to Rossetti. Her portrait also occurs in a picture by Holman Hunt and in Millais's Ophelia. The story of her marriage to Rossetti and her early death will be briefly dealt with further on.

Both on account of her romantic history and her individual

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attractions, the personality of Miss Siddal has always exercised a delicate charm over those who love Rossetti. The portrait in oils painted by herself and reproduced in Mr. W. M. Rossetti's “ Memoir” (vol. i., p. 175), though not unlike the face in Mr. Wells's Salutation , fails to do full justice either to the descriptions of her beauty or to the imaginative works produced under its influence, as the Beata Beatrix . Far more pleasing are Rossetti's sketches of her, some of which I have reproduced. [sketch 1] [sketch 2] [sketch 3] [sketch 4] [sketch 5] For its artistic, not for its personal interest, I give the following plain description of her by her brother-in-law at the time when she and Rossetti first met: “Tall, finely formed, with a lofty neck and regular, yet somewhat uncommon features, greenish blue unsparkling eyes, large perfect eyelids, brilliant complexion, and a lavish wealth of coppery golden hair.” With this brilliance of form and colouring went an unhappy, yet not uncommon, consumptive taint, which rendered her perpetually delicate.

Miss Siddal was the model for most of Rossetti's earliest and finest water-colours containing women, and probably for all his Beatrices except the last. A little later Miss Fanny Cornforth, a favourite model, who sat to Rossetti until almost the end of his life, began to appear at intervals in his pictures, notably as the woman in Found .

To resume the tale of early work, in 1851 Rossetti continued to be engaged on small subjects of a mediæval or dramatic character. We have, for instance, the charming little group called Borgia , formerly in the collection of Mr. G. P. Boyce, the well-known water-colour painter, and reproduced here by permission of its present owner, Mr. Hacon. In this the famous Lucretia is seen seated with a lute in her hands, to the music of which two children are dancing. Over her shoulders lean on the one side the bloated Pope Alexander VI., on the other her brother Cæsar, beating time with a knife against a wine-glass on the table, and blowing the rose-petals from her hair. Lucretia's white gown is of ample folds, with elaborate sleeves, looped up all over with coloured ribbons and bows, a device which so took Rossetti's fancy that he repeated it in Bonifazio's Mistress (1860). A pen-and-ink sketch of earlier date for the Borgia group bears simply the legend from “Richard III.,” “To caper nimbly in a lady's chamber to the lascivious pleasing of a lute.” In this the figures bear a much smaller relation to the whole area of the scene, which is not well composed. Rossetti first drew the picture in the same way, but got it back from Mr. Boyce, I

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Borgia

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Figure: Water color. text in lower right corner: D.G.R. 1851. A family grouping in Lucretia Borgia's chamber. She stands in the center, turned slightly to her left and wearing a white dress. Two children dance in front of her, facing left. Behind her stand two men, who peer over her shoulders at her bosom.

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How they Met Themselves

Figure: Water color. Text across bottom: How they met themselves D.G.R. 1864. Illustrating a döpplegänger myth, a pair of lovers meet their doubles in a wood. All figures are standing, the distressed and swooning couple to the right of their doubles, who are outlined in white.

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suppose about 1860, and by dint of scraping it out and adding patches of paper—a form of mosaic in which he excelled—very greatly improved the design. The water-colour was repeated in 1863 for Mrs. Tong, and is now the property of Mr. William Coltart, of Birkenhead. It was exhibited, together with the 1851 version, at the New Gallery in 1897-8.

In the same year (1851) was produced the first design for a subject of weird and ghostly conception, called How they met Themselves . This depicts a pair of lovers wandering at twilight in a wood, and suddenly confronted with their own doubles. The lady is fainting; her lover with a terrified look essays to draw his sword. The apparitions, glancing defiantly and ominously in their faces, are passing on, outlined with a pale halo of light. The legend of the Döppelgänger was one of a class of mysterious horrors which greatly appealed to Rossetti's imagination, and which fascinated him from boyhood up. Few but he would however have dared to draw it, and fewer still could have succeeded with it. The first design just referred to, in pen-and-ink, was destroyed or lost at an early date; but Rossetti re-drew it for Mr. Boyce in 1860 whilst at Paris on his honeymoon, and four years later painted two water-colour versions, [version 1] [version 2] one of which, formerly included in the Graham collection, and now belonging to Mr. S. Pepys Cockerell, is reproduced here. It was last seen in public at the New Gallery, 1897-8. The other was lent to the Burlington Fine Arts Club in 1883 by Mr. J. Anderson Rose. It is, according to Mr. Fairfax Murray, rather the finer of the two, and is now in California. The pen-and-ink version dated 1851-1860 was exhibited at Burlington House in 1883, the year after the artist's death. It was one of a number of subjects which Rossetti had photographed from time to time in order to distribute copies to his friends.

To the year following, 1852, belongs a remarkably fine water-colour, representing Giotto painting the portrait of Dante . ¹

This shows Giotto as a young man, rather modern looking, seated on a scaffold before the wall of the Bargello, and painting the famous portrait of Dante which was discovered on removing the plaster from the wall in 1839. This incident was impressed upon

Transcribed Footnote (page 39):

¹See a note upon the sale of this picture, page 53. An earlier sketch for it was exhibited at the rooms of the Old Water-Colour Society, 121, Pall Mall, at the winter exhibition of 1852, and (if Mr. Sharp is right in his date) as far back as 1850, at the Portland Place Gallery. Mr. Sharp is certainly wrong in saying that the water-colour itself was exhibited then, as it is dated September, 1852.

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Rossetti as a boy, a copy of the portrait made by one of the discoverers having been sent to his father, and having passed into his own possession. Giotto is in dull red, with brocaded sleeves turned back. To his left is seated Dante in green, with violet sleeves and the red hood, cutting a pomegranate in his hand, and gazing down with a rapt expression to where Beatrice, with eyes intent on a book of devotions, is passing in a church procession. Her ruddy golden hair strikes a bright note at the bottom of the picture. Behind Giotto stands his master, Cimabue, in a robe of blue, watching the work which is to eclipse his; and behind Dante, in a gorgeous apparel of gold-embroidered black, leans his rival, Cavalcanti, holding in his hand a book of Guinicelli, symbolizing thereby the three generations of poets. Brushes, pigments, and a flask of oil are discernible in the box on which Giotto is seated. A palette lies beside him, and instead of using a mahl-stick he is steadying his wrist with his other hand. Numerous accessories, such as a lute with bright blue ribbon and pomegranates in a napkin, are scattered upon the platform.

The subject is intended to give expression to the following lines from Canto XI. of the Purgatorio on the waxing and waning of fame:

“Credette Cimabue nella pintura
Tener lo campo; ed ora ha Giotto il grido,
Sì che la fama di colui oscura.
Così ha tolto l'uno all' altro Guido
La gloria della lingua; e forse è nato
Chi l'uno e l'altro caccerà del nido.”

This picture, we are informed by Mr. W. M. Rossetti (“ Letters and Memoir,” vol. i., p. 163), was intended only for the centre of a triptych, on the sides of which were to be represented Dante, as one of the Priori, banishing the factious chiefs from Florence, and next Dante, mocked by the clown, in exile at the court of Can Grande. The rest of the subject was never painted. Mr. MacCracken was at one time in treaty for the water-colour, which however passed into the possession of Thomas Seddon, the artist, one of the early friends of the group. A few years ago it was sold at auction, and realized no less a sum than £630, being more than sixty times the amount originally paid for it to the artist. The present owner is Mr. John Aird, M.P.

Nothing else of importance is catalogued under the year 1852, but in 1853 we come to one or two well-known designs and pictures. First may be mentioned the pen-and-ink drawing entitled Hesterna

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Giotto painting Dante's portrait

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Figure: Water color. Set on a scaffold in Giotto's studio, on the right Giotto is seated, painting Dante's profile as an old woman looks over the artist's shoulder. Dante sits to the left, and Guido Cavalcante stands behind him, leaning on his shoulder and holding an open book. In the lower right corner, below the scaffold, Beatrice and several other female figures walk past, holding lighted candles and open books.

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Hesterna Rosa

Figure: Pen and ink. Text in lower left corner: Dante Rossetti. Inside a tent, two men kneel and sit next to a short bench, perhaps gambling. A woman stands behind each of them, one gazing skyward, and the other turning her head and hiding her face. To the left, a young girl holds a lute, and to the right, a monkey scratches itself.

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Rosa , still in the possession of Mr. F. G. Stephens, to whom it was presented. ¹ This was founded upon the plaintive song of Elena in Sir Henry Taylor's “Philip van Artevelde”:

“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 sore with strife,
And feel like flowers that fade.’”

The scene as shown in the illustration represents two gamblers throwing dice, and their mistresses, one of whom in a fit of shame is covering her face. She is the “yesterday's rose.” The other clasps her arms round the neck of her lover, and is singing a merry song. An innocent little child near by is touching a lute, and Rossetti has completed the other aspect of the scene by putting in an ape scratching itself, a Düreresque touch which he added also in the little Borgia group. This drawing was shown at the Pre-Raphaelite Exhibition in Russell Place, 1857, at Burlington House in 1883 (No. 334), and at the New Gallery in 1897-8 (No. 19). A water-colour version of the same subject was painted for Mr. Craven, of Manchester, or acquired by him, in 1865. This was exhibited at the Manchester Exhibition, 1882, and at the New Gallery, 1897-8. Rossetti's own description of the picture says: “The scene represented is a pleasure tent, at the close of a night's revel, now growing to dawn. . . . The effect is that of a lamp-light interior towards dawn, when (as also in twilight) all objects seem purely and absolutely blue by the contrast with the warm light therein.” A larger version, bearing the title Elena's Song , was painted in 1871.

The little water-colour sketch called Carlisle Wall , in the collection of the late Mr. Virtue Tebbs, belongs to 1853. It was simply named The Lovers originally, and the inscription states that it was done at Carlisle. Mr. Tebbs himself gave the picture the name it bears, probably because the rich sunset effect behind the lovers on the tower suggested to him the ballad line, “The sun shines red on Carlisle wall.” The picture first belonged to Madox Brown, and passed through two other hands at least before it reached its late owner. It was exhibited at Burlington House in 1883, and again at the New Gallery in 1897-8.

Transcribed Footnote (page 41):

¹ The real date of the drawing is probably 1850. It was altered later and inscribed as “drawn in 1853.”

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This sketch was made during the course of a visit to William Bell Scott at Newcastle in June and July of 1853. Rossetti had made Bell Scott's acquaintance in the same way as he made Browning's and Madox Brown's, by the simple process of writing to him. He had seen some verses that he admired, and that was enough. For many years, indeed to the end of Rossetti's life, Bell Scott remained a staunch and helpful friend. Why in his reminiscences he should have recalled so many things to his friend's discredit

Girl Playing a Lute.

Figure: Water color. A young girl in medieval dress plays a lute. Full figure, facing front.

and forgotten so many that were pleasant is hard to explain. At the period in question Rossetti must have been a delightful companion for anyone with a sense of humour and a not too rigid devotion to rules. His letters are of the gayest kind, rather in contrast to his pictures, which were apt from the very first to be sombre. He chaffs his sister Christina unmercifully for her supposed melancholy disposition, and illustrates his point with caricatures; his letters about patrons are almost scandalously flippant, and he makes fun of all his friends in turn with youthful impartiality and candour. That he was adored in his own circle is certain. The sober Hunt, when the emigration craze had begun to lay hold of the little group of struggling friends, and threatened to involve him also, thought first of the wrench of leaving Rossetti. “I know him,” he wrote, “to be in the same land somewhere, and that at any time he can be found out and spoken with if necessary, and that is enough.” Deverell worshipped him, and we shall see a little further on what Madox Brown, testy and sharp-tempered as he was, could put up with for his sake. This was the real Rossetti, before ill-health and a long course of vitiating drugs had wrecked his nervous system, and this is the Rossetti that we have to imagine in connection with one of the most brilliant groups of literary men and artists that this country has ever produced.

