DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI

1863

FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY LEWIS CARROLL

TO HIS SISTER

CHRISTINA GEORGINA ROSSETTI

AND TO HIS SISTER-IN-LAW

LUCY MADOX ROSSETTI

I DEDICATE

THIS RECORD OF ONE

WHOM WE ALL THREE KNEW AND UNDERSTOOD WELL

AND WHOM TO UNDERSTAND WAS TO LOVE.

W. M. ROSSETTI.

There would not under any circumstances be any great occasion for saying much by way of Preface to this book, and the occasion becomes all the less through my having put a few introductory remarks to the several sections of the work. The reader will readily perceive that the life-work of Dante Rossetti is here considered in two branches:—(1) his Paintings and Designs, to which the Tabular List of Works of Art serves as an Appendix; and (2) his Writings, supplemented by an Index of Writings, and also by the prose paraphrase of The House of Life . Mine is a book of memoranda and of details; perhaps some readers will prefer to say, “of shreds and patches.” The materials were authoritative and mostly in my own hands, and it may fairly be averred that no one else can have at his command, at the present time, any the like quantity of materials out of which a similar book could be constructed. Such being the case, I have thought it well to turn to account, in the interest of my brother's memory, the matter which lay under my control. As to the use made of it, I will only add that I view with some regret the very frequent mention of prices charged and paid; for the works themselves, and their intellectual, artistic, or personal associations, interest me more than any question of prices, and I should like to consult the taste of readers who regard the affair in the same light: but a professional man acts professionally, and prices are not unnaturally debated or recorded in his correspondence, and I reproduce such details as I find, whether on this or on other topics.

Though the present is the only volume which I have yet issued regarding my brother, there are some other minor performances of mine relating to him which it may be excusable here to specify. Since his death in 1882 I have compiled (1883) the Catalogue of his Remaining Works sold at Christie's, and have written (1884) three articles in the Art Journal named Notes on Rossetti and his Works; the Preface and Notes (1886) to the edition of his Collected Works ; and three articles (1888 and 1889) in the Magazine of Art on Portraits of Rossetti. Several details which appear in these various writings might naturally, if not already published there, have found a place in the present volume.

It seems more incumbent upon me to advert to what I have not done in this book than to what I have done. I have not attempted to write a biographical account of my brother, nor to estimate the range or value of his powers and performances in fine art and in literature. I agree with those who think that a brother is not the proper person to undertake work of this sort. An outsider can do it dispassionately, though with imperfect knowledge of the facts; a friend can do it with mastery, and without much undue bias; but a brother, however equitably he may address himself to the task, cannot perform it so as to secure the prompt and cordial assent of his readers. His praise will only pass muster as a brother's praise; and his dispraise, even if extreme and pushed to the point of captiousness, keeps the taint of consanguinity. It runs more chance of being censured as unkind than of being frankly accepted as impartial. My decided inclination therefore is not to put myself forward, now or hereafter, as the biographer of my brother; nor as the critic, still less as the direct panegyrist, of his works. I do not even attempt to describe them otherwise than in a very brief and restricted way. In a spirit of intimate knowledge of what he was and what he did, I undertake to present a synopsis of his works in art and in literature, based upon certain materials which my familiarity with the whole subject enables me to amplify and illustrate on occasion. If I had not a deep regard for Dante Rossetti's memory, I should show myself “no more worthy to be called” his brother; but, whatever my own feeling, I leave it to the admirers and students of his career, or if need be to those who regard it with more severity than sympathy, to form their own judgment both of his performances and of this contribution to a more precise acquaintance with them.

ON examining the correspondence of my brother Dante Rossetti—the letters addressed to him, and those which he himself addressed to members of his family, and to his friends Ford Madox Brown and George Rae, along with some drafts of his letters to other persons—I find a considerable mass of details regarding his pictures and designs, and his literary work. The details could hardly be recorded in a more authentic form than in these letters of concurrent date. I propose therefore to throw together, into something approaching to a consecutive narration, the various particulars which I have thus collected—or rather I should say the more salient and substantial particulars out of a miscellaneous multitude. I am aware that it is possible to be entertaining in any performance of this sort, and possible to be “graphic”—and very possible to be neither the one nor the other. My own forte perhaps is not the entertaining nor the graphic; in default of these valuable qualities, I may at least endeavour to compile with care and fulness, and present the results with precision and perspicuity. From personal knowledge and reminiscence I shall be able here and there to eke out a detail, or supply a missing link: but in the main I shall not seek to travel beyond the record, nor to enter into subjects, however relevant, which do not appear upon the face of the documents with which I undertake to deal. It should be premised that the bulk of correspondence which my brother left behind him was only a fragment of what had passed through his hands during life; on more occasions than one he must have destroyed the entire stock, with very few exceptions, of letters in his possession: from 1864 onwards, or more especially from about 1871, they remain comparatively copious.

I propose to make one principal division in my treatment of the subject—the division between details concerning pictures and designs, and details concerning poems or other writings; and within each of these sections I shall proceed under headings of the successive years, although every now and then I may continue writing about some particular work irrespectively of the date-intervals. The former section, that of pictures and designs, is much the fuller of the two; as the reader who bears in mind that my brother was professionally a painter, not a man of the literary calling, will be well prepared to expect.

