Note: Text is printed in gold lettering with an inverted triangle of decorative
foliage below it.
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI
Note: Inside the front cover is a bookplate which reads “ex libris W. L.
Phillips.”
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI
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.
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.
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
CHISWICK PRESS:—CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO.
TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.
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
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
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
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.
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.
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.
[
The Reproductions are the Work of the Swan Electric Engraving
Company
.]
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,
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
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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-
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.
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
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
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:
- “
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
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?
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-
“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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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-
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.
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.
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
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
Borgia
Swan Electric Engraving Co.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Giotto painting Dante's portrait
Swan Electric Engraving Co.
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.
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.
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.”
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
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
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.
Found
Swan Electric Engraving Co.
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.
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.”
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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
Robert Browning. 1855
Figure: Watercolor. Text in upper left corner: October. Text in upper right
corner: 1855. Browning's head. facing to the right.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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
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”.
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.
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
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
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.”
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Note: This page contains one half of the triptych The Seed of David,
described on the preceding page.
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-
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.
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.
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
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
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
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
.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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