During his stay with Bell Scott Rossetti did not paint much.“I have made,” he writes, “a little water-colour of a woman in

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yellow, which I shall be able to sell, no doubt”—probably the sketch of a girl playing a lute, owned by Mrs. Constance Churchill, a friend of Ruskin's. After leaving Newcastle and the north he went to Coventry and walked thence to Stratford, an exceptional feat of energy for him. At Coventry he made a vigorous and amusing little pen-sketch of a girl trundling a baby in a sort of barrow, which fetched several guineas at the late Mr. Boyce's sale. This glimpse at the lighter side in art was also exceptional, and he emphasized it by writing to a relation: “Would it not make a capital picture of the domestic class, to represent a half dozen of girls racing the babies entrusted to their care—babies bewildered, out of breath, upset, sprawling at bottom of the barrow, etc., etc.!” A harrowing picture it would have been for mothers.

In connection with Mr. MacCracken he writes: “I replied to what he said about The House of John and told him that I should have no objection to paint something else instead, mentioning the two pictures I had in contemplation, viz., the Magdalene at the door of Simon and the town subject. . . . I also offered him the Dante water-colour, begun in London, for thirty-five guineas. This last he snatches at. . . .”

The “Dante water-colour” was the advanced version of his pen-and-ink design, Dante drawing the Angel on the Anniversary of Beatrice's Death ( reproduced page 36). After multitudinous negotiations this drawing actually passed into MacCracken's hands, and at his sale, in May, 1855, was bought by Mr. Thomas Combe, of Oxford. Rossetti, before the picture left him, worked on it for several months, improving it so much beyond his original idea that he says, “the stipulated thirty-five guineas is absurdly under its value now, and I think I must give MacCracken to understand as much.” In an explanatory letter, such as he was fond of sending with his pictures, Rossetti says that he had had “an idea of an intention of the possibility of a suggestion” that he would turn the lady visitor into Gemma Donati, whom Dante afterwards married, and so he meant to paint the Donati arms on her dress, but gave it up as impracticable. He also had a notion of connecting the same personage with the “Lady of Pity” who occurs in the “ Vita Nuova,” and whom he painted more than once later.

Of the other subjects mentioned above, Mary in the House of St. John was not committed to paper until about 1856, and Mary Magdalene a year later. The “town subject” is obviously Found . It is the starting of this great picture that makes the year 1853

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chiefly memorable in connection with Rossetti. Tradition has always had it that the subject—a countryman or drover recognizing in a fallen woman of the streets his own lost sweetheart—was founded on a ballad by William Bell Scott called “Rosabell”. Scott himself, in his strangely sour reminiscences, makes out some kind of grievance against Rossetti for professing to paint the poem

Figure: Pen and ink. Text across bottom: I remember thee; The kindness of thy youth, the love of thy betrothal. Jerem. II. 2. Text at center bottom: Found. Text in lower right corner: D.G.R. On the left, a young woman on a sidewalk crouches against a wall, turning her face away from a man on the right who grasps her arms, apparently trying to pull her to her feet. Behind him, to the right, the man's calf is trammeled to a cart.

and then not doing so; but in point of fact hardly any connection exists between picture and poem beyond the root of the subject-matter, and the picture was begun before the incident which Bell Scott mentions in support of his complaint.

Found was commissioned by MacCracken in 1853, and studies were made for it, notably the pen-and-ink sketches belonging to Col.

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Found

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Figure: Oil. On the left, a young woman crouches against a wall, turning her face away from a man on the right who grasps her arms, apparently trying to pull her to her feet. Behind him, to the right, the man's calf is trammeled to a cart.

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Gillum and Mr. Fairfax Murray, the latter of which is reproduced here. There were also various drawings for the figure of the man and the girl; but the picture was not properly begun until the following September, when Rossetti started painting the brick wall, at Chiswick, where his friends the Keightleys lived. A month later he installed himself with Brown, near Finchley, for the purpose of painting the calf in the cart which the countryman is taking to market. The details of this visit, and its inconvenience, are given in a characteristic passage from Brown's diary, which is so interesting for the general light thrown on Rossetti's methods and his easy-going relations with his friends, that I hope I may be excused for transplanting it from the collection of letters published by Mr. George Allen under the title “Ruskin, Rossetti, and Pre-Raphaelitism”:

“1854, September 5th. On Saturday . . . Rossetti came in the middle of the most broiling sun. I knew he must have come to get something. He wanted costumes to paint a water-colour of the Passover, this instead of setting to work on the picture for which he has been commissioned by McCrack since twelve months. His aunt has, moreover, given him £30, so that it is not for want of money. However, whatever he does is sure to be beautiful. But the rage for strangeness disfigures his ideas. . . .”

“ October 6th. Called on Dante Rossetti. Saw Miss Siddal, looking thinner and more deathlike and more beautiful and more ragged than ever; a real artist, a woman without parallel for many a long year. Gabriel as usual diffuse and inconsequent in his work. Drawing wonderful and lovely Guggums one after another, and his picture never advancing. However he is at the wall, and I am to get him a white calf and a cart to paint here; would he but study the golden one a little more. Poor Gabriello. . . .”

“ November 12th. Gabriel . . . getting on slowly with his calf. He paints in all like Albert Dürer, hair by hair, and seems incapable of any breadth; but this he will get by going over it from feeling at home. From want of habit I see Nature bothers him, but it is sweetly drawn and felt.”

“ November 27th. Saw Gabriel's calf; very beautiful, but takes a long time. Endless emendations, no perceptible progress from day to day, and all the time he wearing my greatcoat, which I want, and a pair of my breeches, besides food and an unlimited supply of turpentine.”

“ December 16th. Gabriel not having yet done his cart, and talking quite freely about several days yet, having been here since the 1st November, and not seeming to notice any hints. . . . Emma being within a week or two of her confinement, and he having had his bed made on the floor in the parlour one week now and not getting up till 11, besides my finances being reduced to £2 12 s. 6 d. which must last till 20th January, I told him delicately he must go, or go home at night by the 'bus. This he said was too expensive. I told him he might ride to his work in the morning and go home at night. This he said he should never think of. . . . So he is gone for the present.”

Found was never finished. “It was,” writes Mr. W. M. Rossetti,“a source of lifelong vexation to my brother and to the gentlemen, some three or four in succession, who commissioned him to finish it.” ¹

Transcribed Footnote (page 45):

1 In a letter of November 13th, 1859, occurs the following: “Leathart of Newcastle has written me this morning settling a commission which he has now given me for the Found , at 350 guineas.”

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The perspective, always in elaborate compositions a difficulty for Rossetti, resolved itself into a checkmate at an early period, and though the figures were altered, and though Mr. Frederick Shields once made special studies for the pavement edges, nothing could be satisfactorily done with it. The wall, the girl's head, and the cart with the calf remained as an eloquent testimony of Rossetti's intense efforts to produce a really valuable modern picture, with a lesson in it, and these were of course priceless as mementos of his early work. Moreover, in his latest years he practically completed the group; so, after his death, Sir Edward Burne-Jones consented to give

Study for the Woman in Found.

Figure: Pen and ink with slight wash. Head and shoulders of a woman leaning on her right shoulder, her head turned to the right, with her eyes closed and her bonnet falling down on her shoulders.

a sort of finish to the picture by washing in blue sky, and this he has done all over the space where the churchyard railing was meant to come, showing that even this had been left blank. The pen-and-ink design reproduced here will make the details clearer. In its half-completed state the picture passed into the possession of Mr. William Graham, who had last commissioned it, and after his death it went to America.

Of the two finished pen-and-ink studies mentioned as belonging to Col. Gillum and Mr. Fairfax Murray, the former is probably the earlier. ¹ It was exhibited at the Hogarth Club in 1859, at the

Transcribed Footnote (page 46):

¹ There is a larger drawing than either of these in the possession of Mr. Rossetti, but it is of later date and probably done by an assistant.

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Burlington Fine Arts Club in 1883, and again at the New Gallery in 1897-8. Both are inscribed in Rossetti's hand with the verse from Jeremiah: “I remember thee, the kindness of thy youth, and the love of thy betrothal.” The following sonnet, one of Rossetti's latest ones, from “ Ballads and Sonnets,” also describes the picture:

“ ‘There is a budding morrow in midnight:”—
So sang our Keats, our English nightingale.
And here as lamps across the bridge turn pale
In London's smokeless resurrection-light,
Dark breaks to dawn. But o'er the deadly blight
Of love deflowered and sorrow of none avail
Which makes this man gasp and this woman quail,
Can day from darkness ever again take flight?

“Ah, gave not these two hearts their mutual pledge,
Under one mantle sheltered 'neath the hedge
In gloaming courtship? And, O God! to-day
He only knows he holds her;—but what part
Can life now take? She cries in her locked heart,
‘Leave me—I do not know you—go away!’ ”

There was something in the air at the time which caused this everlasting and painful human problem to take strong hold of the entire group of “Pre-Raphaelite” poets and painters. Bell Scott, as we have seen, treated it pretty openly in his poem called“Rosabell” or “Mary Anne”. Holman Hunt painted it in a much-discussed picture, The Awakened Conscience . Rossetti sought to give expression to it in Found , and also in a different manner in “Jenny”, one of the earliest of his poems. The theme comes out in other work of his besides, as, for instance, in the Gate of Memory and in the drawing called Hesterna Rosa . Difficult as it is to treat delicately, the subject in Rossetti's hands never falls below a lofty level of reverence and pathos. Hood was not more sympathetic or pure-minded in his treatment of it. That “Jenny”, which breathes the very spirit of pitiful tenderness, should have been attacked later on the grounds of impurity is one of those incongruities of the journalistic mind which cannot rationally be accounted for.

A short note on Rossetti's movements during the period just covered may be useful. We left him in 1848, after a few months' work at Madox Brown's, sharing a studio with Holman Hunt in Cleveland Street, Soho, and painting at the Girlhood of the Virgin . This picture was finished in a studio which he shortly afterwards took for himself at No. 72, Newman Street, over a dancing academy familiarly referred to as “the hop shop.” The proprietor of the

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house going bankrupt, Rossetti's goods and those of a friend, the American poet Thomas Buchanan Read, by the harsh law of the time underwent distraint in August, 1850. Upon this Rossetti moved two doors away to No. 74 in the same street, where he remained until the beginning of 1851, when he took in common with Deverell the first floor rooms at No. 17, Red Lion Square—the rooms which Morris and Burne-Jones occupied subsequently from 1856 to 1859, and which served as a cradle for the famous firm. I forget which group of occupants it was that fled these rooms on account of “the bugs of Bloomsbury,” but in May of 1851 Rossetti gave notice to quit them, and for a time quartered himself once more upon Madox Brown at No. 17, Newman Street, near his old studio. It was at this time that he sat to Brown for the portrait of Chaucer, in the great picture of Chaucer reading his Legend of Custance at the Court of Edward III ., now in the Sydney Museum. The sitting was done in one night, lasting till four o'clock in the morning, and the head was not subsequently touched. Mr. William Rossetti says that his brother at the time was held to resemble Chaucer, also to some extent the Stratford bust of Shakespeare. He is most inclined, however, to agree with Mr. Knight, who suggests a resemblance to Salvini. Rossetti's next move was a more permanent one. In November, 1852, he took a set of rooms at 14, Chatham Place, Blackfriars, on a site now cleared away, overlooking the river and presenting other advantages. Here he remained for nearly ten years, including the brief two years of his married life, and here he accomplished what many judges consider the most interesting portion of his work. To those who knew Rossetti in his youthful days the Blackfriars rooms are a keen and poignant memory, bound up with one of the most attractive personalities it could ever have been their fortune to meet, and sweetened by the recollection of that other gracious presence, the frail and beautiful Miss Siddal. When Rossetti took these rooms he gave up, for the first time, living at home with his father and mother in Arlington Street, Mornington Crescent, whither the family had removed from Charlotte Street in 1851. He had, therefore, acquired a certain measure of independence as a painter, which went on increasing with each successive year as generous or wealthy patrons attached themselves. That his progress in this respect was slow, and that for many years he was reduced to selling water-colours of priceless beauty for comparatively trifling sums, was the result partly of a determination which he formed never to exhibit

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Sig. H

his work or allow it to be exhibited by others. This resolve, which later on became a sort of mania, is said to have been due in the first instance to the discouraging reception of Ecce Ancilla Domini in 1850. For a long time, of course, it prevented his being known at all or appreciated by possible purchasers, and his work circulated amongst a narrow circle of artistic friends, or was bought up by casual and temporary patrons, of whom he was lucky in securing a

Sketch of Miss Siddal.