I add here a very few personal particulars, simply as memoranda for guidance and reference. Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti, who from 1850 or thereabouts called himself Dante Gabriel Rossetti, was the son of Gabriele Rossetti, a political exile from the Neapolitan kingdom, and of Frances Mary Lavinia (Polidori), an Englishwoman of parentage Italian (Tuscan) on the father's side. He was born in London on 12th May 1828. Gabriele Rossetti was Professor of Italian in King's College, London, and subsisted by teaching his language; in letters he was known as a patriotic poet, and as a speculative commentator upon Dante's writings, and upon other kindred branches of literature. Dante Gabriel had an elder sister, Maria Francesca (who died in 1876), and a younger brother and sister, William Michael and Christina Georgina. He was educated in King's College School, which he quitted in or about 1843 to study as a painter, becoming a student in the Antique School of the Royal Academy, and afterwards benefiting from the friendly guidance of the painter Ford Madox Brown. In 1848 he associated himself with three rising artists— William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and Thomas Woolner—in founding the so-called Præraphaelite Brotherhood, with a view to a reform or re-development of art. There were three other members of the Brotherhood, Frederic George Stephens, James Collinson, and William Michael Rossetti; Collinson seceded after a while, and Walter Howell Deverell filled his place. Rossetti exhibited his first oil-picture, The Girlhood of Mary Virgin , in 1849; he soon afterwards resolved to withhold his works from exhibition altogether. In 1860 he married Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal, daughter of a Sheffield cutler— she died in 1862. Rossetti, who had already made some mark as a poet by compositions printed in The Germ , 1850, and in The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine , towards 1856, published his first volume, the translations named The Early Italian Poets , in 1861; in 1870 appeared the volume Poems , and in 1881 the same volume with some modification of its contents, and the Ballads and Sonnets . He died on 9th April 1882, at Birchington-on-Sea, near Margate. The final stage of his disease was uræmia; but insomnia dating from about 1867, and consequent abuse of chloral as a soporific, were the root of the evil. At Birchington he lies buried, under a figured Irish cross monument designed by Madox Brown.

This was, I think, the year in which Dante Rossetti left school, and entered a drawing academy; it was the academy in Queen Street, Bloomsbury, known as Sass's, but kept at this time by Mr. F. S. Cary, an oil-painter of moderate attainment, son of the well-reputed translator of Dante's Commedia. Rossetti was a member in 1843 of some sketching club. I cannot remember who his colleagues may have been—presumably other students in the same drawing-school; certainly not any of the remarkable young artist-students with whom he afterwards became associated in the Præraphaelite movement, for these only became known to him after he had passed from Cary's to the antique school of the Royal Academy. In July he made for the sketching club a design of the Death of Marmion , and two designs, from Goldsmith's Deserted Village, of the old soldier recounting his battles to the parson. One of these latter he regarded at the time as his most finished, and perhaps his best, pen-and-ink design. His next subject for the club was to be a parting of two lovers; this he treated in August in six varying compositions. In the same month he drew, from As You Like It, Orlando and Adam in the Forest , and also the Death of Virginia . The latter subject did not inspire him to original invention, so he borrowed (I should fear, contrary to the rules of the club) the composition which he found in a series of lithographed subjects from Roman history by an old family friend, Filippo Pistrucci, brother of the celebrated medallist. These subjects by Pistrucci are generally well invented and composed, though of no high mark in point of execution. It fell to Rossetti to fix the next subject for design; he selected, from Byron's Siege of Corinth, Minotti firing the train of gunpowder. I can still recollect something of this last-named drawing, which was mainly in outline; and remember that in this instance also he recurred, for some of his accessory figures or groupings, to the Pistrucci lithographs, although the composition as a whole was his own.

Walter Scott, I may here take occasion to observe, was, along with Shakespeare, one of the very earliest poets in whom my brother delighted; Byron came a little later, and for a while reigned supreme. Shelley he read with enthusiasm in 1844, but he had probably no knowledge of him in 1843. Afterwards followed Mrs. Browning, Tennyson, and, eclipsing all predecessors for some years, Browning. Towards 1846 Bailey's Festus, and from a rather earlier date Keats, also ranked with the highest. The poems of Dante were not (contrary to a prevalent supposition) impressive to my brother in mere boyhood. It can hardly, I think, have been earlier than 1844 that he looked into them with serious attention or awakened admiration; they then at once rooted deeply and germinated rapidly in his mind.

The above, proper to the year 1843, is the only record I have by me of the boyish period of my brother's art. We next come to

before the middle of which year the Præraphaelite movement had already been fairly started in the minds and practice of its founders, and Rossetti was working as a professional painter at his first oil-picture. This was the now somewhat celebrated work The Girlhood of Mary Virgin . He exhibited it in 1849 in the Free Exhibition, Hyde Park Corner; Millais and Hunt appearing at the same time in the Royal Academy with their first “Præraphaelite” works—Keats's Isabella, and Rienzi swearing Revenge over his Brother's Corpse . This was, I think, literally my brother's first oil-picture; having only been preceded by a subject begun, but never nearly completed, on a good-sized canvas, to be entitled Retro me, Sathana , representing, as a mediæval-costumed group, an aged ecclesiastic, a youthful lady, and the fiend. The Girlhood of Mary was commenced, though not finished, prior to the oil-portrait of our father, also a work of 1848. Of this portrait I find the artist's own judgment recorded at a much later date, perhaps 1861. He terms it “a funny piece of painting, but no doubt considerably though not perfectly like.” It was painted for his godfather, Mr. Charles Lyell, of Kinnordy, an elegant Dantesque scholar, and is now the property of Mr. Leonard Lyell. On August 20th Rossetti wrote that he had made one study for the colour of his symbolic picture, and was then essaying a second; he had also made a nude study for the figure of St. Anna. By November 22nd he had painted this saint's head into the picture; it was done from our mother, and is indeed a very accurate likeness of her at her then age of forty-eight. The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (my brother particularly objected to the inclination which some people evinced to call it “The Education of the Virgin”) is a canvas 33 inches tall, containing four figures—the Virgin, her mother and father, and a girl-angel—also the dove, symbolizing the Holy Ghost. The dominant idea is that the Virgin advances in purity and virtue, until, at the appointed moment, she becomes fit to be the Bride and the Mother of Deity. Thus she is represented embroidering from a lily (emblem of purity) set up upon six volumes, each inscribed with the name of a special virtue. Two sonnets were written to exhibit this idea. As the St. Anna was painted from our mother, so was the Mary painted from our sister Christina.

