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Title: Rossetti

Author: H. C. Marillier

Release date: November 7, 2022 [eBook #69305]

Language: English

Original publication: United Kingdom: George Bell & Sons

Credits: Al Haines


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROSSETTI ***







[Frontispiece: BEATA BEATRIX.]



  Bell's Miniature Series of Painters


  ROSSETTI

  BY

  H. C. MARILLIER



  LONDON
  GEORGE BELL & SONS
  1906




  CHISWICK PRESS: CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO.
  TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.




TABLE OF CONTENTS


CHAPTER

I. INTRODUCTORY

II. THE "PRE-RAPHAELITE BROTHERHOOD"

III. WORK FROM 1849 TO 1853--INFLUENCE OF BROWNING AND DANTE

IV. FRIENDSHIP WITH RUSKIN--MARRIAGE, AND DEATH OF MRS. ROSSETTI

V. WORK FROM 1854 TO 1857

VI. WORK FROM 1858 TO 1862

VII. SETTLING AT CHELSEA--WORK FROM 1863 TO 1874

VIII. CLOSE OF THE RECORD. 1874-1882

OUR ILLUSTRATIONS

CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF CHIEF PICTURES




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


BEATA BEATRIX ... Frontispiece

ECCE ANCILLA DOMINI

THE BLUE CLOSET

MARY MAGDALENE AT THE HOUSE OF SIMON THE PHARISEE

THE BELOVED

MARIANA

ASTARTE SYRIACA

DANTE'S DREAM




DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI



CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY

Dante Gabriel, or, to give him his full christening name, Gabriel
Charles Dante Rossetti, was born on May 12th, 1828, at No. 38,
Charlotte Street, Portland Place, and was the second of four
children, born in successive years.  Gabriele Rossetti, his father,
was a native of the city of Vasto, in the province of Abruzzi.  He
was a man of superior ability and force of character, and was at one
time custodian of bronzes at the Naples Museum; but having made
himself obnoxious to the Bourbon King Ferdinand during the
suppression of the constitution in 1821, he 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
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 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 Gabriel was indebted for much,
but especially to his mother.  One can judge of the latter's quiet
sensible character, and deep religious instincts, from the portraits
left us by her son.  But, besides these qualities, she possessed good
literary and artistic judgement, shrewd knowledge of human nature,
and a fund of common sense which was strong enough to prevent 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 at the last as a patriot in his native land.  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
literary critic 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 their
father's lifetime.  Gabriele Rossetti was a commentator on Dante, and
himself a writer of verse, mainly in a politico-patriotic vein.  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 as a young man to read upon his own lines, that
the pictorial richness and splendour of the Florentine dawned on him
and seized him with its spell.  "The 'Convito,'" he says, "was 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.

Reared in this studious atmosphere, however, 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.

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 "Sir Hugh the Heron," a legendary
poem founded on a tale by Allan Cunningham.  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 expressed considerable 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.  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, 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 was admitted to King's College, where his father was
Italian professor.  His artistic training did not begin until 1841 or
1842, when he left school, and entered himself at a drawing academy
known in those days as "Sass's," and kept by Mr. F. S. Gary, son of
the translator of Dante.  He remained some four years at Gary'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 graphically delineated by a
fellow-student, whose observant eye has preserved for us a probably
accurate conception of the fiery young enthusiast:

"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 furtive 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."

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 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.  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.

Before following his fortunes further in this direction we must go
back and note what Rossetti's activities in literature had amounted
to during this period.  These are no less than astonishing.  To take
the greatest first, they include the bulk of the 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 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.  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 spent over musty volumes at the British Museum.  Even this was
not all, for between the same years he began a translation in verse
of the Nibelungenlied, and finished a translation of 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 however that may be, he was not encouraged to
abandon painting as a means of livelihood, and having made the
arrangement already described with Madox Brown, he settled down with
a characteristic mixture of enthusiasm and despair to the pursuit of
art.