Figure: Pencil. 3/4 length seated figure, facing an easel, head turned to the right. She holds a paintbrush in her right hand, and a maul-stick in her left.

fairly continuous series. In the days of his greatness it may have had an opposite effect by arousing curiosity, and producing a feeling of pique. Buyers were attracted towards a man who was notorious for despising the public eye, and whose work was spoken of with bated breath as something supremely precious. Those were not altogether Rossetti's best days. More patronage at the start would have increased the quantity and importance of his work during the period of his greatest inventiveness; whilst a little less at the finish

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would have removed the temptation, after his powers had begun to fail, of turning out replicas which did not interest him, and of which a good number, there is cause to suppose, were not even done by himself.

There were a few exceptions to his rule of seclusion which may as well be mentioned here, though they involve some anticipation of future chapters. In 1857 a small “Pre-Raphaelite Exhibition” was organized at No. 4, Russell Place, Fitzroy Square, to which Millais, Holman Hunt, Madox Brown, Arthur Hughes, W. L. Windus and others all sent pictures. Rossetti exhibited a water-colour Dante's Dream , Dante drawing the Angel , the pen-and-ink Hesterna Rosa , a Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon , and a very beautiful little water-colour done in this year, the Blue Closet . In 1858, at the annual exhibition of the Liverpool Academy, a body which for many years was staunchly faithful to the Pre-Raphaelites, and which died for its allegiance, Rossetti exhibited the Dante's Dream again and two other water-colours, the Christmas Carol and Wedding of St. George . In this year the old Hogarth Club was founded, and Rossetti at first took some interest in its exhibitions. The earliest version of Lucretia Borgia was exhibited under these auspices, as was also the oil portrait called Bocca Baciata , and possibly other things as well. In 1862 the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh held an exhibition to which Rossetti sent for sale, from his studio in London, a study for Found called The Farmer's Daughter and a head in oils called Fair Rosamund . A few other pictures were exhibited in Glasgow (1878 and 1879), Liverpool (1864), and Edinburgh (1877); and the great Loan Exhibition in Manchester in 1882, the last year of Rossetti's life, included no fewer than nine subjects by his hand—the greatest number ever exhibited together up to that date. With these exceptions, and possibly one or two others of minor importance, it is essential to remember that Rossetti's work was absolutely unseen by the public, who became acquainted with him as a poet long before they knew him even dimly as a painter. The effects of this ignorance are still discernible. Even after two great exhibitions of his works in London, and after the publication of a wide selection from his designs, there are people who believe that Rossetti never painted but from one model, and that all his pictures are distinguished by impossible lips and a goitrous development of neck.

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Miss Siddal: From a Drawing at South Kensington Museum

Figure: Pen and ink. Full-length figure standing, with her face turned to her right. Her left hands rests on a window ledge, and her right hand is on a table slightly behind her.

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Note: blank page

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CHAPTER IV

FRIENDSHIP WITH RUSKIN.—MARRIAGE, AND

DEATH OF MRS. ROSSETTI

WITH the year 1854 Rossetti's life entered upon a new phase. This was the first year of his memorable connection with Ruskin, some details of which have recently been placed before the world in the form of letters. At the same time he had by now engaged himself to marry Miss Siddal, whose companionship and whose health became, for the next eight years, the most absorbing facts in his private life. To speak of Ruskin first, his was no ordinary friendship, but a curious combination of patron, friend, and mentor, not a little suggestive of the benevolent god in the background of a classical drama. If Rossetti had been a common man, living an orderly life and working on regular lines, such a connection would have been, as he jocularly described it at first, “in a way to make his fortune.” For Ruskin was willing to buy within certain limits almost everything that Rossetti produced, or to sell it to others, and was ever ready to propose congenial themes. Furthermore, having taken a great fancy to Miss Siddal, and admiring her poetic and artistic gifts, which had grown in a remarkable way under Rossetti's tuition, he tried to make an arrangement whereby he should purchase all her work also, paying a minimum sum of £150 a year. For a long time, in fact, this arrangement was carried out. In Miss Siddal's precarious state of health, necessitating constant change with periods of rest, such a proposition was obviously a tactful way of offering to contribute towards her expenses; and there is no doubt that Ruskin's help at this critical period was invaluable, and that without it the young couple would have suffered even more struggling times than they did. For Rossetti was hopelessly and heedlessly unthrifty, flush of money one day, out-at-elbows the next, borrowing from the needy Brown, putting off the day of repayment, and invariably anticipating

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with the greatest ingenuity any money to be earned from commissions. One of the Ruskin letters, besides being typical in itself of the writer, throws a momentary flash of light upon this butterfly existence:

“? Oct ., 1855.

“DEAR ROSSETTI,

“You are a very odd creature, that's a fact. I said I would find funds for you to go into Wales to draw something I wanted. I never said I would for you to go to Paris, to disturb yourself and other people, and I won't. . . .

“I am ill-tempered to-day—you are such absurd creatures both of you. I don't say you do wrong, because you don't seem to know what is wrong, but do just whatever you like as far as possible—as puppies and tomtits do.However, as it is so, I must think for you—and first, I can't have you going to Paris, nor going near Ida, ¹ till you have finished those drawings, and Miss Heaton's too. You can't do anything now but indoors, and the less you excite Ida the better. Positively, if you go to Paris I will; but you won't go, I'm sure, when you know I seriously don't think it right. I will advance you what you want on this drawing, but only on condition it goes straight on.

“Most truly yours,

“J. RUSKIN.”

Rossetti seems to have gone to Paris and to have enjoyed meeting the Brownings there, after which the incident drops. No one can read these letters of Ruskin's without feeling that there breathes through them a spirit of wonderful generosity and kindness, unmixed with a single mean thought or secondary motive. He never tried to get a drawing more cheaply than the market price, or to sell it at a higher without sending the difference to the artist. The wiles of the bargainer were foreign to him, and even in conferring kindnesses he is at evident pains to conceal the obligation. On the other hand he had, in private as well as in his writings, a vigorous mode of expression not always meant to be taken seriously, and a dogmatic way of criticising what he did not like, and of suggesting alterations, which some men might not have resented, but which Rossetti in time could not bring himself to bear. The next letter to the one just quoted is an instance in point:

“DEAR ROSSETTI,

“ I have been mighty poorly. . . . Coming to scratch again gradually. Please oblige me in one or two matters or you will make me ill again. Take all the pure green out of the flesh in the Nativity I send, and try to get it a little less like worsted work by Wednesday, when I will send for it. I want the Archdeacon of Salop, who is coming for some practical talk over religious art for the multitude, to see it. . . .”

On this occasion we hear later: “ Nativity is much mended. Many thanks;” but the result of carrying out Ruskin's suggestions

Transcribed Footnote (page 52):

¹ The pet-name given by Ruskin to Miss Siddal, from some allusion to Tennyson's Princess.

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Robert Browning. 1855

Figure: Watercolor. Text in upper left corner: October. Text in upper right corner: 1855. Browning's head. facing to the right.

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too literally was not always satisfactory, as the following pair of letters will show:

“I think I like that duet between Ida and you better than anything you have done for me yet, for it has no faults and is full of power—except and always that man with boots and lady with golden hair. ¹I have sent your Beatrice ² to-day to somebody who will like to look at it; it will be sent or brought to you on Monday. Please leave word about reception of it if you must go out. Please put a dab of Chinese white into the hole in the cheek and paint it over. People will say that Beatrice has been giving the other bridesmaids apredestinate scratched face; also a white-faced bridesmaid behind is very ugly to look at—like a skull or body in corruption. Also please ask Hunt about young fool who wants grapes, and his colour of sleeve. Then—I will tell you where this drawing is to be sent next to be lectured upon, and am affectionately yours,

“JOHN RUSKIN.”

“DEAR ROSSETTI,

“ I suppose the girl who let me in was up to telling you what I had said, and to showing you what I had done. I had told her to tell you that I was in such a passion that I was like to tear everything in the room to pieces at your daubing over the head in that picture; and that it was no use to me now until you had painted it in again. And I told her to show you that I had carried off the Passover instead. . . . How you could think I could care to look at it with any pleasure in that mess, I can't think. Before, the whole thing was explained—there was only a white respirator before the mouth. You have deprived me of a great pleasure by your absurdity. I never, so long as I live, will trust you to do anything again, out of my sight.”

“You are a conceited monkey,” he writes once more on a similar occasion, when an alteration had displeased him, “thinking your pictures right when I tell you positively they are wrong. What do you know about the matter, I should like to know?”

Still, against such episodes as this must be set the genuine admiration which Ruskin had for Rossetti's work of this period and up to, perhaps, 1865, when he had practically abandoned the romantic compositions of his youth, with all their charm and

Transcribed Footnote (page 53):

¹ “Duet between Ida and you,” possibly (?) the Paolo and Francesca triptych. “Man with boots and lady with golden hair,” the Belle Dame sans Mercy ; also described generically in another letter as The Man with his Blue Wife. Ruskin had a humorous way of referring to his drawings in this style which is rather puzzling, and must be very much so to those unacquainted with the pictures and their dates.

Transcribed Footnote (page 53):

² The Beatrice referred to here, and in many of Ruskin's letters of 1855-56, must be a copy made from the Beatrice at a Wedding Feast denying her Salutation to Dante , which belongs to Mr. H. T. Wells, R.A. ( see page 36). The latter was painted at least by 1852, in which year it was brought to Mr. Wells by the late Mr. Thomas Seddon, together with the Giotto painting Dante . Rossetti, being at the time hard up for money, was anxious to sell these two drawings, and Mr. Wells took one and Mr. Seddon the other. The price asked and paid for them was about £10 each. They are amongst the finest specimens of Rossetti's early work. At about the date of these letters, Rossetti seems to have borrowed the Beatrice from Mr. Wells to copy for Ruskin, and the criticisms just quoted refer to the copy. In Ruskin, Rossetti, and Pre-Raphaelitism they are made to refer to the original water-colour, which is reproduced by way of illustration, but which certainly has never been altered in the manner described. The copy has gone, I find, to Mr. Ruskin's old friend, Prof. C. E. Norton, of Harvard.

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naïveté, and adopted riper and more sophisticated methods of expression. This admiration has been fully recorded in his serious writings and lectures,—as for instance when he says:

“ I believe that Rossetti's name should be placed first on the list of men, within my own range of knowledge, who have raised and changed the spirit of modern art; raised in absolute attainment, changed in direction of temper.”