Other artistic schemes were going on concurrently. On August 28th Rossetti sat up all night, and made, from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m., an outline of Coleridge's Genevieve —“certainly the best thing I have done,” as he wrote at the time. It represented the lute-playing lover and his lady, was given to Mr. Coventry Patmore, and appeared in the Rossetti Exhibition at the Burlington Club in 1883. He also re-designed The Death of Marmion about the same date, and made out the composition—an extensive and ambitious one— from a song in Browning's drama Pippa Passes. This he called Hist, said Kate the Queen ; the subject being the queen seated among her maidens and tire-women, her attention aroused by the song which her enamoured page is singing in an opening apart. The watercolour of this composition is extant, dated 1851; the oil-painting was begun, but never nearly finished.

The Girlhood of Mary Virgin , and its successor, Ecce Ancilla Domini (the Annunciation ), had now been completed and exhibited. Following these, another oil-painting was undertaken, with a landscape background, which, according to the severe (and I think highly salutary) Præraphaelite rule of that period, was to be faithfully and assiduously painted on the spot. I cannot remember what was the intended subject of this new picture. Late in the summer or early in the autumn of 1850 my brother went down to Sevenoaks, found a background which be regarded as suitable, made a sketch of it, and in due course painted it on to the canvas. Holman Hunt was there at the same time, executing in Knole Park the landscape of his picture (from the Two Gentlemen of Verona) Sylvia Rescued by Valentine from Proteus. Rossetti's background was a sylvan scene of a somewhat mournful aspect. For some reason or other, which I cannot well define to myself, my brother, after painting this portion of the background, laid the canvas aside, and could not be got to resume work upon it; the thing remained untouched for some twenty years. Finally, he took it up again, painted as its subject-matter a group of girls dancing al fresco, gave it the title of The Bower Meadow , and sold it to a firm of picture-dealers for a very handsome amount in the summer of 1872—little or nothing further, beyond the very careful handiwork of 1850, being done to that original section of its background. The dealers did not keep the work long on hand, but disposed of it for nearly £1000 to Mr. Dunlop, whose unsatisfactory transactions with Rossetti direct find some record here under the date of 1864. This gentleman was at the time the owner of two other works by Rossetti, the Roman de la Rose and Ophelia ; and he parted with these two as equivalents to a portion of the price of The Bower Meadow .

In the earlier part of 1850 Rossetti had hoped to get his composition Hist, said Kate the Queen , which was well approved by Millais, ready as an oil-picture for the ensuing exhibition, but by the end of the summer he found this not to be manageable. He then designed the last scene of Much Ado About Nothing, where Benedick stops with a kiss the tart and cavilling mouth of his Beatrice. I still possess the pencil sketch, which is neatly but rather slightly handled, and with not much in it to suggest to connoisseurs of the present day that it is a Rossetti. My brother intended to carry it out as an oil-picture, but he never in fact made a beginning of it on canvas.

I recur for a moment to the two sacred symbolic pictures— The Girlhood of Mary Virgin , painted in 1848-49, and The Annunciation , painted in 1849-50. Rossetti was open-minded enough as to what claimed permanent recognition in these works, so unlike the current product of their day, and what called, on the contrary, for some degree of apology. In the late summer of 1851, while laying stress on the fact that they were original inventions, independent of any previous treatment, he acknowledged that the mediævalisms in them were absurd, though only superficial. Perhaps he need hardly have extended this stricture to The Annunciation , which, while marked by a peculiar tinge of semi-ascetic abstraction, has little or nothing that can be fixed upon as mediæval. Visitors to the National Gallery, where this picture now hangs, can judge as to that point for themselves. Later on, at the end of 1864, he wrote of The Girlhood of Mary Virgin , then re-consigned to him for a while for re-framing, “I can look at it a long way off now, as the work of quite another ‘crittur,’ and find it to be a long way better than I thought.” In another letter to a different friend he spoke still more strongly: “I assure you it quite surprised me (and shamed me a little) to see what I did fifteen years ago, when I was twenty.”

In the latter part of this year my brother made a sketch from life of our cousin Teodorico Pietrocola-Rossetti. I mention it less for any importance it might have (which indeed was little) as a work of art than because it gives me an opportunity of bringing into my record the name of this warmly affectionate relative and most worthy and excellent person. He was a young man in 1852, something less than thirty years of age, and was a native of the same city as our father, Vasto in the Abruzzi, in the then Kingdom of Naples. After spending some few years in England without getting into any successful groove of employment, he returned to Italy, and entered with single-minded zeal into the promulgation among his compatriots of an evangelistic or semi-Protestant form of the Christian religion. He died in Florence of apoplexy in June 1883, just as he had given out the text for a discourse to his small congregation, and was about to address them from it.

In a letter of my brother, dated December 4th, I observe the statement—“My sketches are kicked out at that precious place in Pall Mall.” The “place in Pall Mall” was, I think, an exhibition (one of the earliest of its class) of water-colour sketches and studies; what the offered and rejected contributions by my brother may have been I no longer recollect. Possibly they were hung after all, as seems to be suggested in a letter quoted under the next ensuing year.

was the last year whose close our father witnessed. My brother did, on a small scale, a delicate characteristic pencil-drawing of him, as he was wont to sit at his writing-table, with a broad-peaked cap for his failing eyesight, holding close up for perusal some page of his own writing. In May my brother added a background to this portrait, representing an angle of the dining-room in the house in which the sketch had been made—No. 38 Arlington Street, Mornington Crescent (all the family except Dante himself had resided there in 1851 and 1852); and he sent off the drawing to Frome, in Somerset, where our parents, with our sister Christina, were then settled for several months.

On the very first day of 1853 Rossetti thought he had finished some alterations which he had undertaken in his old oil-picture of The Annunciation , dubbed “the blessed white eyesore” in one of his familiar letters, and in another “the blessed white daub.” He proceeds— “Yesterday, after giving up the angel's head as a bad job (owing to William's malevolent expression) at about one o'clock, I took to working it up out of my own intelligence, and got it better by a great deal than it has yet been. I have put a gilt saucer behind his head—which crowns the China-ese character of the picture.” However, the work done on January 1st proved to be not quite final; the picture was still in hand up to the 15th of the month, or thereabouts.