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 Mr. 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 _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, as an
upshot of the acquaintance, agreed to work for a time with him,
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
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 real picture.  The
year 1848 marks his transition artistically from boyhood to
adolescence, an adolescence in which depth of feeling and height of
aspiration transcended the power of accomplishment, and no artificial
mannerisms obscured the 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
famous Pre-Raphaelite movement, and will more properly serve to begin
a new, than to end a preliminary chapter.




CHAPTER II

THE "PRE-RAPHAELITE BROTHERHOOD"

In relating afresh the history of the "Pre-Raphaelite" movement, one
has many precedents to choose from.  According to the point of view
selected one may see in it the conscious expression of a great
artistic revival, deliberately planned by a body of zealots, and
based upon a structure of lofty principles; or one may go to the
opposite extreme and regard it merely as an exuberant freak, an
irresponsible outburst on the part of a few impulsive youths linked
together for one brief moment by a mutual combination of enthusiasm
and high spirits.  For both of these points of view ample authority
might be quoted, and the truth as usual lies somewhere safe between
them.

The tendency has been, on the whole, not unnaturally, to exaggerate
the significance of the "Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood," which after all
was but the grain of mustard seed from which a great tree sprung.
Its formation 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 did not sympathize with the new ideas which
were ripening in Rossetti and his friends from those who did.  The
final development of these ideas was brought about by a meeting at
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 stereotyped fashion of painting 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 a 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 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.
It is a mistake to suppose that what Rossetti and his companions
admired or sought to imitate in these old masters was their mediaeval
and primitive style of painting.  The mediaeval 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; also 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.  "Rossetti,"
says Mr. Hunt, "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."  Mr. Hunt adds 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, Rossetti, Millais, and Holman
Hunt, four more or less active adherents were enlisted.  Hunt
introduced Mr. F. G. Stephens, who at that time was a painter, but
very soon abandoned art for criticism.  Woolner, the 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.

For the doings of the Brotherhood the curious reader will do well to
consult the "Memoirs" and the "Rossetti Papers" published by Mr. W.
M. Rossetti.  Mr. Rossetti, not being an artist, was himself elected
secretary, and with business-like care preserved in a diary all the
daily and weekly occurrences that came under his notice.  It is
sufficient to say here 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 picture 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
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.

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_;
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 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
triumph with the striking picture, _Lorenzo and Isabella_.

Rossetti's subject, as can well be imagined, gave him endless
trouble, and was a source of violent fits of alternate depression and
energy.  Madox Brown's diary, a document full of dry humour and
quaint touches, to say nothing 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.  The picture is on many accounts
a favourite one with lovers of Rossetti's work.  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 balcony at which her father, St. Joachim, is tending a
symbolically fruitful vine.  On the right of the picture, are the
figures of the Virgin and her mother seated at an embroidery frame.
The young girl, a most untypical Madonna, in simple gray dress with
pale green at the wrists, pauses with a needle in her 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 bearing the names of
the six cardinal virtues.  These, and a 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.  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.

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 cited the 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 whole composition was
repeated in oil in 1859, and the meeting in Paradise formed the
subject of more than one separate drawing.  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 his
picture of the previous year.  This is well known to frequenters of
the National Gallery at Millbank, and is described elsewhere.  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-Raphaelites" exhibited at the Academy, and
pursued them relentlessly until time and success finally established
their position.

[Illustration: ECCE ANCILLA DOMINI.]

It would serve no purpose to go again and at length into the nature
of this attack.  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.  In a
series of letters to the "Times" he 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 Brotherhood 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 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
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 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 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.  The first number
included "My Sister's Sleep" and the prose romance, "Hand and Soul,"
by Rossetti.  Subsequent numbers contained "The Blessed Damozel,"
"The Carillon," "Sea Limits" (under its first title of "From the
Cliffs"), and six or seven sonnets.  Of the four numbers published
the first two only were called "The Germ," the title in the third and
fourth 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.

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.  Both it and "Hand and Soul" have frequently been
reprinted.  The latter is interesting for the light it throws upon
Rossetti's mediaeval and mystical mind.  To some extent it is 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.