Nor was Rossetti, though he may have chafed often enough at the criticisms lavished upon his work and methods, a backward or half-hearted friend. He speaks in a family letter of Ruskin as the best friend, with one or two exceptions, that he had ever made, and up to the limits of his capricious nature he evidently took genuine pains to please him. The fact of the intimacy lasting a full eight years proves this. It came to an end gradually and without any open disagreement, from the purely natural circumstance that Rossetti was developing upon his own lines and had too much independence to subject his genius permanently to the fixed ideas of any critic, however eminent. ¹ Other causes as well may have helped to determine the inevitable. Marriage, especially in the case of self-absorbed natures, is an effectual solvent of old ties; and in addition to marriage Rossetti had his constant anxiety for his wife's health to occupy him. So it came about that the two fell apart, and whether we should count it loss or gain we cannot entirely tell, saving as a matter of sentiment. The long duration of the intercourse, and its closeness for so many years, are points to be borne in mind in judging of Rossetti's character; for an unfair impression of him might easily be got from the Ruskin letters, which, besides revealing only one side of the correspondence, are so scattered in date as to convey a false idea of the length of time they cover, and by consequence a false idea of the rapidity of the dénoûment.

A difficulty about the friendship with Ruskin which cost Rossetti some unpleasantness was the marked antipathy existing

Transcribed Footnote (page 54):

¹ Mr. W. M. Rossetti in his “ Memoir,” vol. i., p. 261, mentions letters from Ruskin which show that in 1865, although there had been a considerable divergence over the painting of Venus Verticordia , which the critic frankly detested, no positive breach of friendship had occurred. One letter ends: “You meant them—the first and second (letters)—just as rightly as this pretty third; and yet they conclusively showed me that we could not at present—nor for some time yet—be companions any more, though true friends, I hope, as ever. I do not choose any more to talk to you until you can recognize my superiorities as I can yours. You simply do not see certain characters in me. A day may come when you will be able; then—without apology, without restraint, merely as being different from what you are now—come back to me, and we will be as we used to be.” After this the two men scarcely saw each other, though even as late as 1870 they were exchanging perfectly amicable correspondence.

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between the critic and Madox Brown, which Rossetti tried in vain to bridge over. Ruskin ignored Brown's pictures, and Brown, who was vain and touchy for such a great man, whether he suffered directly or not, felt the slight very deeply. In company, where the two were often bound to meet, he could with difficulty prevail upon himself to be civil, and Rossetti finally had to accept the circumstances, and veil all mention of his new acquaintance in jocular allusions to the “Great Prohibited.”

Before passing from the subject of Ruskin it is interesting to note that he enlisted Rossetti as an active helper in the scheme promoted by Frederick Denison Maurice for bringing art into the East end.

In Rossetti's “Letters to William Allingham,” edited by Dr. Birkbeck Hill, this episode in the painter's life is referred to many times:

October 15 th, 1854. “Ruskin is back. . . . He has written to me saying he wants to consult with me about plans for ‘teaching the masons’; so you may soon expect to find every man shoulder his hod, ‘with upturned fervid face and hair put back.’”

November.“Perhaps you know that he [Ruskin] has joined Maurice's scheme for a Working Men's College, which has now begun to be put in operation at 31, Red Lion Square. Ruskin has most liberally undertaken a drawing class, which he attends every Thursday evening. . . . He is most enthusiastic about it, and has so infected me that I think of offering an evening weekly for the same purpose when I am settled in town again.”

January 23 rd, 1855.“I began my class last night at the Working Men's College: it is for the figure, quite a separate thing from Ruskin's, who teaches foliage. I have set one of them as a model to the rest till they can find themselves another model . . . some of them, two or three, show unmistakable aptitute—almost more than one could ever have hoped for.”

Rossetti kept on his class for very nearly four years, and then it was taken over by Madox Brown. His method of teaching has been described by one who attended his lectures, and who himself derived benefit from them. He began at once with colour. As in his own personality and his own work, light and shade, drawing, and everything else was subservient to colour. Without troubling about the grammar of design he gave his pupils nature to copy and showed them how to copy it. In his own pithy language he wrote to a friend: “You think I have turned humanitarian, but you should see my class for the model! None of your Freehand Drawing Books used! The British mind is brought to bear on the British mug at once, and with results that would astonish you.” A later generation has come to see wisdom in Rossetti's method, and has introduced it under government auspices in elementary schools.

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Moreover, throughout our educational system the autocratic rule of grammar is being more and more relaxed, so that almost we may look forward to a time when the great authors of the classical period will be read primarily for themselves, and not secondarily as a medium for illustrating the use of the subjunctive.

Ruskin's admiration for Miss Siddal and her work has already been mentioned, and is abundantly evident in the letters of this period. In one from Rossetti to Brown, dated April, 1855, the

The Quest of the Grail. By Miss Siddal.

Figure: Oil. In a water-filled sepulcher, a young knight kneels in a small boat, flanked by two young female angels. He has just washed his hands in a basin held by one of the angels, and he gazes at the grail held by the other.

painter describes how Ruskin had thought her a noble glorious creature, and how his father had said that by her look and manner she might have been a countess. In another, to Allingham, he says: “About a week ago Ruskin saw and bought on the spot every scrap of designs hitherto produced by Miss Siddal. He declared that they were far better than mine, or almost than anyone's, and seemed quite wild with delight at getting them. . . . He is going to have them splendidly mounted and bound together in gold, and no doubt this will be a real opening for her, as it is already a great assistance

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Sig. I

and encouragement.” Miss Siddal's failing health, however, shortly afterwards put an end to her productiveness, and with the exception of one or two small water-colours, very much in Rossetti's own style as regards colouring, she painted no pictures. Her designs are, however, of great interest, both on their own account, for the imaginative insight they display, and because Rossetti often worked on them, and occasionally even borrowed her ideas. In the case of the well-known illustration of St. Cecily, for instance, done for

The Woeful Victory. By Miss Siddal.

Figure: Pen and ink. In the foreground, a young knight lies dead, while another knight kneels directly behind him, and his attendant stands by holding a horse's reins. Behind this trio, a young woman and a young man stand in a tournament box. The young man stares at her as she looks away from the dead knight and hands the kneeling knight his prize.

Tennyson's “Palace of Art”, it is far from unlikely that Rossetti's design for the central figure was borrowed from Miss Siddal. Her drawings for it exist. The water-colour called The Quest of the Grail , which used to belong to Mr. Ruskin, and which is reproduced here by the kind permission of Mr. Arthur Severn, to whom he gave it, is a very typical instance of her richness in invention and also of the way in which Rossetti used to help her. It is signed “E. E. S. inv.: E. E. S. et D. G. R. del.” Another drawing by Miss Siddal

Transcribed Footnote (page 57):

¹ This drawing was exhibited at the New Gallery in 1897-8 in the name of Rossetti.

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which I have reproduced, from Mr. W. M. Rossetti's negative, is called The Woeful Victory , and has an especial interest in being (there is reason to suppose) intended for an illustration to Rossetti's poem, “The Bride's Prelude”. As will be seen, the lady is turning away her head as she gives the prize of victory to the knight who has slain her lover. Two other very interesting designs will be found in the “Letters to William Allingham.” A few poems by Miss Siddal which have been preserved show the same delicacy of insight and feeling that is present in her drawings, together with the same incomplete maturity of expression.

Her life, so much as we know of it, was passive and singularly free from adventure. Wrapped up in Rossetti, as he was in her, she varied the monotony of her confined existence by occasional changes of air at Hastings, Matlock, Bath, or Clevedon in Somersetshire, with one longer trip abroad in the winter and early spring of 1855-6. During the intervals she worked in Rossetti's studio at Chatham Place, Blackfriars, or sat to him for endless studies, concerning which Madox Brown's diary of 1855 contains the following passage: “He (Rossetti) showed me a drawer full of ‘Guggums’; God knows how many, but not bad work I should say for the six years he has known her. It is like a monomania with him. Many of them are matchless in beauty, however, and one day will be worth large sums.”

In 1860 Rossetti and Miss Siddal carried out their long projected plans of matrimony, which had been delayed by uncertain prospects, and perhaps also by a final want of resolution on Rossetti's part. In a private letter to his mother, dated Hastings, April 13, 1860, he says:

“I write this word to say that Lizzy and I are going to be married at last, in as few days as possible. . . . Like all the important things I ever meant to do—to fulfil duty or secure happiness—this one has been deferred almost beyond possibility. I have hardly deserved that Lizzy should still consent to it, but she has done so, and I trust I may still have time to prove my thankfulness to her. . . . The constantly failing state of her health is a terrible anxiety indeed; but I must still hope for the best, and am at any rate in a better position to take the step, as regards money prospects, than I have ever been before.”

After still further delays, on account of Miss Siddal's health, the marriage took place on May 23rd, 1860, and the young couple went for their wedding trip to Paris and Boulogne. On their return they took a cottage at Hampstead, while the rooms at Chatham Place were extended by opening a door into the adjoining house. The independent bachelor habits to which both were accustomed

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Miss Siddal: From a Drawing in the Possession of H.T. Wells, R.A.

Figure: Pencil. Text in lower left corner: D.G.R. Blackfriars. To the left, a full-length figure stands 3/4 front leaning on a chair back and gazing at a picture on an easel. Behind her is a window, through which Blackfriars Bridge and the Thames are seen.

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made life as Bohemian and irregular after marriage as before it. Men friends came and went as they pleased; tavern dinners relieved the strain of studio work, and little if any respect was paid to the conventions of social intercourse. Mrs. Rossetti's delicate health alone made it impossible for her to go about much, except amongst devoted and intimate friends, the chief of whom in these days perhaps were Algernon Charles Swinburne and the Madox Brown and Morris families. The acquaintance with the first and last mentioned of these dates from the Oxford episode of 1857-8, which there will be occasion to deal with in reviewing Rossetti's work during the years so

Rossetti Sitting to Miss Siddal.

Figure: Pen and ink. Text in lower right corner: Sept. 1853 D.G.R. Full-length profile of two seated figures. To the left, DGR sits facing Elizabeth, his feet propped on a chair seat. The back of this chair serves as an easel, as Lizzie leans over her work, scrutinizing DGR as she sketches.

briefly outlined in the foregoing pages. In May, 1861, Mrs. Rossetti gave birth to a child, still-born, and her slow recovery, added to the phthisical troubles with which she was afflicted, induced a severe and wearing form of neuralgia. For this she was prescribed laudanum, of which, on the night of February 10, 1862, she unhappily took an overdose. Poor Rossetti, on returning home from the Working Men's College, where he had been lecturing, found his wife already past recovery, and, frantic with anxiety, rushed off to Highgate Rise to summon the ever-ready assistance of Madox Brown. The following morning she died, after but two years of married life clouded with illness; and for a time at least her loss deprived Rossetti of all capacity for work and almost of all interest in his art. The most

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touching event in his whole career of swift and flame-like emotions is the sudden impulse which led him, as his wife's coffin was being closed, to bury in her beautiful hair of gold the drafts of all his early poems, which at her request he had copied into a little book. Scenes

Miss Siddal. October, 1856.

Figure: Pencil. Text in lower right: D.G.R. Weymouth St. Oct. 1856. Full-length figure angled to the left as she reclines in an arm-chair, her eyes closed, her hands clasped, and her head resting on a pillow.

such as these are not suited for a biographer, still less for one who is only concerned with biography in so far as it binds and illustrates the artistic record. Some poets might dare to touch them; but no poet yet has tried to put into words the dramatic intensity of grief which was expressed in this now historic sacrifice to the memory of Rossetti's dead wife.