The person most interested towards this time in my brother's art-work was Mr. McCracken, a merchant or ship-broker of Belfast, who had already had some purchasing transactions with Madox Brown and with Holman Hunt. Rossetti's first picture, The Girlhood of Mary Virgin , had been bought by the Marchioness Dowager of Bath (an aunt of ours, Miss Charlotte Polidori, being for several years a governess in that family); his second picture, The Annunciation , remained unsold for some while, but in January 1853 was purchased by Mr. McCracken. The improvements in the work had been made with a view to its delivery to this purchaser. The only other outsider who had put himself forward as a patron prior to McCracken was Mr. Cottingham, an architect in Waterloo Road; he finessed and shilly-shallied, and finally bought nothing. McCracken was really hearty, and even enthusiastic; he had conceived a high idea of Rossetti's powers, and from Belfast plied him with letters, pointing every now and then to a personal meeting: but time passed, Rossetti never saw McCracken in the flesh, and at a not very advanced date in their correspondence the liberal Irishman died. I remember that he used to amuse my brother by constantly writing of Mr. Ruskin under the designation “The Graduate”; and that my brother (who was by no means, as some recent writers will have it, destitute of a sense of humour and frolic) parodied in November 1853 an early sonnet of Tennyson's about The Kraken, for which word he substituted McCracken .

A letter addressed by Rossetti to Madox Brown on 1st March gives several details which may as well appear in his own words:—“I think you have never seen my Giotto's Dante here [he must mean the watercolour of Giotto painting the Portrait of the youthful Dante ], which I shall not have much longer. Not that I have made any direct use of it as yet, nor am likely to do so just now, as I have got a £150 commission from McCracken, and am in a fair way to get one from Miller of Liverpool—perhaps a better one. However, I may nail him for the Dante and Beatrice . Please let me know in your answer (as soon as possible) whether you ever named to McCracken anything regarding the prices which I took for those sketches now exhibiting. Ruskin has written him some extravagant praises (though with obtuse accompaniments) upon one of them—I cannot make out which—and McCracken seems excited, wanting it, and not knowing (or making believe not to know) that it is sold. I therefore want to be sure whether he is really acquainted with the price I had; as, in answering him, were I to propose to do him a similar one, I should not think of undertaking it at anything like a similar price, and want to know whether it is necessary to specify that these sketches were sold to friends.”

In this letter some details are not quite clear, even to myself, at this distance of time. Mr. Miller here mentioned was Mr. John Miller of Liverpool, a leading merchant and picture-buyer there, of Scotch nationality, one of the most cordial, large-hearted, and lovable men I ever knew; neither my brother nor myself had any personal acquaintance with him for three or four years following 1853. I do not think that the proposed commission from Mr. Miller, a comparatively large one, took effect. “The Dante and Beatrice” was, I suppose, some work in prospect, not already executed; perhaps the “Dantesque watercolour”” which, as we shall see, was ultimately sold to McCracken, not Miller. “Those sketches now exhibiting I am quite uncertain about. Beatrice and Dante at a Marriage-feast , and Giotto painting the Portrait of Dante , had been exhibited in 1851-52, but can hardly be referred to here. The tone of this letter, as my readers may be apt to observe, shows that my brother was not likely to neglect his own interest in a bargain; and indeed he constantly laid his plans well in such matters, and effected them with tenacity and acuteness.

A few words may here be spared to the watercolour Giotto painting the Portrait of Dante ; which I have always considered one of the most important pictorial inventions of my brother, at any period of his career. It was intended to represent the life and work of the great Florentine in a triple relation. (1) It shows Giotto painting, on a wall of the Chapel of the Bargello in Florence, that portrait of the youthful Dante which was rediscovered towards 1839, chiefly through the exertions of Mr. (afterwards Barone) Seymour Kirkup, an English painter settled in the Tuscan capital. Kirkup made at once a watercolour copy of the head of Dante, and sent it as a gift to my father; from whom it came to my brother, and with him it remained up to the date of his death. In Rossetti's picture, as in the original, Dante is represented holding a pomegranate. (2) The picture shows also the relation of Dante to his love—Beatrice, who is passing below in a church-procession—to the poetry of the time in his friend Guido Cavalcanti, and to its fine art in Giotto. (3) It embodies the celebrated passage of Dante's Purgatorio in which the rise and fall of great reputations in art and letters are expressed by the waning of Cimabue's art before Giotto's, and of the poetry of Guido Guinicelli before that of Guido Cavalcanti, with a suggestion that Cavalcanti also might be superseded by Dante himself: Cimabue therefore is introduced looking on at Giotto's painting, and Cavalcanti holds the poems of Guinicelli.*

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

But this subject, triple though itself was in reference, was only intended to be the first member of a triptych picture. The second member was to show Dante, as one of the Priori of Florence, adjudging both Cavalcanti and a member of the opposite political faction to banishment— the act which gave a pretext for Dante's own exile from the country of his birth. The third and last section of the triptych was to portray that incident of Dante in exile and the court-jester, in the palace of Can Grande della Scala, which Rossetti versified in his poem Dante at Verona . This was truly a large and a comprehensive scheme of work: it remained unrealized.

I now return to Mr. McCracken. In July 1853 he was corresponding with Rossetti about some further work which he wished to commission. The subject of The Madonna in the House of John (of which my brother eventually made a watercolour ranking among his best-conceived and most impressive works) had been proposed; but for some reason or other it was set aside, and Rossetti then named two other contemplated subjects. These were Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon the Pharisee , and what a letter of his termed “ the town-subject”—being no doubt the composition which he entitled Found , representing a rustic lover, a drover, who finds in London streets his early and long-lost sweetheart, sunk in a life of shame and degradation. He also offered to Mr. McCracken, at the price of £36,* a Dantesque watercolour which he had begun. This I consider to have been the subject, from the Vita Nova , of Dante drawing an Angel in memory of Beatrice . Dante relates that, on the first anniversary of his lady's death, he was engaged in drawing an angel, in memory of her, when he found that certain persons had entered his chamber unperceived; and he then saluted them, saying “Another was with me.” Rossetti, when the offer of his Dantesque subject was made to McCracken, was staying near Newcastle-on-Tyne, on a visit to his valued friend Mr. William Bell Scott, the painter and poet, then Master of the Government School of Design in Newcastle; he proposed to send for the watercolour from London, and finish it in the North. He had done during his visit sketches for an etching from Scott's poem of Mary Anne, and for the Magdalene subject. That my brother's prices were at this time the reverse of high, and had recently been extremely low, may be inferred from his remarking that previous watercolours, on the same scale as the Dante incident now saleable at £36, had been disposed of for £12. But the mercury was rising in the Rossettian barometer; and by the end of September he had come to consider the watercolour, then nearly finished, to be worth much more than even £36, and he thought of telling McCracken so. This gentleman had meanwhile given him a further commission for an oil-picture, I cannot remember what.