CHAPTER III

WORK FROM 1849 TO 1853

INFLUENCE OF BROWNING AND DANTE

Before the first number of the "Germ" had appeared, and while it was
in progress, Rossetti, accompanied by Holman Hunt, paid a short and
hurried visit to Paris and Belgium.  A rhyming diary and a series of
jocular sonnets, interspersed with a few serious ones, recall the
vigour of his first impressions.  A large proportion of the time was
spent at the Louvre and other galleries, rushing through Old Masters
at a furious rate.

After their return home Rossetti found his affairs in a bad way.  The
failure of the _Ecce Ancilla_ to find a purchaser at once (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.
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
impossible and had to be dropped.  The composition of it remains,
however, in a little painting called _Hist, said Kate the Queen_,
dated 1851.  Two other designs from Browning which were carried out
at this time are a pen-and-ink drawing from "Sordello" entitled
_Taurello's first sight of Fortune_ and _The Laboratory_.  The latter
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.

In addition to these three subjects, Rossetti drew or painted in the
years 1849-50 other themes of a romantic and mediaeval 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.

From the "Vita Nuova" Rossetti took the incident of _Dante drawing an
Angel on the Anniversary of Beatrice's Death_, executed first in
pen-and-ink, and originally given to Millais.  A water-colour of the
same subject is 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.

The "Vita Nuova" also furnished the subject of a small water-colour
of 1849, representing _Beatrice at the Wedding Feast denying her
salutation to Dante_.  The poet, 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.  The central figure
of the bridal procession is a portrait of Miss Elizabeth Eleanor
Siddal, who first came into Rossetti's life at about this date.  She
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_.

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.  She was the model for
most of Rossetti's earliest and finest water-colours containing
women, and probably for all his Beatrices except the last.

To resume the tale of early work, in 1851 Rossetti continued to be
engaged on small subjects of a mediaeval or dramatic character.  We
have, for instance, the charming little group called _Borgia_, in
which 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 Caesar, 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).

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 legend of the
Doppelganger was one of a class of mysterious horrors which greatly
appealed to Rossetti's imagination, and which fascinated him from
boyhood.  Few but he however would have dared to draw it, and fewer
still could have succeeded with it.  The first design just referred
to, was drawn in pen-and-ink, and was destroyed or lost at an early
date; but Rossetti redrew it in 1860 whilst at Paris on his
honeymoon, and four years later painted two water-colour versions.

To the year following, 1852, belongs a remarkable water-colour,
representing Giotto painting a famous portrait of Dante which was
discovered on removing the plaster from the wall of the Bargello in
1839.  Giotto is in dull red, with brocaded sleeves turned back.  To
his left is seated Dante, cutting a pomegranate in his hand, and
gazing down with a rapt expression to where Beatrice is passing in a
church procession.  Behind Giotto stands his master, Cimabue,
watching the work which is to eclipse his; and behind Dante leans his
rival, Cavalcanti, holding in his hand a book of Guinicelli,
symbolizing thereby the three generations of poets.

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 Rosa_,
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 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.  A
water-colour version of the same subject was painted in 1865, and a
larger version, bearing the title _Elena's Song_, was painted in 1871.

The starting of _Found_ is one of the most memorable events in
connection with the year 1853.  The subject is a countryman or drover
recognizing in a fallen woman of the streets his own lost sweetheart.
_Found_ was commissioned by a Mr. MacCracken, who was also the
purchaser of _Ecce Ancilla_, in 1853, and several studies were made
for it.  The picture however 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."  After his death, Sir Edward Burne-Jones consented
to give a sort of finish to the picture by washing in blue sky.  In
its half-completed state it passed into the possession of Mr. William
Graham, and after his death it went to America.

* * * * *

A short note on Rossetti's movements during the period just covered
may be given here.  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_.  At the beginning
of 1851, 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.  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.  He had by now acquired a certain
measure of independence as a painter, which went on increasing as
generous or wealthy patrons attached themselves.  That his progress
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.  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.  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.  With some few exceptions,
however, 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.