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King Arthur's Tomb

Swan Electric Engraving Co.

Figure: Water color. Text in lower right corner: D.G.R. 1854 Arthur's Tomb. Water color. Full-length painting of two figures in a grove next to a tomb, beneath some short leafy trees. Guenevere kneels before the side of Arthur's tomb with her hands raised before her face to deter Launcelot's kiss. The knight stands leaning over the head of the king's tomb, attempting to kiss Guenevere.

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CHAPTER V

WORK FROM 1854 TO 1857

ROSSETTI'S work, during the earlier part of the period we have been glancing through, was of a particularly interesting, and towards the latter end of a sufficiently varied character. In range of subject it belongs to the category described in Chapter III.,

D.G. Rossetti, by Himself. September, 1855.

Figure: Pen and ink. Inscribed lower right: "Sept 20 1855." Head and shoulders of a youthful D.G.R., with a moustache and goatee. His head is turned slightly to right.

with the important addition that now for the first time is added to his sources of romantic inspiration the “Morte Darthur” of Sir Thomas Malory. This cycle of old Celtic legends had been for many years practically a sealed book in England, and its wide popularity to-day is largely owing to the interest revived in it by Rossetti, and later by the famous group of Oxford friends, including William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. Tennyson became infected from the same source, and produced the first set of the “Idylls Of the King” in 1859; but Rossetti had become acquainted with Malory by 1854, which is the date of that strange, sad little water-colour, King Arthur's Tomb , representing, in an imaginary scene, Launcelot bidding a last farewell to Guenevere. Bending across the marble effigy of the dead prince is the gaunt figure of Launcelot, beseeching a kiss from the

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queen, who, repentant now, and clad in mourning garments, crouches by the tomb and repels his unhallowed love. In the background is the knight's charger, ready caparisoned for his journey, and as if from an instinctive sense of contrast, to heighten the dramatic effect, a sunny smiling orchard enfolds and beautifies the scene. This little drawing was first purchased by Ruskin, who gave it away because he complained that in the course of some retouching Rossetti had “scratched out the eyes.” Shortly afterwards it passed into the hands of Mr. Morris, who might almost have lent his features for Sir Launcelot. It came later still into the magnificent collection of Mr. William Graham, which was broken up in 1886, and now belongs to Mr. S. Pepys Cockerell, who has kindly allowed it to be photographed and reproduced for this work. With the exception of some portraits, including a newly-discovered head of Miss Siddal in water-colour, probably the first done and unhappily a good deal faded, only one other drawing by Rossetti, to my knowledge, bears date 1854—a little sketch of The Queen's Page , from Heine, done for William Allingham to illustrate his translation of the lyric. The fact is that Rossetti had in hand a large number of pen-and-ink drawings and water-colours, which were continually put on one side as fresh work accumulated or fresh ideas crowded into his restless brain, and were often not finished until many years later. I have not seen it mentioned before, but the statement can easily be verified, that many, if not most, of Rossetti's later pictures were planned during these early strenuous years of his life. No one will ever know what piles of unused studies and drawings were destroyed in the periodic excavations of his studio, or during his frequent removals, but one visitor of about this time, Sir Edward Burne-Jones, has recorded his amazement at the number which littered the floor and every available corner. Mr. William Rossetti inherited a valuable collection of such relics, many of which, however, were sold in 1883 or subsequently. The best as well as the largest collection now is that of Mr. Fairfax Murray, who has the advantage of being a recognized authority on Rossetti's work, as well as the possessor of an unrivalled aggregation of his early drawings and manuscripts. Among the pencil sketches and studies so preserved are several which show that Rossetti had in his mind at the time the composition of works which were not executed for many years afterwards. Here, for instance, we find in embryo, committed to paper during the early fifties, Morning Music (painted 1864), Hamlet and Ophelia (1858), My Lady Greensleeves (1859), Tibullus and Delia (1867), Fight for
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a Woman (1865), Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon (1858), Saluto di Beatrice (1859), Proserpine (1871), and The Boat of Love , from a sonnet by Dante to Guido Cavalcanti, taken up late in life and still unfinished in 1880.

In addition to these designs, which were all carried out more or

Design for a Picture, Not Executed.

Figure: Pencil. Full length sketch of three figures. A young woman in profile kneels, looking out a window on the left with her hands clasped in prayer. To the left of her, another young woman plays a lute, while a third young woman sits or kneels behind the first, cradling what is perhaps another musical instrument in her arms.

less completely, are several others which were not. Some of the latter, though it is not always easy to identify their subjects, evidently occupied Rossetti's thoughts for a considerable time, as they are repeated in various forms; and a few are interesting enough to be worth description and illustration on their own account. The first, which is reproduced by Mr. Murray's permission, represents a lady kneeling at a low prie-dieu before a window and two other figures

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kneeling by her. A large and carefully-worked nude study was made for the centre figure, which Mr. Murray also has. The second, from the same source, might seem to refer to a Dantesque incident from the appearance of the figure on the left; but which I am unable to determine. It was repeated with variations two or three times. In addition to these, Mr. Murray has a very interesting little sketch

Design for a Picture, Not Executed.

Figure: Pencil. Four full-length figures. A seated woman supports a boy sitting on her lap, encircling his head and waist with her arms. To the right, a man looks over the woman's shoulder at a seated figure on the left, who tends to the boy's hand. Behind the man, the outlines for two additional figures are lightly sketched.

illustrating the “Ballata” of Guido Cavalcanti which Rossetti has translated in his Early Italian Poets —the one beginning:

“Being in thought of love, I chanced to see
Two youthful damozels.”

The poet and the maidens are represented meeting at a well in the foreground of the picture, and Love goes up the street beyond them, drawing the hearts of ladies who look out from the windows. The first words of the poem, in Italian, are inscribed on a corner of the drawing.

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Sig. K

The Design for an Old Ballad , in pen-and-ink—illustrating the pathetic story of “Fair Annie” and her generous sister—may be classed among these instances of subjects which Rossetti thought out but never painted; and so may the drawings of Giorgione and Fra Angelico painting , the Parable of Love (a lady drawing her own portrait from a mirror whilst her lover guides her hand), and Dante at Verona , a study for one side of the triptych which was to include the incident of Giotto painting Dante's portrait, already described and illustrated. With all these conflicting subjects to occupy Rossetti's thoughts, with many months spent upon Found , and

Design for a Ballad.

Figure: Pen and ink. Full-length sketch of three figures. To the right, two young women in profile embrace, while to the left, a baby sleeps peacefully in a niche in a wall above a bunk bed.

taking into consideration as well those drawers-full of “wonderful and lovely” Miss Siddals, which Madox Brown and Ruskin so admired, it is not to be wondered at that the actual finished work of these early years was sparse in quantity and slight in quality—much slighter, for instance, than the two religious paintings with which he had begun his career. On the other hand, for many people these little water-colours of Rossetti's second period, despite their quaintness, hard colouring, and occasional faults of drawing or design, have a charm of their own that nothing in his larger and more elaborated later work can recall. Many of them besides are flawless examples of work, and exhibit none of the defects just mentioned.

In the early part of 1854 Rossetti had written to Ruskin that

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he was occupied with ideas for three subjects, Found , Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon , and another which is not named in the reply, but which from the context I infer to have been the water-colour diptych of Paolo and Francesca da Rimini . In August of the same year he wrote to William Allingham that he was at work on a Hamlet and Ophelia , “deeply symbolical of course,” and predestined for the folio which Millais had presented, and which was still supposed to be in circulation among the members of a select sketching club. About the same time he submitted to Ruskin two designs [design 1] [design 2] for The Passover , one of which was chosen to be begun at once, while Ruskin also commissioned seven drawings from the Purgatorio, of which one certainly, Matilda gathering Flowers , was very shortly put in hand. None of these undertakings saw the light for at least another year; the Hamlet not for four or five. The Matilda was finished first and delivered in September, 1855, and on the 2nd December Madox Brown records in his diary, apropos Miss Siddal being stranded in Paris without money, “Gabriel, who saw that none of the drawings on the easel could be completed before long, began a fresh one, Francesca da Rimini , in three compartments; worked day and night, finished it in a week, got thirty-five guineas for it from Ruskin, and started off to relieve them.” This was the earliest version of a subject that Rossetti returned to more than once, representing in one compartment the lovers' kiss, and in the second their two souls floating clasped together in Hell through a rain of pale sulphurous flames. Between the compartments are two figures meant for Dante and Virgil, and the words “O Lasso!” A more elaborately finished version of the complete picture was painted in 1862 for Mr. Leathart, and a copy of the first compartment only, a drawing of singular loveliness and power, was sold to Mr. Graham in 1861. This will be further described under the latter date. A pencil study for one compartment only, dated 1854, belongs to Mr. J. A. R. Munro, but hardly counts as a finished picture. Mr. Sharp in his not always accurate book on Rossetti describes the pencil drawing as belonging to Mr. Ruskin and a replica of the Leathart picture as having been done for Mr. Rae. As a matter of fact it is the Ruskin early water-colour that belongs to Mr. Rae, and the Leathart picture ( here reproduced) was the replica. The latter remains in the possession of Mr. T. H. Leathart. The Graham picture is now the property of Mr. W. R. Moss, of Bolton, Lancashire, who has kindly allowed it to be engraved for this work. ( See Chap. VI.) Within the same period, viz., by October, 1855, another Dante subject, The Vision of Rachel and

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Diptych: Paolo and Francesca da Rimini

Figure: Water color triptych. Text in left compartment: “Quanti dolci pensier Quanto disio.” Text in central compartment: “O lasso!” Text in right compartment: “Menò costor al doloroso passo!” In left compartment, two lovers seated before a bottle-glass window kiss, holding hands while a book lies open on the young woman's lap. In the central compartment, two men in dark robes stand 3/4 front, looking toward the right compartment. In the right compartment, the two lovers embrace, floating through drops of flame in hell.

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Dante's Vision of Rachel and Leah

Figure: Water color. Two full-length women in long dark dresses in front of a stone wall and a wooded area, on either side of a water-filled stone basin. The left figure wears a cape and veil as she sits on the wall, her hands at her sides, gazing downward, perhaps at her reflection. To the right, another downward-gazing young woman stands holding a spray of flowers and vines which cascade over the basin onto the ground at her feet.

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Leah , was taken up and completed. For this Ruskin paid “thirty guineas instead of twenty asked,” and afterwards parted with it to Miss Heaton, of Leeds, an early patron whom he introduced to Rossetti's work. It is now in the possession of Mr. Beresford Heaton.

Matilda gathering Flowers , which forms a sort of companion to The Vision of Rachel and Leah , I have never seen, and its whereabouts

Study for Rachel.

Figure: Pencil. Full-length sketch of a young woman seated on a high bench, with her torso turned to her left. Her hands are clasped on her left knee, and she gazes downward.

are unknown to me. The latter picture, as will be seen, represents two young girls at a fountain. The one to the left is in purple, sitting on the well, the other in bright green, holding a spray of honeysuckle which trails all over the stonework. Beyond is a buttercup meadow, with a little stream meandering through it, and at the back is an orchard. Dante, in the distance to the spectator's left, contemplates the graceful scene, which is, by the way, of a typically English, and most un-Oriental character. Madox Brown has the following record in his diary, under the date August 15, 1855: “Rossetti still here, painting at his drawing of Rachel and Leah . I suggested his putting in Dante in the distance and sundry great improvements, and now he is in spirits with it and will ask £5 more for it.” As already mentioned he obtained ten. The little study in pencil for one of the figures was drawn from Miss Siddal.

