With John R. Parsons as his cameraman, DGR created a
series of photographs of Jane Morris on 7 July 1865. Two
were taken indoors, the rest outside in the garden of DGR's Cheyne Walk house.
Remarkable works of early photographic art, they are equally important
for elucidating DGR's paintings, where he takes such a different approach
to his female subject. These differences are especially clear when a
particular photograph was consciously used as the basis for some
subsequent painting. Where the photographs are full of striking details and
angularities, the paintings or drawings tend to be highly finished. In each case,
however, the effect is powerfully disturbing—two very different
types of DGR's characteristically
“grotesque” style. Some prefer the more stark power of
the photographs and deplore what they see as a process of
“prettification
” in the paintings that descend from the
photographic images. But the stylistic contrast between photo
and painting or drawing helps to reveal why, in an important sense, the
strangely finished pictures,
rather than the original photos, vividly exemplify
a grotesque pictorial style. In this sense the photographs provide a
singular key for “reading
” Rossetti's pictorial work as a
whole—most especially the pictures of the last fifteen years.
Some of the photographs are modern prints made when
the original 1865 prints showed signs of fading early in the
twentieth-century. So they are in fact photos of photos. In eleven
instances we can see that two different prints were made from a single
original plate: in these cases DGR wanted either to change the
compositional structure by cropping the image or to change the lighting
on the image, or both. Several of the prints also show that other kinds of
intervention took place either on the original plate or on the original
print. A notable fact is that DGR seems to have painted over parts of
In 1933 Gordon Bottomly, at the request of May Morris,
assembled twenty-eight prints of these photographs in an
A small set of six of these photographs, probably all made by Emery Walker, is preserved in the Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery, and a set of seven that belonged to DGR is at Princeton. The boards that originally housed the latter bears a gilt inscription: “Mrs. Morris./ From D. G. Rossetti's Collection”.
The photos were made in DGR's back garden, where he put up a kind of tent or marquee within which he arranged a chair and couch set against the backdrop of a Japanese screen. Mrs. Morris was variously posed in this space—as Jan Marsh has observed, in a style recalling Nadar's 1862 publicity images of Sarah Bernhardt (which DGR must have seen during his 1864 trip to Paris).