CHAPTER IV

  FRIENDSHIP WITH RUSKIN.--MARRIAGE,
  AND DEATH OF MRS. ROSSETTI

With the year 1854 Rossetti's life entered upon a new phase.  This
was the first year of his memorable connection with Ruskin.  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.  If Rossetti had been a common man, living an
ordinary life and working on regular lines, such a connection would
have been, as he jocularly described it once, "in a way to make his
fortune."  For Ruskin was willing to buy within certain limits almost
everything that Rossetti produced.  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, 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 unthrifty, flush of money one day, out-at-elbows the
next, and invariably anticipating any money to be earned from
commissions.  The Ruskin letters which have been published, throw an
interesting light upon this butterfly existence.

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 Frederic Denison Maurice for bringing art into the East end.  His
method of teaching has been described by one who attended his
lectures.  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.  A
later generation has come to see wisdom in Rossetti's method, and has
introduced it successfully under government auspices in elementary
schools.

In 1860 Rossetti and Miss Siddal carried out their long projected
plans of matrimony, which had been delayed by the latter's illness,
by uncertain prospects, and perhaps also by a final want of
resolution on Rossetti's part.

The marriage took place on May 23rd, and the young couple went for
their wedding trip to Paris and Boulogne.  On their return the rooms
at Chatham Place were extended by opening a door into the adjoining
house.  The independent bachelor habits to which both were accustomed
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.  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 hair the drafts of all his early poems, which at her request
he had copied into a little book.  Only a poet could put into words
the dramatic intensity of grief which was expressed in this now
historic sacrifice to the memory of Rossetti's dead wife.




CHAPTER V

WORK FROM 1854 TO 1857

Rossetti's work, during the earlier part of the period we have been
glancing through, was of a particularly interesting, and towards the
latter end of a sufficiently varied character.  In range of subject
it belongs to the category described in Chapter III, 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 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.  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.  Apart from this Rossetti had
in hand a number of drawings which were continually put on one side
as fresh ideas crowded into his restless brain, and were often not
finished until many years later.  The statement could easily be
verified, that many, if not most, of Rossetti's later pictures were
planned during these early strenuous years of his life, so that 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 have a charm that nothing
in his larger and more elaborated later work can recall.

In the early part of 1854 Rossetti wrote 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, but which from
the context one may infer to have been the water-colour diptych of
_Paolo and Francesco da Rimini_.  In August of the same year he wrote
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 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 lover's 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, with the words "O Lasso!"  Within
the same period, viz., by October, 1855, another Dante subject, _The
Vision of Rachel and Leah_, was taken up and completed.

_The Passover_ drawing, just referred to, is a small, unfinished
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_.  _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.

Other drawings which are dated, or were finished by 1855, though they
may have been in hand considerably earlier, are _The Nativity_, _La
Belle Dame sans Mercy_, and the _Annunciation_, all water-colours.
In the last-named the Virgin (done from Miss Siddal) is represented
washing clothes in a stream, whilst the angel Gabriel stands by with
folded wings, between two trees: both are in white, and the picture
shows a strong effect of sunlight.

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.

In 1856 were completed the water-colours of _Dante's Dream_ and _Fra
Pace_.  Mr. William Morris, who acquired several early water-colours
by Rossetti, was apparently the first purchaser of _Fra Pace_.  The
picture represents a kneeling monk busy illuminating at a desk.  He
has worked so long 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, but it is
eminently characteristic of Rossetti, full of quaint conceits and
humour, from the row of little bottles that hold the good man's
pigments to the dead mouse he is copying and the split pomegranate
that lies uneaten by his side.

The _Dante's Dream_ above 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.  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.

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 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.  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.

The year 1856 (or, if we take the date of publication, 1857) deserves
commemoration as the year of the famous Moxon "Tennyson," for which
Rossetti designed no fewer than five illustrations.

Separate pen-and-ink drawings exist for most, if not for all, of
these Tennyson designs, and water-colours were afterwards painted
from three of them.