The Passover drawing, referred to in one of Ruskin's letters in the last chapter, is a small, unfinished, but highly interesting water-colour, in which once more Rossetti has treated the domestic life of the Holy Family with a reverent freedom from conventionality, such as Millais used in the Carpenter's Shop and Holman Hunt in the Finding of Christ in the Temple . This time the incident represented is an imaginary one, the sprinkling of blood upon the lintels, with Mary gathering bitter herbs for the Passover. The scene, to quote

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Rossetti's own description, “is in the house porch, where Christ (as a boy) holds a bowl of blood from which Zacharias is sprinkling the posts and lintel. Joseph has brought the lamb and Elizabeth lights the pyre. The shoes which John fastens, and the bitter herbs which Mary is gathering, form part of the ritual.” It will be seen that the whole idea is full of allegory, the part assigned to the characters being generally chosen from some special allusion to the future. Ruskin, however, who seized the drawing and bore it away in an unfinished state lest worse should befall, after that unhappy difference about the Beatrice , refused to recognize this. Patmore, he says, in reply to some letter, “is very nice; but what the mischief does he mean by Symbolism? I call that Passover plain prosy Fact. No Symbolism at all.” The two pencil drawings, [drawing 1] [drawing 2] showing the alternative pictures offered, also belonged to Ruskin and were much admired by him. They are now at Oxford, in the possession of Sir Henry Acland, who has kindly allowed them to be reproduced. [drawing 1] [drawing 2] The Passover was one of Rossetti's very earliest designs, having been sketched out first as far back as 1849; it was the one selected for a memorial window to Rossetti in the church at Birchington-on-Sea, where he was buried, the adaptation for purposes of stained glass being carried out by Mr. Frederick Shields. The unfinished water-colour is the only one of Rossetti's drawings which Mr. Ruskin still retains in his possession, all the many others which once belonged to him having been given away, exchanged, or sold.

Other drawings which are dated, or were finished by 1855, though they may have been in hand considerably earlier, are The Nativity (done in a week and sold to Ruskin for fifteen guineas: see page 52), La Belle Dame sans Mercy , and the Annunciation , all water-colours, of which the two last were acquired by the late Mr. George Price Boyce, and formed part of his fine collection. After the sale of his pictures in 1897, La Belle Dame , with others, came into the possession of Mr. Fairfax Murray, but the Annunciation was retained by Mrs. Boyce. It never belonged to Mr. Ruskin, as has generally been stated, but was much admired by him.In it the Virgin (done from Miss Siddal) is represented washing clothes in a stream, ¹ whilst the angel Gabriel stands with folded wings between two trees hard by, on which he leans his hands. Both are in white, and the whole picture shows a strong effect of sunlight. The inscription put upon it by Rossetti was, “My beloved is mine and I

Transcribed Footnote (page 68):

¹ Compare the line in Rossetti's “Ave”.

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Design for The Passover: Gathering Bitter Herbs

Figure: Pencil. Five full-length figures outside a small hut, variously kneeling and bending over to gather herbs.

Design for The Eating of the Passover: Unexecuted

Figure: Pencil. Six figures around a table, standing and kneeling, all holding staves.

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am his; he feedeth among the lilies. Hail thou that art highly favoured; blessed art thou among women.

With regard to the drawing of La Belle Dame sans Mercy —which, in spite of its name, does not immediately suggest the well-known Keats ballad—there is some room for ingenious speculation. The title, it is true, ante-dated its execution, and belonged as well to a little sepia sketch of the subject given to an early friend, the

Tennyson Reading Maud.

Figure: Pen and ink. Text in lower right corner: "Maud" 1855. Full-length sketch of Tennyson in profile facing left, seated in an over-stuffed chair and reading from a book held in his right hand. His legs are tightly crossed, and his left hand grasps his right shin.

sculptor Alex. Munro, in 1848. This even bore upon its frame the two verses from Keats beginning:

“I met a lady in the wood,
Most beautiful, a fairy's child;”

but the composition represents neither wood nor fairy—simply a pair of figures walking arm-in-arm, the man booted and spurred, the lady golden haired, in a bright blue gown and long girdle. It was laconically referred to by Ruskin, who at one time owned and highly valued the drawing, as “the man and his blue wife.” Mr. Fairfax

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Murray has suggested an idea that the composition may have been intended at first to represent Laertes leading away Ophelia, and points out that the figures reappear almost exactly in a water-colour of 1864 entitled The First Madness of Ophelia .

Of portraits, there belong to the year 1855 a pen-and-ink head of Rossetti himself at the age of twenty-seven, sallow-faced and slightly bearded, of which at least one copy exists, perhaps by

The Maids of Elfen-Mere.

Figure: Woodcut. text in lower right corner: T Dalziel. Full-length woodcut of four figures. Three young women stand in flowing gowns, facing forward, left, and right, before a youth, who faces backward while seated on the floor, turning his head away from them.

another hand; a water-colour portrait of Browning , done at Paris in October of the year; a lovely little water-colour of Miss Siddal seated upon the ground, in the possession of Mr. Wells; and a sketch, which however deserves notice for its intrinsic interest, of Tennyson reading aloud the proof-sheets of “Maud.” Browning, at whose house the reading took place, on September 27, 1855, retained possession of this sketch, and his son may possibly have it still; but a copy was made at Miss Siddal's request by Rossetti, who gave it away many years later when he was cherishing a real or imaginary grievance against Tennyson, and this is reproduced on page 69 by permission of its present owner, Mr. Cosmo Monkhouse.

In addition to the foregoing there must be chronicled under 1855 the first of the important and beautiful designs for woodcuts, which in the absence of his pictures were almost the only means afforded to the public for many years of judging of Rossetti's work. This is a drawing for a poem in William Allingham's “Day and Night Songs,” called The Maids of Elfen-Mere . Allingham was employed in the Customs in Ireland, and at the period in question, and for some years after, Rossetti and he were very intimate, corresponding

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freely and vivaciously on all topics concerning their circle. Rossetti's letters have fortunately been preserved, and unlike some others which have shared the same publicity are entirely suitable for and worthy of general reading. They have been excellently edited by Dr. Birkbeck Hill, and are a source of information on these years of Rossetti's life from which I have not scrupled occasionally to draw. In them the whole history of this wood-block is circumstantially

Drawing for The Maids of Elfen-Mere.

Figure: Pen and ink. Four full length figures. A young man sits on the ground, turned slightly to the left. His hands are clasped around his left knee, and he gazes downward. Behind him, three women in flowing dresses face forward, left, and right.

detailed, so that I need not dwell much upon it here; sufficient to say that Rossetti was violently displeased with the cutting of his design by Dalziel, and after keeping the edition waiting ever so long, wanted to cancel and withdraw the block. Allingham and some others were by no means equally displeased, and eventually on the former's urgent petition it was allowed to go in. To our eyes to-day it appears a sufficiently creditable piece of work, ¹ though it is too fine and light in tone to yield a satisfactory reproduction. As a set-off against the coarseness of the block shown here I have placed alongside it a reproduction from one of the original pen-and-ink designs which Rossetti copied on to the wood, and which has kindly been lent to me for the purpose by its present owner, Dr. Robert Spence Watson, of Gateshead. A larger drawing remains in the possession of Mrs. Allingham. An interesting incident in connection with this block is that Rossetti first drew the subject on the wood without reversing it, showing at once his

Transcribed Footnote (page 71):

¹ It was his delight at the sight of this woodcut in Allingham's book that started William Morris on designing and engraving blocks himself. Both he and Burne-Jones were emphatic in admiration, the latter writing of it as “the most beautiful drawing for an illustration that I have ever seen.”

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inexperience and the same kind of happy-go-lucky confidence which afterwards led to the deplorable fiasco at the Oxford Union. The drawing as shown here is intended to be reversed.

In 1856 were completed the water-colours of Dante's Dream and Fra Pace ; the former for Miss Heaton, the latter for anyone who would buy it,—Ruskin, who had the first offer, having pronounced it to be “very ingenious and wonderful, but not my sort of drawing.” Mr. William Morris, who, as we shall presently see, acquired several early water-colours by Rossetti, was apparently the first purchaser of Fra Pace , which later on found its way into the great Graham collection, and is now in the possession of Mrs. Jekyll, one of Mr. William Graham's daughters. It represents, as the plate will show, a kneeling monk busy illuminating at a desk. He is copying a dead mouse, and has worked so long and with such preoccupation that the cat has coiled itself up asleep upon his trailing robe. A youthful acolyte is tickling it with a straw in order to beguile the tedium of the long silence. The drawing is somewhat archaic in character and stiff in design—based upon Memling, some have said; but it is eminently characteristic of Rossetti, full of quaint conceits and devices, from the row of little bottles that hold the good man's pigments to the split pomegranate that lies uneaten by his side. From the amount of humour it contains Rossetti must evidently have enjoyed doing it.

The Dante's Dream just mentioned is the first, and in certain points most beautiful, version of the subject which afterwards served for Rossetti's largest picture, the one in the Walker Art Gallery at Liverpool. A third picture, not so large as the latter, but distinguished by a pair of predellas, belongs to Mr. Wiliam Imrie, of the same city. These will be further described in their proper place. Mr. Heaton's little water-colour—really not a very little one in comparison with most of the works of that time—has been described (even by Mr. W. M. Rossetti) as different in composition from the later versions. This, it will be seen by comparing the illustrations, is hardly the case. The water-colour is somewhat squarer in shape, but the composition and pose of the five figures are very much the same as in the large Liverpool picture. Love, arrayed in bright blue, instead of in flame red as the later versions represent him, is leading a very grave and sorrowful Dante up to the bier whereon in a vision he saw his lady lie. Her maidens at head and at foot are lowering or holding up a snowy pall, on which are strewed symbolic sprigs of hawthorn bloom. Poppies of death cover the floor. The

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Fra Pace.

Swan Electric Engraving Co.

Figure: Water color. Monogram lower right. Two full-length figures in a rectory. To the left, a monk kneels next to desk, drawing a dead mouse in an illuminated manuscript. Behind him, a small boy plays tries to awaken a cat who has curled up asleep in the folds of the monk's robe.

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Dante's Dream: From the Water-Colour

Figure: Water color. Five full-length figures. In a chamber, a man stands in profile facing to the right, gazing down at a woman who lies on a bier behind him. He is led to the bier by an embodiment of love, who holds his left hand while bending over to kiss the supine woman. An attendant stands at the head and foot of the bier. The dead woman's eyes are closed and her hands are joined as if in prayer.

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Sig. L

scene is an interior, with open vistas to right and left, showing the sunny city of Florence and the winding Arno. Certain features, such as the red birds of love flying in and out at the openings and filling all the house, are absent in this earlier picture, which gains by a depth of feeling peculiarly its own, by entire freedom from affectation in the expression of the faces, and by the simple beauty of the recumbent Beatrice, with her golden hair, done, according to

Faust and Margaret.

Figure: Pen and ink. Initialed lower right. Three full-length figures. On the right, Faust stands with his back against a prison cell wall, his arms raised and bent as he clasps Margaret's hands. She faces him, raising her arms to grasp his hands as they gaze into one another's eyes. In the background to the left, a shadowy figure of Mephistopheles descends a stairway into the cell.

Mr. William Rossetti, from the wife of his friend, James Hannay. Rossetti made a charming study for the Beatrice of the later picture from Mrs. Morris, although in the picture itself the effect has been somewhat spoilt by altering the colour of the hair, and by the introduction of ugly mannerisms, which marred a great deal of the painter's latest work.