Two other projects occupied him in 1853. He was painting, and by the end of October he finished, an oil-portrait of his aunt, Miss Charlotte Polidori, to be given to our grandfather. The likeness came to my brother's satisfaction, and is in fact extremely good: the picture now belongs to another near relative. He was also engaged upon the picture Found , and thought of going to Frome to paint into its background a brick wall, a cart, and a heifer; but Frome was not ultimately chosen for this purpose.

The oil-picture for Mr. McCracken was completed early in March. Rossetti, in one of his family letters, laconically termed it a daub, and attached little importance to it; but I presume it was up to, or not much below, his usual standard of work, for he was never inclined to do injustice to his patrons, nor to himself in their eyes or his own. We lately found him applying this same term “daub” to the Annunciation picture ; and that, whatever else it may be, is assuredly not a daub. I observe in a letter of a much later date—March 1874—a reference to the Annunciation , such as may tend to confirm the authorities of the National Gallery in the opinion which they probably entertain that the “white daub” is not a daub et præterea nihil. At that period a fire had destroyed the premises of the Pantechnicon in Pimlico, and a rumour went that all the modern pictures belonging to Mr. Wynn Ellis had perished in the conflagration. My brother believed (for some reason which I do not follow, as I am not aware that the Annunciation ever belonged to Mr. Ellis) that this work was included among the modern paintings in question; and he then wrote of it as “about the best thing I did at that time.”

A letter from my brother to Mr. McCracken, dated 15th May, contains some particulars worthy of attention. He begins by referring to some drawing of his which is not clearly defined, but which I understand to be probably the one named Dante drawing an Angel in memory of Beatrice . Of this subject he made in 1849 a pen-and-ink design, which he presented to Mr. Millais. He had also, as we lately saw, produced a watercolour of it, a wholly different composition, belonging to McCracken. When my brother wrote in May 1854 he had received from McCracken a letter (addressed, I suppose, to that gentleman) from Dr. Anthony, referring to a drawing, seemingly the pen-and-ink design above-named, the property of Millais. Dr. Anthony had supposed it to be Millais's own performance. On this point Rossetti says: “He seems equally abroad as to the authorship and subject of the drawing, and cannot have much perception of variety in style, or he would not have taken my work for Millais's.” Further on Rossetti refers to Dante's Vita Nuova , and he proceeds: “A better and full account you would find in an article in Tait's Magazine some years back. The article is called, I think, Dante and Beatrice, and is by Theodore Martin, better known as ‘Bon Gaultier.’ Rather oddly, the subject of my drawing which you have is there suggested for painting. For my own part, I had long been familiar with the book, and been in the habit of designing all its subjects in different ways, before I met with that article. . . I had an idea of an intention of the possibility of a suggestion [the reader will observe the whimsical and clearly intentional vagueness of this phrase] that the lady in my drawing [ i.e., one of the personages looking on while Dante is absorbed in designing the angel] should be Gemma Donati, whom Dante married afterwards; and for that reason meant to have put the Donati arms on the dresses of the three visitors, but could not find a suitable way of doing so. The visitors are unnamed in the text, but I had an idea also of connecting the pitying lady with another part of the Vita Nuova . And in fact the sketch is full of notions of my own in this way, which would only be cared about by one to whom Dante was a chief study.”

The intercourse of my brother with Mr. Ruskin began in the spring of 1854. I find the facts recorded thus in a letter of 14th April to Madox Brown: “McCracken of course sent my drawing 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 came. . . He seems in a mood to make my fortune.” Mr. McCracken, inspirited by Ruskin's praise of the watercolour drawing (seemingly the Dantesque subject), liberally paid for it £50, instead of the stipulated £36. Between the critic and the painter the intercourse was for a long while truly affectionate on both sides. With my brother—as I dare say with most other persons—Mr. Ruskin assumed the attitude of a man who could enlighten him on matters of theory and principle in art, and could guide his steps in the right path; but at the same time he amply recognized and honoured his gifts of artistic invention, and deferred to his actual technical attainment—neither overrating its amount nor undervaluing its calibre. For his part, my brother had a very deep regard for the tender and generous traits of Mr. Ruskin's character, and took pleasure in the quaintness as well as the richness of his mind. For some years they saw a great deal of one another, Ruskin being frequently in Rossetti's studio, and Rossetti not seldom in Ruskin's hospitable family-mansion at Denmark Hill, Camberwell. Miss Siddal, with whom my brother had been in love since 1851 or thereabouts, and to whom he introduced Mr. Ruskin, was a bond of union between them; for “the Graduate” took a very sympathetic interest in her, and in her limited but refined artistic faculty, and proved the sincerity of his feeling by more than one munificent act. Gradually the intimacy between the two friends relaxed. Rossetti, as he advanced in years, in reputation, and in art, became less and less disposed to conform his work to the likings of any Mentor—even of one for whom he had so genuine an esteem as he entertained for Mr. Ruskin; while the latter, serenely conscious of being always in the right, laid down the law, and pronounced judgment tempered by mercy, with undeviating exactness. At last the relations between the painter and the critic became strained—one was so earnest to enlighten the other, and that other so difficult to be enlightened out of his own perceptions and predilections; and it may have been in 1865 or 1866 that Ruskin and Rossetti saw the last of one another— mutually regretful, and perhaps mutually relieved, that it should be the last. A friendship once so warm, based on such solid grounds of reciprocal esteem suggesting reciprocal concession, should not have terminated thus: but so it did terminate, and it remained unrenewed.