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 late possessor, Mr. George Rae.  These
comprise:

(1) The _Damsel of the Sanc Grael_, robed in green, holding a
long-stemmed cup in her hand.

(2) _The Death of Breuse sans Pitié_, one of the crudest and least
successful of Rossetti's water-colours.

(3) _The Chapel before the Lists_, a scene suggested by Malory of a
lady helping to arm a kneeling knight, her long white head-dress, as
she stoops to kiss him, falling like a mantle down her blue dress.
Upon the pointed shield of the knight is a figure of a maiden in
distress.  Beyond the chapel is a tented field, and knights going
forth to joust.

(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 mediaeval 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.  A banner
hangs down at the right from a pole which cuts the picture diagonally
in half.

(5) _The Blue Closet_, illustrated and described elsewhere.

[Illustration: THE BLUE CLOSET.]

_The Wedding of St. George_, in the same 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 kneels and leans her head upon his
breast, cutting off a long 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.

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 rise to another, not less important, and
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
an added religious tinge which was hardly visible in the other.  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 first introduced to their notice by Burne-Jones.

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 which even more potently than the "P.R.B." has changed the
face of art in England, and which resulted in the formation of a
group that 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."

By the end of 1856 Burne-Jones and Morris had left Oxford and were
settled in London, occupying the rooms at 17, Red Lion Square, which
had formerly served as a studio for Rossetti and Deverell.  Both were
under the spell of Rossetti's influence.  The _ménage_ at Red Lion
Square lasted till 1859, and was a rallying point for all members of
the circle.  "From the incidents that occurred or were invented
there," says Mr. Mackail, "a sort of Book of the Hundred Merry Tales
gradually was formed, of which Morris was the central figure."  The
rooms were "the quaintest in all London," as Burne-Jones wrote, "hung
with brasses of old knights and drawings of Albert Dürer"; and in
order to furnish them recourse had to be had to invention.  A local
joiner was engaged to manufacture furniture from Morris's own
designs: "intensely mediaeval" was Rossetti's description of it to a
friend, "tables and chairs like incubi and succubi."  Next came the
idea of painting pictures on walls, cupboards, and doors, about the
time that Morris was planning to build himself at Upton, in the
neighbourhood of Bexley Heath, a "palace of art" the like of which
should never have been seen.  In the general enthusiasm Rossetti set
to and designed a pair of panels for a cabinet--the subject of his
early pen-and-ink drawing, _The Salutation of Beatrice_, representing
in two compartments Dante meeting Beatrice in Florence, and again in
Paradise.

At the risk of repetition, one may mention once more a side of the
movement which is apt to be overshadowed by its far-reaching results;
namely, the light-heartedness and sense of fun which prevailed
amongst this band of artistic pioneers.  There was nothing of the
mawkish affectation which discredited the aesthetes who came after.
When Burne-Jones was down at Upton, helping to decorate the Red House
in 1860, Rossetti wrote to a mutual friend: "I wish you were in town,
to see you sometimes, for I literally see no one now except Madox
Brown pretty often, and even he is gone to join Morris, who is out of
reach at Upton, and with them is married Jones painting the inner
walls of the house that Top built (Morris was always called 'Topsy'
by his friends).  But as for the neighbours, when they see men
pourtrayed by Jones upon the walls, the images of the Chaldeans
pourtrayed (by _him!_) in Extract Vermilion, exceeding all
probability in dyed attire upon their heads, after the manner of no
Babylonians of any Chaldea, the land of anyone's nativity--as soon as
they see them with their eyes, shall they not account him doting and
send messengers into Colney Hatch?"