Of the same date as Dante's Dream is a pen-and-ink design belonging to Mr. Arthur Hughes, which represents Faust and Margaret in the prison. ¹ Mephistopheles is coming down the steps, urging the pair to make haste. At the very close of his life Rossetti essayed to paint an important picture, dealing with the incident of the jewel-casket, to be called Gretchen , or Risen at Dawn . Particulars as to this will be found in Chapter IX.

Transcribed Footnote (page 73):

¹ On page 24 mention was made of an early drawing of Gretchen and Mephistopheles in the Chapel , belonging to Mr. J. A. R. Munro. This, I find, since the page was printed, now belongs to Dr. H. A. Munro, who has also a second, less finished, drawing of the same subject, but totally different in composition. In this, Faust kneels at a pew close by, looking lovingly at Gretchen, and the upper spandrils of the picture contain large heads of Faust and Mephistopheles. Both will be found reproduced at page 24. [reproduction 1] [reproduction 2] The finished drawing, with the flaming sword pointing to Gretchen, and the words “Dies Irae” round it, was done for the “Cyclographic Society,” and criticisms on it by Millais and Holman Hunt were quoted by Mr. Rossetti in the “Art Journal,” May, 1894.

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In March, 1856, Rossetti secured an important commission— judged by the standard of his current work and prices—to paint a reredos in three compartments for the cathedral of Llandaff, which John P. Seddon was engaged in restoring. The matter had been broached a year earlier, when Madox Brown had felt a momentary annoyance at being passed over himself and asked to recommend Rossetti. This did not deter him from pushing his friend's interests, and through the influence of Mr. Bruce, M.P., afterwards Lord Aberdare, and the Seddons, Rossetti got the commission at his own price, viz., £400 for the triple picture—“a big thing,” as he wrote, “which I shall go into with a howl of delight after all my small work.” The subject he chose for this undertaking was The Seed of David , showing in the centre-piece the infant Christ on his mother's knee being adored by a shepherd and a king, and on either side a single figure of David, first as a shepherd-boy slinging the stone for Goliath, and secondly as a king harping to the glory of God. In this year the Llandaff triptych got no further than a set of water-colour designs, which for a long time have been in the possession of Rossetti's early friend Vernon (now Mr. Justice) Lushington. Even they were probably not all completed until later, as several earlier studies [study 1] [study 2] [study 3] [study 4] [study 5] were made, of which some were sold after Rossetti's death, and are to be found in the possession of Mr. J. W. Thompson, of Walcot, Stalham. Mr. Fairfax Murray also has one or more. The painting was started about 1858, and was evidently much discussed with Ruskin, who wished Rossetti to use for the face of the Virgin the handsome features of Miss Herbert, an actress whose acquaintance he had just then made, and who sat to him more than once. In 1857, however, Rossetti had met Miss Burden, afterwards Mrs. Morris, and it is her face which appears in the picture. The colouring and the work in general is not unlike that of the early Adoration by Burne-Jones , which was painted about the same time, under the strong influence of Rossetti, and which will be remembered at the Winter Exhibition of the New Gallery, 1898-9. In this picture also Mrs. Morris sat for the Virgin, and William Morris and Swinburne are recognizable among the group of worshippers. The triptych was not completely finished until 1864, and after that was considerably retouched in 1869, when Rossetti went down to Llandaff for the purpose.

An interesting family letter, ¹ of June, 1864, gives Rossetti's own description of the triptych, and also shows how much novelty of idea

Transcribed Footnote (page 74):

¹W. M. Rossetti, “ Letters and Memoir,” vol. ii., p. 174.

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The Seed of David: Triptych in Llandaff Cathedral

Figure: Oil. Three panels with arched tops. The left panel shows David as a shepherd with a sling-shot and stone, ready to slay Goliath. The center panel depicts the birth of Christ among a group of people dressed in medieval attire. The right panel shows David as a king, playing a harp.

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Note: This page contains one half of the triptych The Seed of David, described on the preceding page.

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and teaching he contrived to throw into such a hackneyed theme as the Adoration: “It is intended,” he says, “to show Christ sprung from high and low in the person of David, who was both Shepherd and King, and worshipped by high and low—a King and a Shepherd —at his nativity. Accordingly in the centre-piece an angel is represented leading the Shepherd and King to worship in the stable at the feet of Christ, who is in his mother's arms. She holds his hand for the Shepherd, and his foot for the King, to kiss—so showing the superiority of poverty over riches in the eyes of Christ. There is an opening all round the stable, through which angels are looking in, whilst other angels are playing on musical instruments in a loft above. . . . The three pictures are in a stone framework in the cathedral, which being white I fear must injure their effect; but before long I shall go down there and give directions for such decoration of the framework as seems best. I have been thinking of some concise mottoes to inscribe round the pictures, so as to suggest their purport, and have hit on the following:

(1) Christ sprang from David Shepherd, and even so
(2) From David King, being born of high and low.
(3) The Shepherd lays his crook, the King his crown
(4) Here at Christ's feet, and high and low bow down.”

The year 1856 (or, if we take the date of publication, 1857) deserves commemoration apart from these annals as the year of the famous Moxon “Tennyson”, for which Rossetti designed no fewer than five illustrations. The first mention we have of the matter is in a letter from Rossetti himself to Allingham, dated January 23, 1855, in which he says:

“The other day Moxon called on me, wanting me to do some of the blocks for the new Tennyson. The artists already engaged are Millais, Hunt, Landseer, Stanfield, Maclise, Creswick, Mulready, and Horsley. The right names would have been Millais, Hunt, Madox Brown, Hughes, a certain lady, and myself. NO OTHERS. . . . Each artist, it seems, is to do about half-a-dozen; but I hardly expect to manage so many, as I find the work of drawing on wood particularly trying to the eyes. I have not begun even designing for them yet, but fancy I shall try the‘Vision of Sin’, and‘Palace of Art’, etc.—those where one can allegorize on one's own hook, without killing for oneself and everyone a distinct idea of the poet's.”

Rossetti's interpretation of the last sentence may be sought for in the wonderful illustration to the “Palace of Art” , on which he has lavished all the wealth of his rich mediæval fancy and feeling for beauty, without trespassing to any apparent extent upon either the central idea of the poem or any one of its details. Tennyson, who hated pictures, and took the most attenuated interest in this edition of his poems, is said to have been a good deal puzzled by the illus-

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The Palace of Art.

Figure: Woodcut. Monogram, lower right corner. A woman kneeling to the left plays a small organ as an angel embraces her from behind and kisses her forehead. A guard eating an apple stands in the lower left corner, his back to the couple.

The Palace of Art.

Figure: Woodcut. Monogram, lower left corner. A supine Arthur is cradled on the laps of ten young, weeping queens.

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The Lady of Shalott.

Figure: Woodcut. Lancelot facing left while standing on a barge, leans over to gaze upon the supine Lady of Shalott.

Mariana in the South

Figure: Woodcut. Monogram, lower left. Mariana kneels to the left, kissing the feet of a crucifix on the wall. Behind her, a free-standing mirror reflects the scene.

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tration in question, which is intended to represent the verse describing how

“in a clear-wall'd city on the sea
Near gilded organ-pipes, her hair
Wound with white roses, slept St. Cecily;
An angel looked at her.”

As I have already mentioned in Chapter IV., there is reason to believe that Rossetti availed himself of a design by Miss Siddal for the centre figure of St. Cecily .

A second illustration for the same poem, showing how “mythic

SIR GALAHAD.

Figure: Woodcut. Sir Galahad, kneeling at the top of a flight of steps before the altar of a deserted chapel in a wood at night, is in the act of making the sign of the cross on his face with the holy water in a vessel suspended on a beam. The chapel is brilliantly lit within so that the faces of the girls standing below, praying and tolling the golden bell hanging at the entrance, are illuminated by the reflection of light from the altar.Surtees, p. 70

Uther's deeply-wounded son” was tended in the Vale of Avalon by weeping queens, Tennyson liked best of any in the book, and indeed it can hardly be surpassed for beauty. The remaining three designs— intended to illustrate “The Lady of Shalott”, “Sir Galahad” at the secret shrine, and “Mariana in the South”, have each a separate and never-fading charm, without entirely rivalling the exquisite workmanship and elaborate finish of the two just mentioned. Messrs. Macmillan, who afterwards acquired the rights of the Moxon “Tennyson,” have with great generosity placed the original five wood-blocks [woodblock 1] [woodblock 2] [woodblock 3] [woodblock 4] [woodblock 5] at my disposal, and I can only regret that the electrotypes made from them do not do better justice to Rossetti's work and to Dalziel's really fine cutting. Not that Rossetti himself was

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SIR GALAHAD AT THE SHRINE

Figure: Water color. Sir Galahad, kneeling at the top of a flight of steps before the altar of a deserted chapel in a wood at night, is in the act of making the sign of the cross on his face with the holy water in a vessel suspended on a beam. The chapel is brilliantly lit within so that the faces of the girls standing below, praying and tolling the golden bell hanging at the entrance, are illuminated by the reflection of light from the altar.Surtees, p. 70

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The Blue Closet

Swan Electric Engraving Co.

Figure: Water color. Monogram and date lower right: "1857." Two Queens playing upon the keys of a clavicord within a chamber, the walls and floor of which are tiled in brilliant blue, from which the drawing takes its name. A red lily rises from a patch of earth in the centre foreground. Surtees, p. 50

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entirely satisfied with the results. As in the case of the Allingham block, he found himself at variance with the engravers more than once, especially Dalziel, preferring the simpler and broader work of Linton ( Sir Galahad and Mariana ). In one of those little humorous flashes that generally mean either much more or much less than they seem to, he wrote to Bell Scott:

“I have designed five blocks for Tennyson, some of which are still cutting and maiming. It is a thankless task. After a fortnight's work my block goes to the engraver, like Agag delicately, and is hewn to pieces before the Lord Harry.

“ADDRESS TO THE DALZIEL BROTHERS.

“O woodman, spare that block,
O gash not anyhow!
It took ten days by clock,
I'd fain protect it now.
Chorus—Wild laughter from Dalziel's workshop.”

For these Tennyson designs, according to Mr. W. M. Rossetti, his brother got £15 each. ¹Separate pen-and-ink drawings [drawing 1] [drawing 2] [drawing 3] [drawing 4] exist for most, if not for all of them, ² and water-colours were afterwards painted from three: St. Cecily (1857), described by a well-known writer as glowing “with such a glow of gold and amethyst as sometimes burns upon the sunset Atlantic”; Sir Galahad in the Chapel (1859), formerly in Mr. James Leathart's collection, and now in the Corporation Gallery at Birmingham; Mariana (1862)—not to be confused with an oil Mariana of later date, named direct from the lady in “Measure for Measure.” The water-colour belongs to Mr. George Rae, and is also known by the title Heart of the Night .

About 1857 was designed a drawing in crayons of St. Luke the Painter , for which the artist composed the fine sonnet beginning:

“Give honour unto Luke Evangelist;
For he it was (the aged legends say)
Who first taught Art to fold her hands and pray.”

This sonnet was afterwards included in the “House of Life” series, under “Old and New Art”, as No. LXXIV. It is an interesting enunciation of “Pre-Raphaelite” principles.

Since abandoning his picture of Hist, said Kate the Queen , in 1853, Rossetti had up to this date produced no further work in oil, a rather remarkable fact considering that both his earlier works were in the more important medium. He had started upon Found , it is true; but the amount of work done upon the actual canvas was inconsiderable. Ruskin had once or twice half advised him to take up

Transcribed Footnote (page 79):

¹ In the “ Memoir ” the price is given as £30.

Transcribed Footnote (page 79):

² Mr. C. F. Murray owns three out of the five, the missing ones being Sir Galahad and The Lady of Shalott .