The first letter which I find from Mr. Ruskin is dated 2nd May 1854. It expresses a wish that Rossetti would give him a little drawing in requital for copies of all the critic's books then published. It also commissions a drawing (meaning no doubt watercolour) for £15, being, as the letter proceeds to point out, the same price which had already been paid by Mr. Boyce for another drawing. This gentleman, George Price Boyce, originally destined for the architectural profession, took definitely to watercolour painting somewhere towards 1854, and was a cordial admirer and not unfrequent purchaser of Rossetti's works. I am not aware which was the design adverted to in Mr. Ruskin's letter; perhaps an Annunciation, in which Mary is represented as bathing her feet in a rivulet .

The picture Found , commissioned by Mr. McCracken, was at this time in the forefront. On 11th May Rossetti, then at Hastings, wrote that he would have to come up to London, to replenish his colour-box before beginning Found on the canvas. Soon afterwards, 5th June, Mr. Ruskin wrote, expressing his supposition that Rossetti might be disinclined to paint at present his proposed modern subjects, as Holman Hunt had lately exhibited something in the same line (this points apparently to the then much-discussed and much admired picture entitled The Awakened Conscience ). The details of Found were painted chiefly at Finchley (where Madox Brown resided), and at Chiswick (where an old and excellent family-friend Mr. Keightley the historian was settled): at Finchley, the calf and cart; at Chiswick, the brick wall. Along with Found , the subject of The Magdalene at the Door of Simon the Pharisee is mentioned in this letter from Mr. Ruskin, and another work which was to unite various incidents in one tableau. This latter may probably have been the Paolo and Francesca , a tripartite composition, for another letter of Mr. Ruskin's, of not much later date, speaks of that subject as being in his hands, price £36: it was transferred eventually to some other purchaser. My brother repeated the composition more than once: in its best form, the example belonging to Mr. Leathart, I rate it very high among his productions. In a further letter belonging apparently to 1854 (but Mr. Ruskin was not in the habit of dating his missives) he expresses himself as much struck by two sketches which my brother had made of the Passover, and he commissions that which he terms “the doorway one.” This was The Passover in the Holy Family , a subject which Rossetti had invented as far back as 1849. It represented the family of Zacharias preparing to share the paschal feast with the Holy Family: Mary was gathering bitter herbs, the child John unlatching the shoe of the child Jesus, and Zacharias sprinkling the door-posts with the blood of the lamb. Mr. Ruskin conceived—and has always retained, I believe—a high opinion of this symbolic-realistic invention: he laid more stress on its realism than on its symbolism. Two watercolours were begun of it, but not finished: nor do I think the subject ever received completion in any replica. The same composition now appears in the church at Birchington, in the two-light memorial-window commissioned by our mother close to my brother's grave; as his attached friend Mr. Frederick J. Shields chose to carry it out, with some added details of his own, in the form of stained glass. Another composition which was offered to Mr. Ruskin about this time was A Monk illuminating, but it was declined. This may I presume have been much the same as Fra Pace , a watercolour executed or completed at a later date. A “”Matilda (no doubt the subject, from Dante's Purgatory, of Matilda gathering flowers) was also commissioned.

It may be apparent from these details that, at an early stage of their acquaintance, Ruskin had the refusal of pretty nearly everything that Rossetti produced. He accepted many specimens, and some he declined. I cannot at this distance of time define what was the precise nature of the terms. I should say that there was a general understanding that, within a certain annual maximum, Ruskin would buy, if he liked it, whatever Rossetti had to offer him, at a scale of prices such as other purchasers would pay; and under this arrangement funds would be forthcoming at times to meet the painter's convenience, without rigid assessment according to value previously delivered. Any such system was clearly very commodious for Rossetti. The annual amount which he thus made was no doubt moderate, or even small; but it was earned under the most pleasing conditions—those of warm appreciation by a pre-eminent critic and connoisseur, and of easy friendliness in the interchange of work and money. It relieved Rossetti from present anxiety as to the means of subsistence, and exempted him from slaving—which he chafed to think about—in the routine of exhibition-rooms.

In one of my brother's letters of this year I observe the following observation, relative to apicture from As You Like It painted by his friend Walter Howell Deverell, then recently deceased: “I have been doing one or two things to poor Deverell's picture; the chief of which has been to attempt getting rid of what I thought unpleasant in Celia's face.”

Miss Heaton, a lady resident in Leeds, appears in or about this year as one of the purchasers of my brother's works. A Beatrice had been begun for her, but was appropriated by Mr. Ruskin; who proposed that Miss Heaton should receive instead the Paolo and Francesca , or, if she preferred it, a Rachel at the price of £26: this title must indicate Dante's vision of Rachel and Leah, of which Rossetti made a watercolour. Towards June of this year he executed for Ruskin, in a week, a watercolour of The Nativity , price £15, and he accounted it one of his best performances: but the critic dissented—as in such details he not unfrequently did—from the painter, who thereupon settled to exchange it. This was probably not done, as a later note from Mr. Ruskin speaks of The Nativity as then improved. The Passover in the Holy Family was still in hand at the beginning of July; the head of Jesus being done after a boy from St. Martin's School. “That drawing of Launcelot is almost finished” appears in a letter of 1855, probably towards September; the watercolour, which was purchased by Ruskin, of Launcelot and Queen Guenevere at the effigied tomb of King Arthur: also in September “that drawing with the buttercups,” bought by Ruskin for £30; this may possibly be the Matilda before mentioned.

The first design by Rossetti which got engraved was one which forms the frontispiece to Mr. Allingham's volume Day and Night Songs: it was in hand in June, and represents a youth listening in rapt mood to the chaunt of three mystic or supernatural women, the “Maids of Elfin-mere.” This was engraved on wood in 1855 by Messrs. Dalziel: my brother was highly dissatisfied, and regarded the woodcut as a decided travestie of his work—although I think that spectators of the present day, who have only the woodcut itself to judge by, would be considerably more indulgent to it.