During the long vacation of 1857 Rossetti went up to Oxford with
Morris on a visit to the architect, Benjamin Woodward, who was at
work upon a debating hall for the Union Society, and seeing an
opportunity for mural decoration of a kind never previously attempted
in England in the new hall of the Union, he became fired with an idea
for carrying it out.  The hall was a long building, with an apse at
each end, and a gallery running all the way round.  In this gallery
were bookcases, and above the cases were ten semi-circular bays, each
pierced with a pair of circular windows.  These bays, it was
suggested, should be painted with scenes from the Arthurian legend,
and the roof, as part of the general scheme, was to be decorated in a
harmonious manner.  A building committee was in charge of the
operations, and without any clear idea of its responsibilities or
restrictions it fell in with Rossetti's proposal that he and a select
band of artists should execute the work gratuitously, but that the
Union should defray their expenses at Oxford and should provide all
necessary materials.  The time estimated for completing the work was
six weeks.  Seven artists, including Rossetti, Burne-Jones, and
Morris, were enlisted without much trouble, the remaining four being
Arthur Hughes, Spencer Stanhope, Val Prinsep, and J. Hungerford
Pollen, who had already won much credit from his painting of the roof
in Merton College Chapel.  Rossetti took as subjects for two bays
_Launcelot asleep before the Chapel of the Sanc Grael_ and _Sir
Galahad, Sir Bors and Sir Percival receiving the Sanc Grael_.  The
others chose similar themes, but in a short time it was found that
the work in hand was considerably more than had been anticipated,
though abundant evidence remains of the enthusiasm which was put into
it.

Unfortunately the delight was not to be of long duration.  Almost
before the pictures were finished they had begun to decay, the effect
of tempera laid direct upon a new brick wall, with no preparation but
a layer of whitewash, being quite inadequate to resist the English
climate.  Several of the designs were never completed.  In 1859 some
arrangement was entered into by the Union with a Mr. Riviere to fill
the three blank compartments; and after that the ill-fated
undertaking, on which so much pains and so much skill had been spent,
gradually faded away and resolved itself into what it is to-day, a
dingy blur of colours in which may be distinguished the occasional
vague form of an armoured limb or a patch of flowery background.

Rossetti's connection with Oxford, and its intercalation in his work,
does not end with the Union paintings.  It was destined to furnish
him with a more lasting influence--a face that to the end of his life
haunted his pictures with an austere and solemn beauty, dominating
and transforming all other kinds, so as even to give rise to the
suggestion--a shallow and ignorant one, it is true--that he painted
but one type of face.  It was at the theatre, one night in the summer
of 1857, that Rossetti and Burne-Jones found themselves sitting near
two youthful Misses Burden, daughters of an Oxford resident, the
elder of whom, by her striking features and wealth of dark wavy hair,
appealed so forcibly to Rossetti's painter eye that he obtained an
introduction in order to ask for sittings.  A pen-and-ink head called
_Queen Guenevere_, now in the National Gallery at Dublin, and
evidently intended to replace the earlier studies done for _Launcelot
at the Shrine_, was one of the first fruits of this acquaintance,
which, for the rest, does not seem to have become really prolific of
results until several years later, when Rossetti's wife was dead.  In
the meantime William Morris, whose admiration went even further, had
married Miss Burden, and the casual relationship of painter and
sitter which existed between her and Rossetti deepened into a
friendship, in which Miss Siddal participated, both up to and after
her marriage.




CHAPTER VI

WORK FROM 1858 TO 1862

The year 1858, while the Oxford affair was still in train, saw the
completion of two pen-and-ink drawings which had been in hand a long
time.  These were _Hamlet and Ophelia_ and _Mary Magdalene at the
Door of Simon the Pharisee_.

[Illustration: MARY MAGDALENE AT THE HOUSE OF SIMON THE PHARISEE.]

The drawing of _Mary Magdalene_, perhaps the most perfect of all
Rossetti's early works, was begun at least by 1853, and continued to
occupy his thoughts in one form or another for many years.  Rossetti
wrote a sonnet for the picture, which is found in his first volume,
called "Poems."

Another subject finished in 1858 was _Mary in the House of John_.
The scene is at late twilight, or in an eastern night, the red glow
of the sky casting a purple light over the clustered dwellings of
Nazareth, with deep blue hills beyond.  In the interior of the room
are Mary and St. John, the latter seated in shadow, engaged in
striking light from a flint; whilst Mary, standing before the tall
window, fills a hanging lamp from a jar of oil.