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oil, on account of its superior market value as compared with water-colour. “Very foolish it is, but so it is,” as he wrote; and by way of backing his recommendation he commissioned, somewhere about 1855. a St. Catharine picture for himself. This was finished in 1857, but an alteration to the figure at the last moment so displeased the purchaser that he begged Rossetti either to sell it to someone else or to alter it back again. The picture represents a mediæval artist painting from a lady a full-length picture of St. Catharine, with her wheel and other accessories. It is described as being especially rich in colour, and belonged some years ago to Mr. J. G. Kershaw, by whom it was exhibited at the Burlington Fine Arts Club in 1883.

In point of number and interest the productions of 1857 are remarkable. It was the year of the Oxford frescoes, for one thing, though these dragged on till 1859; and it was the year of a charming little series of water-colours, which were acquired one after the other by Rossetti's newly-made acquaintance, William Morris, who, some time later, being in want of capital for his own business, sold them in a batch to their present possessor, Mr. Rae. These comprise—to leave the frescoes until later:

(1) The Damsel of the Sanc Grael , robed in green, holding a long-stemmed cup in her hand, and with the holy dove above her bearing a censer in its beak. Many years later, in 1874, Rossetti painted an oil version of the same subject for Mr. Rae, in which he modernized, and many will think spoilt, the archaic simplicity of the design. As both versions are reproduced in this book, readers will be able to form their own opinions on the point, though they will miss in the one case the primitive charm of the fresh green colour, and in the other the sumptuous and heavy richness of the painting.

(2) The Death of Breuse sans Pitié , one of the crudest and least successful of all Rossetti's water-colours. The terribly realistic encounter of two knights struggling in the foreground, and the grimness of the scene behind, where a dead man is hanging contorted on a tree while a lady waits beside him with a halter round her neck, has a repulsive and unpleasant effect. The composition, moreover, is grotesque and strained, and the painting (although Rossetti worked on it later) unsatisfactory.

(3) The Chapel before the Lists , a scene suggested by Malory. In a lighted chapel a lady is helping to arm a kneeling knight in red, her long white head-dress, as she stoops to kiss him, falling like a mantle down her blue dress. She is holding his long two-handed sword. Upon the pointed shield of the knight is a figure of a maiden

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The Tune of Seven Towers

Swan Electric Engraving Co.

Figure: Water color. A woman seated in an oak chair towering above her into a belfry plays upon a musical instrument which is fitted to the chair and lies across her knees. A bell rope hangs down from above; a staff, with banner suspended, cuts diagonally across the picture.Surtees, p. 51

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THE DAMSEL OF THE SANC GRAEL

Figure: Water color. Inscribed upper left and right: "Sanct Grael." She stands whole-length to front with hair outspread, holding in her left hand a long-stemmed cup and a basket of bread covered with a little white napkin; her right hand is raised in blessing. The Holy Dove bearing a censer in its beak has come to rest above her head. Surtees, p. 51

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Sig. M

in distress (Andromeda, or the Princess in the dragon story). Beyond the chapel is a tented field, and knights going forth to joust. This little drawing was considerably touched up in 1864, and bears the double date in one corner.

(4) The Tune of Seven Towers , a quaint little scene, very characteristic of Rossetti's fertility and originality of invention. A lady in red with mediæval head-dress is sitting in a high oaken chair, which above towers up into a sort of belfry, and is playing upon a musical instrument which also forms part of the chair. A man in green doublet, with long boots, sits sideways on a stool close by watching her, and a second lady stands mournfully behind. In an alcove at the back a maid is seen reaching through a little window to place an orange branch upon a bed. A banner hangs down at the right from a pole which cuts the picture diagonally in half, and which ends in a socket beside the oaken chair.

(5) The Blue Closet , the gem of the collection for beauty of colour, represents two queens, the one on the left in red with green sleeves, and the one on the right in crimson and grey, playing upon opposite sides of a carved and inlaid dulcimer or clavichord. Two other ladies stand behind them singing. Above their heads the wall is tiled with blue, and so likewise is the floor, suggesting the title of the picture. Strong blue touches upon an escutcheon at the back carry the thought still further.

William Morris, with whom the last two pictures were especial favourites, used their romantic and sweet-sounding titles as themes to base two poems on; and this has led to a confused idea that the pictures illustrate the poems. In reality they have nothing in common but their names, and for these the painter, not the poet, was responsible. In Mr. Rae's catalogue the poems are quoted.

A sixth subject acquired in the same manner as the others, and at the same time, by Mr. Rae, was the early water-colour triptych of Paolo and Francesca , which used to belong to Mr. Ruskin and has already been mentioned ( see page 66).

The Wedding of St. George , also in Mr. Rae's collection, belongs to this year, but was not acquired from Mr. Morris. The old story of St. George and the Dragon had a powerful influence upon the romantic school to which Rossetti belonged. Burne-Jones's variations upon it are well known, and Rossetti also, besides treating it as a whole in a series of designs for stained glass windows, painted St. George more than once at typical stages of the adventure. In this earliest version he is resting from his feat, clad in armour, with a gorgeous

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surcoat, whilst the princess, now wholly his, kneels and leans her head upon his breast, cutting off a large dark lock of hair which she has bound upon the crest of his helmet. The dragon's head, a monstrous object, stands grotesquely in one corner in a box with ropes attached for drawing it along. In the background is a hedge of flowers and attendant angels playing on bells. “One of the grandest things, like a golden dim dream,” wrote James Smetham the Methodist painter, in a letter quoted by Mr. W. M. Rossetti. “Love ‘credulous all gold,’ gold armour, a sense of secret enclosure

THE GATE OF MEMORY.

Figure: Water color. Monogram lower right corner. On the right a prostitute stands at dusk under an archway, watching a group of dancing children and recognizes herself as once she was in the figure of a seated, flower-crowned child. An over-hanging lamp casts a dull yellow light upon the children and illumines for a moment a large rat as it scuttles out of sight. Fine houses with lighted windows supply the background.Surtees, p. 56

in ‘palace-chambers far apart’—quaint chambers in quaint palaces, where angels creep in thro' sliding panel doors, and stand behind rows of flowers, drumming on golden bells, with wings crimson and green.”

Other water-colours of 1857 are The Gate of Memory , which used to belong to the Rev. Moncure Conway, representing a woman standing under an arch and watching some children at play—a theme based upon W. B. Scott's “Mary Anne;” The Garden Bower , a drawing of a girl drinking out of a long glass, bought by Mr. Plint, and subsequently acquired by Mr. Leathart; and A Christmas Carol , one of those scenes of chamber music that Rossetti was so fond of depicting in his early days. This beautiful little water-colour (also formerly in Mr. Leathart's collection, and now owned by Mr. Fairfax Murray), has no affinity with the later oil painting of the same name belonging to Mr. Rae, which represents a girl robed in some Eastern stuff with her head thrown back, singing to a lute “a song of Christ's birth with the tune of Bululalow”—as the old Winchester mystery phrases it. The water-colour, it will be seen from the plate, represents a lady singing and playing upon a sort of clavichord, whilst two maidens comb out her beautiful long hair. I have seen it suggested that

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The Wedding of St. George

Swan Electric Engraving Co.

Figure: Water color. Monogram and date, lower right corner: "1857." In a confined space crammed with accessories, St. George is kissing the Princess; enveloped in his arms she is in the act of cutting off a lock of her hair.Surtees, p. 55

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the subject was taken from Swinburne's poem of the “Christmas Carol”, which begins:

“Three damsels in the queen's chamber;
The queen's mouth was most fair;
She spake a word of God's mother
As the combs went in her hair.”

A reference to “Poems and Ballads” would have shown that this is not the case, but that, as with the Blue Closet , the Tune of Seven Towers ,

THE GARDEN BOWER.

Figure: Water color. Monogram, date lower left corner: "1859." Two women in a garden face each other. The one on the right is drinking from a long glass offered to her by a serving-woman in a blue smock (Fanny Cornforth). Espalier trees against a red-brick wall provide the background. Surtees, p. 68

and Arthur's Tomb , the poem took its inspiration and title from Rossetti's picture. The Christmas Carol was exhibited at the Liverpool Academy, together with the water-colour, Dante's Dream , in 1858. It was done at the close of the year, and is appropriately dated “Xmas 1857-8.”

We now come to the story of the Oxford “Frescoes,” as they are called—although not really fresco at all, but tempera—to which a short introduction is necessary. A much fuller account of the whole proceeding than I can give here will be found in Mr. Mackail's “Life of William Morris,” volume i. The artistic and romantic impulses stirring in England at the midpoint of the century had, as we have seen, produced one notable movement in the shape of the “Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.” Five or six years later they gave birth to another, not less important either in regard to its results or to the quality of men engaged in it; and very shortly afterwards a fusion of the two took place. The second of these “Brotherhoods” —the word was actually adopted for a time—had its origin at Exeter College, Oxford, in the personalities of William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, and resolved itself at first, like its forerunner, into a “crusade and holy warfare against the age,” with a much wider scope

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of conflict and with an added religious tinge which was hardly visible, though doubtless present, in the other. The parallelism of effort and ideal which appears in these two independent movements—for the “P.R.B.” was not among the primary influences at Oxford— might strike one at first as a coincidence, were it not merely a fresh instance of a broad and general fact that new ideas ripen like corn of which the sowers are many and the harvest universal. The Oxford group, like the “P.R.B.,” published a magazine to illustrate, not to preach, their principles, and had as a tangible link with Rossetti the same warm appreciation of the beauties of the Arthurian legend. Mr. Mackail says it was at a bookshop in Birmingham that Burne-Jones first discovered (about 1855) a copy of Southey's “Malory,” which he used to read in snatches. Morris, on hearing of this, bought the book, which “at once became for both one of their most precious treasures; so precious that even among their intimates there was some shyness over it, till a year later they heard Rossetti speak of it and the Bible as the two greatest books in the world, and their tongues were unloosed by the sanction of his authority.”

In the Christmas vacation of 1855 Burne-Jones came up to London, and after attending a meeting of the Working Men's College in order to see Rossetti, whom he and Morris had already begun to worship, he was introduced to him at Vernon Lushington's rooms in Doctors' Commons. The next day he visited Rossetti in his studio at Blackfriars, and saw him working on Fra Pace . Thus was laid the foundation of an alliance that even more potently than the “P.R.B.” has changed the face of art in England—an alliance which consolidated the principal factors that were working in the field of reform, and resulted in the formation of a group which for combined poetic, literary, and artistic power is unapproached in the history of the nation. Incidentally, it was this visit that determined Burne-Jones—hankering after art but predestined for the Church—to become a painter; and no one can fail to be struck with the evidence of Rossetti's influence upon his early work.

To the “ Oxford and Cambridge Magazine,” William Morris's organ, which ran for the twelve months of 1856, Rossetti contributed “The Burden of Nineveh”, “The Blessed Damozel”, (a little altered from the Germ version), and “The Staff and Scrip”. Ruskin wrote to him wild with curiosity to find out who was the author of the first-named poem, and it is interesting to know from his hesitation in replying that Rossetti up to that time had been shy of discussing or mentioning his poetry to Ruskin.

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A Christmas Carol

Swan Electric Engraving Co.

Figure: Water color on panel. Monogram and date upper left: "Xmas 1857-8." A young woman in red, with the face of Elizabeth Siddal, having her hair combed out by two attendants, is seated in the centre facing to front, playing a clavichord decorated on two panels with scenes of the Annunciation and Nativity, and hung with sprigs of green foliage; holly trees in red barrels stand to left and rigth against a wall of bright blue tiles; a black and gold tapestry hangs behind the central figure and falls to form a carpet beneath her feet. Surtees, p. 55

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