Letters from Mr. Ruskin continue throughout this year. They speak of works by Rossetti, but in terms not always conducive to identification. One design is termed “a duet between Ida and you.” Ida was the fancy-name (allusive I think to Tennyson's Princess) which Ruskin bestowed upon Miss Siddal: he liked this design better than any previous work which Rossetti had produced for him, except the “Man with boots and lady with golden hair”— of which the correct title is La Belle Dame sans Merci .

In March Rossetti “had in hand a large drawing of Dante's vision of dead Beatrice, as well as Passover, and Monk.” He appears to mean the first form, a watercolour, in which he treated the subject commonly called Dante's Dream — this watercolour was bought by Miss Heaton; The Passover in the Holy Family ; and the Fra

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Pace . He wished to get the picture-dealer Mr. White (of Maddox Street) to visit his studio while these and some other works were visible there—of course with a view to establishing a professional connection with this dealer. I dare say that the visit came off, and that Mr. White purchased something from my brother now and again; but cannot vouch for particulars.

The first hint of his triptych-picture for Llandaff Cathedral, The Infant Christ adored by a King and a Shepherd , appears in the same letter of March. Mr. Thomas Seddon the painter had then earned Rossetti's warm acknowledgment by bringing round to him “a Welsh M.P.,” to put the matter in train, and he was hopeful of a prosperous result. The M.P. was I think Mr. Henry Austen Bruce, now Lord Aberdare.

Woodcut-designs proved again afflictive to Rossetti in 1856. On August 2nd he wrote that he was at the last gasp of time with the designs which he had undertaken to produce, to be engraved on wood in the well-known illustrated edition of Tennyson published by Moxon and Co.: they were then getting a little forward. He foresaw that, with a view to working upon the blocks which yet remained to be done, he would have to fly London and Moxon, as he could not endure the publisher's pestering. I judge that he received £30 per design: as I find in one of his letters the phrase “Moxon owes me £30, as I have done the King Arthur block.” He preferred Linton as a wood-engraver to the Dalziels; and was particularly pleased with his second proof of the Mariana subject. Another letter—addressed this time to Mr. Moxon—sets forth that the design of The Lady of Shalott , though delayed for a week, would be soon ready: “I have drawn it twice over, for the sake of an alteration, so you see I do not spare trouble.” He speaks also of the block for Sir Galahad , and of a second Sir Galahad which he intended to do without delay: this intention, it appears, must have miscarried, for there is not, in the Tennyson volume, any second illustration to the poem in question. Another project, equally abortive, was that of doing a design for the Two Voices.“Nothing would please me better,” he adds, “than that Mr. Madox Brown should do the Vision of Sin, as I hear Hunt proposed to you: his name ought by all means to be in the work.” And so it ought, but it is not; more's the pity—for Moxon's Illustrated Tennyson. Mr. Moxon did in fact apply to Mr. Brown to take up the various subjects which Rossetti had at first intended to design, but had, for one reason or another, omitted: but at that late date Brown was unwilling to entertain any such proposal, and it came to nought.

All this matter of designs and blocks, I well remember, became a sore subject between Moxon and Rossetti. Moxon used to write or call frequently, and considered himself aggrieved because the blocks, when he expected or required to have them ready, were still uncompleted. He suffered much worry and disappointment; and I have even heard it said—but I suppose this is only to be construed as a grim joke, not as a sober and grievous reality—that “Rossetti killed Moxon.” It is true that the publisher did not long survive the issue of the illustrated Tennyson. On the other hand, my brother, besides being very fastidious, and therefore somewhat dilatory, over his own share in these designs, found constant reason to be doubly fastidious over the guise which his work assumed at the hands of the wood-engravers: he corrected, altered, protested, and sent back blocks to be amended. My brother was, no doubt, a difficult man with whom to carry on work in co-operation: having his own ideas, from which he was not to be moved; his own habits, from which he was not to be jogged; his own notions of business, from which he was not to be diverted. Co-operators, I can easily think, railed at him, and yet they liked him too. He assumed the easy attitude of one born to dominate—to know his own place, and to set others in theirs. When once this relation between the parties was established, things went well; for my brother was a genial despot, good-naturedly hearty and unassuming in manner, and only tenacious upon the question at issue. To play the first fiddle, and have the lion's share—surely that is, as Burns says, “a sma' request,” for a man conscious of genius.

A letter dated 8th December 1856 gives the first trace of a purchaser, Mr. Plint, who will be mentioned again further on. This gentleman wanted to have a Blessed Damozel done (no doubt as a watercolour) for £63; Rossetti, however, was inclined to stick to St. Cecilia for £42—the subject of the death of St. Cecilia which forms one of the Tennyson wood-designs. As to this wood-block he had been earnest in impressing on the engraver that “none of the work is to be left out.”

On Christmas Day he was preparing to exhibit certain works in a small collection got up in the then Hogarth Club, to which he and some of his closest friends belonged. He proposed to send “Lady Trevelyan's drawing” (I am not certain which this is), “the Llandaff sketches,” and, along with these, David

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Rex , a separate version of the third compartment, but this last would not be ready for a fortnight or so.