Another important item to be recorded under 1858 is a water-colour
called _Before the Battle_, painted for Rossetti's American friend,
Professor Norton, of Harvard.

The most important work of 1859 is a highly-finished little head in
oils, called _Bocca Baciata_, which was bought by the late Mr. Boyce.
The model for this was Miss Fanny Cornforth, afterwards Mrs. Schott,
whose florid type of beauty reappears in a series of sensuous
pictures of the kind that Rossetti began to paint after
1862--_Aurelia_ (_Fazio's Mistress_), _The Blue Bower_, _The Lady at
her Toilet_, _Lilith_, and_ The Lady of the Fan_.  These pictures,
and numerous portraits in oil and water-colour, give a sufficiently
recognizable idea of this model, who exercised almost as remarkable
an influence over Rossetti's life as over his art.

_Bonifazio's Mistress_, a specially charming little water-colour, was
painted in 1860.  It shows a lady (dressed in the same brightly
be-ribanded flounces as Lucretia Borgia wears in the little 1851
group) who has been sitting to her lover, a painter, when suddenly
she has fallen back in her chair, dead.

The connection of this subject with the poet, Bonifazio (or Fazio)
degli Uberti is entirely fanciful.  There can be little doubt that it
was intended to illustrate Rossetti's own story of "St. Agnes of
Intercession."  _Bonifazio's Mistress_ has no connection whatever
either in subject or composition with the oil painting of the same
name done in 1863, and afterwards re-named _Aurelia_.  The latter is
simply a three-quarter length figure of a lady plaiting her hair
before a toilet glass.

This (1860) was the year of Rossetti's marriage, as has already been
stated, and in June he was at Paris on his honeymoon.  While there he
executed two pen-and-ink drawings, one of which was the design of
_How they met Themselves_, done to replace the earlier version of
1851, which had been lost.  The other represents a scene from
Boswell's "Life of Johnson," a curious source of inspiration for
Rossetti, rendered more remarkable from the fact that the incident
chosen is of a humorous and spicy character.  Dr. Maxwell told the
story how two young women from Staffordshire had come up to town to
consult Johnson about Methodism, in which they were much interested.
"Come," said he, "you pretty fools, dine with Maxwell and me at the
Mitre, and we will talk over that subject"; which they did, and after
dinner he took one of them on his knee, and fondled her for
half-an-hour together.

In 1861 Rossetti's translations from the Italian poets were at last
published, together with the "Vita Nuova."  Rossetti thought out a
very charming design of two lovers kissing in a rose-garden, which he
proposed to etch on copper for the title-page.  The plate, however,
displeased him, and he destroyed it.  The central idea of this design
reappears in _Love's Greeting_, a panel designed for the Red House,
and in a water-colour of 1864 inscribed _Roman de la Rose_, in which
Love appears overshadowing the kissing pair with his wings.

In 1861 was painted, on a little panel, 10 by 8 inches, a portrait of
Mrs. Rossetti, called _Regina Cordium_ or _The Queen of Hearts_,
showing just the head and bare shoulders, on a gold ground, behind a
parapet on which rests one hand holding a purple pansy.  A more
important outcome of the year is the fine composition known as
_Cassandra_.  The subject is a scene on the walls of Troy just before
Hector's last battle.  Rossetti wrote two sonnets for the drawing
which will be found in his volume of "Poems."

