The Spirit of the Rainbow Dante Gabriel Rossetti 1 1876
Sir Sydney Cockerell told Virginia Surtees in 1953 that he had been told by Watts-Dunton that the model for the drawing was Watts-Dunton's mistress and that DGR made the picture at his request. <artist/> <location/> <bibl/> <note/> </citnpictorial> <citnmythic> <name/> <culture/> <bibl/> <note/> </citnmythic> <citnhistorical> <event/> <place/> <date/> <bibl/> <note/> </citnhistorical> <citnautobiographical> <name/> <place/> <date/> <bibl/> <note/> </citnautobiographical> <citnscenic> <place/> <date/> <bibl/> <note/> </citnscenic> </listcitn> </source> <commentaries> <head>Commentary</head> <section type="intro"> <head>Introduction</head> <p>This is the only finished, full-length female nude that DGR is known to have executed. DGR intended to fill in the background with a rainy landscape of trees, perhaps with a waterfall as well. That the woman represented in the drawing was Watts-Dunton's mistress, as Sydney Cockerell told Virginia Surtees, seems to be obliquely borne out in James Douglas's biography of Watts-Dunton. Douglas pointedly does not name the model for this drawing, though he observes that she was also the model for the half-nude picture known as <xref doc="a.s247.raw"> <title level="pic"> <hi rend="i">Forced Music</hi> and he suggests—in the running head covering his treatment of these works—that Watts-Dunton regarded her as “The Loveliest of all Rossetti's Models” (Douglas II. 277).

Textual History: Composition

Textual History: Revision

Production History

Reception

Iconographic

Pictorial

Historical

Literary

The drawing illustrates Watts-Dunton's sonnet “The Wood-Haunter's Dream”, a dream account of “The Spirit of the Rainbow” who is represented as a kind of “belle dame sans merci” (“God gives the world the Rainbow, her the rains”).

Translation

Autobiographical

Bibliographic

Douglas, <hi rend="i">Theodore Watts-Dunton</hi> , II. 276-277. Sharp, <hi rend="i">DGR: A Record and a Study</hi> , 254-255. Surtees, <hi rend="i">A Catalogue Raisonné</hi> , vol. 1, 145.

Marillier reproduction Dante Gabriele Rossetti con 107 Illustrazioni Elena Rossetti Angeli 1906 0 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, An Illustrated Memorial of His Art and Life H. C. Marillier 1899 0 The Spirit of the Rainbow DGR 1876 1876 black crayon 3