In this year Rossetti painted a small oil-picture of St. Katharine for Mr. Ruskin; it represented an exceedingly mediæval artist painting from a lady who poses with a wheel as St. Katharine, and it was exhibited at the Burlington Club, in the collection of Rossetti's works got together there in 1883. The catalogue described it as “the only oil-picture painted between 1853 and 1858,” which is, I presume, nearly correct. Two or three of Mr. Ruskin's letters relate to this work. In one note he expresses a wish to see the St. Katharine as soon as done, adding that he will pay cash for it, and that old debts may stand over; the “old debts” being seemingly arrears of work for which my brother had already received payment. In another note he objects to an alteration that had been made in the picture, which, unless altered back, he would resign. In yet another he pronounces the St. Katharine “an absurdity,” without defining why. It is no doubt a quaint invention, not without a twinkle of humour in the treatment, and the costume of the fifteenth-century artist is probably not such a working-garb as the man would really have assumed to paint in. Mr. Ruskin admired at this time The Magdalene , a term which must designate the subject of The Magdalene at the Door of Simon the Pharisee , and he would willingly have resigned for that work the “oil-picture [ St. Katharine ] at 50 guineas.” In other letters Mr. Ruskin expresses himself willing to subscribe to a reredos, and a flower-border for it— evidently pointing to the reredos or triptych- picture for Llandaff Cathedral; and he speaks disparagingly of a drawing with some male heads. I don't know which drawing this was, nor whether the censure was just; but it emphasizes the fact that, from an early date in Rossetti's painting, his predilection and his mastery were in female heads, those of men being rather wanting in energy and variety of virile type. Ruskin also proposed to exhibit at a lecture in Oxford “the Beatrice” and the Paolo and Francesca .

It was in 1857 that my brother undertook to paint a series of Arthurian pictures in the Hall of the Union Club in Oxford. He must have known something of Mr. Burne Jones, then an Oxford student, in 1856, or possibly 1855; that gentleman having sought him out, and asked his opinion as to some of his romantic pen-and-ink designs, very remarkable in promise and originality of suggestion. Through Mr. Jones, Rossetti came to know Mr. William Morris, and afterwards Mr. Algernon Swinburne, also Oxford students. The decoration-project for the Union Hall was, however, undertaken apart from these acquaintances, and also apart from any direct influence of Mr. Ruskin. It was concerted at the outset of the Long Vacation between Rossetti and Mr. Benjamin Woodward, the architect employed both for the Union Hall and for the Oxford Museum; an Irishman of the most genuine artistic gifts and sympathies, and of a character singularly prepossessing in its retiring modesty. Morris at once tendered his co-operation. Rossetti gave his work gratis, the funds of the Union not admitting, presumably, of any other arrangement; but his materials were paid for, and he lived at free quarters in Oxford. Mr. Burne Jones was soon associated with him as painter of some of the subjects; also Mr. Hungerford Pollen, of Oxford, Mr. Spencer Stanhope, Mr. Arthur Hughes, a choice painter and early friend, and Mr. Val Prinsep, a friend of more recent date. These, along with Alexander Munro for sculptural work, were all. Not any one of them was conversant with the processes of solid and permanent wall-painting. The works were executed, I understood, in a sort of watercolour distemper, and were from the beginning predestined, by Fate and Climate, to ruin. My brother allotted to himself two large spaces on the walls; painted one subject more or less completely, Sir Launcelot at the Shrine of the Sangrael , and began or schemed out the other, Sir Galahad receiving the Sangrael . In October 1857 I was minded to go to Oxford, and see what was doing; but my brother, on the 30th of the month, wrote to me that things were then “in a muddle,” and advised me to wait awhile, which I did. The scheme was in active operation in 1857, stagnated in 1858, and was partially revived, and soon afterwards finally dropped, in 1859.

A letter from Mr. Ruskin, which may perhaps belong to this year, informs Rossetti that he need not worry about money which he owed to the writer (rather maybe about work which he owed in return for money paid), but recommends him to attend to commissions given by other persons, and to the one for Llandaff Cathedral. He offers to remit £73 of the debt, provided Rossetti will do another side of the painting-work for the Union Hall, but stipulates that the objects therein must be properly represented—a clause which suggests that Ruskin regarded some of the object-painting already done in the Hall as departing not a little from the rigid accuracy of the Præraphaelite dogma. On the last day of this year Rossetti was expecting to receive in a fortnight some money from the authorities in Llandaff. He was engrossed with a picture—which I should presume to be one section of this same Llandaff commission —and was eager to get it finished. This however was not to be accomplished for some time yet to come, so far as the entire triptych is concerned. The price paid for the triptych may probably have been £400. A letter of Rossetti's is extant saying that he had named £400 as the figure for the three compartments, and £200 for the central one singly. At the time he regarded these sums as “impracticable”; but he was not likely to take less, and may possibly even have received somewhat more. As we have seen, Mr. Thomas Seddon, the painter, had been instrumental in procuring this commission for Rossetti; his brother, Mr. John P. Seddon, being one of the firm of architects charged with the restoration and the general oversight of Llandaff Cathedral, was also much concerned in all details connected with the triptych, and did everything which friendly and intelligent zeal could do to smooth the painter's path in the affair.

This may be a convenient place for saying something more definite about the Llandaff triptych, one of the largest pictures which my brother produced, and (apart from easel-pictures, some minor church-decorations, and the now totally faded distemper-work in Oxford) the only one which occupies a permanent position in a public building. The central compartment has sometimes (as for instance in the Royal Academy catalogue of 1883) been termed The Adoration of the Magi ; but this is a decided misnomer, and reduces to practical commonplace and insignificance the purport of the entire work. The central compartment represents in fact the Infant Christ adored by a King and a Shepherd; and, taken in connexion with the side-pictures, it indicates the spiritual equality and communion of all conditions of men in the eye of God. The side-pictures show respectively David as a Shepherd about to confront Goliath, and David as a King harping to the Lord. This is substantially another form, or another exemplification, of the same idea—the shepherd and the king being here not only equal in service to the Most High, but actually one and the same man. I venture to say that the triptych, thus understood—and its message is plainly enough conveyed—is something very different from being a three-hundredth version of that hack-subject of mediæval and renaissance painters The Adoration of the Magi.

It was in or about this year that my brother made the personal acquaintance of an actress whom he greatly admired for beauty of face and person, and whose professional talents he also appreciated, though less warmly; her stage-name was Miss Herbert. A letter from Mr. Ruskin expresses a hope that he would soon paint Miss Herbert's head in his picture; the Llandaff triptych is probably meant. Another letter from the friendly but unsparing critic warns Rossetti that, in one of his works, his careless use of pigment has caused a lady in blue to change colour.