About this time (1861-1862) the firm of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner
and Co. was just being started, with William Morris, Rossetti,
Faulkner, Burne-Jones, Madox Brown, Webb, and others as the active
promoters of a venture which was to reform the arts of decoration and
furniture making.  Tapestry, furniture, wallpapers, stained glass,
painted panels, and later on carpet-weaving and dyeing, were among
the industries to which this band of highly original artists and
designers turned their attention.  The Anglo-Catholic movement and
the demand for decoration of an aesthetic and sensuous kind gave the
new firm plenty to do, amongst their first commissions being the
embellishment of two new churches then being built by Bodley, St.
Martin's on the Hill, Scarborough, and St. Michael's at Brighton.
For the former Rossetti executed a design for two pulpit panels and
several windows, achieving from the very first a mastery over this
branch of art which few designers have surpassed.  It is
characteristic of his original mind that he went right back to the
fundamental principles of _vitraux_, paying no attention whatever to
the elaborations which had grown round them, and recognizing that a
picture which was transparent, that is, seen by transmitted light,
must be conceived in flat tones and not made to give the illusion of
shading, as can be done in the case of a surface from which the light
is reflected.

The _Paolo and Francesca_ water-colour is generally attributed to the
year 1861, although no particular authority exists for this beyond an
auctioneer's catalogue.  This beautiful little water-colour
represents the first compartment of the double subject.  In it Paolo
and Francesca are seated before a window bearing the arms of
Malatesta.  Outside is a bright and sunny landscape.  The lovers have
stopped in the midst of their reading to give the fatal kiss that
sealed their doom.

In 1861 or 1862 Rossetti designed two woodcuts for his sister
Christina's "Goblin Market," published by Messrs. Macmillan.  In 1865
he drew two more designs for "The Prince's Progress."  The covers for
these two little volumes, as well as for his own when they appeared,
were designed by Rossetti, and are as original and effective and
tasteful as his decorative work invariably was.




CHAPTER VII

SETTLING AT CHELSEA.  WORK, 1863 TO 1874

After the tragic death of his wife, on February 11th, 1862, Rossetti
could no longer bear to occupy the rooms they had inhabited at
Chatham Place, and began to seek for others.  In the meantime he took
lodgings for a few months in a house in Lincoln's Inn Fields.  He had
a fancy for getting away from the crowd of London, and yet for being
near the river, which caused him to examine one or two old houses in
the then by no means fashionable neighbourhoods of Hammersmith and
Chelsea.  He finally decided in favour of No. 16, Cheyne Walk, a
house which from some traditional association with Queen Elizabeth
became known as Tudor House and is now called Queen's House.  It is
also said to have been described by Thackeray in "Esmond" as the home
of the old Countess of Chelsey.  Here he started a joint _ménage_
with Mr. Swinburne, Mr. George Meredith, and (at casual intervals)
his brother.  Mr. Meredith's subtenancy was not of long duration; in
point of fact he never really occupied his rooms.  But Mr. Swinburne
remained long enough to have shared very considerably the traditions
which soon grew up round Tudor House, and whilst there wrote the most
famous of his dramas, "Atalanta in Calydon," as well as many of the
"Poems and Ballads," and a portion of "Chastelard."  The gloom which
at first had threatened Rossetti gradually wore away before the
robustness of his nature; settling into and furnishing his house on
new, and at that time practically unheard-of, principles, afforded
abundant distraction; and for some years, until his own illness
intervened, Rossetti played the genial and charming host to many old
friends of his intimate group, and to an increasing circle of new
ones who were attracted by sympathy or by the growing glamour of his
name.

One of the charms of the house at Chelsea was its long garden, more
than an acre in extent, with an avenue of trees on to which the
studio looked.  As time went on this garden became tenanted with a
miscellaneous assortment of birds and animals, round which a
veritable saga of anecdote has gathered.  These, with his affection
for bric-à-brac, his spontaneous generosity, his ever-ready wit, his
love of good stories, and his endless flow of _vers d'esprit_, form a
contrast to the somewhat sombre atmosphere in which he sought his
inspirations, and in which, owing to the seclusion of his later
years, he was popularly supposed to live.

To resume the thread of Rossetti's work, the well-known picture of
_Beata Beatrix_, now in the National Collection, bears date 1863, but
was only partially painted in that year, the completion being long
delayed.  One reason for the difficulty may have been that Rossetti
desired to make this picture a living memorial of his wife, and that
no regular studies of the face had been done for it.  What he felt
about it we may gather from the fact that for some years he refused
to send out a replica, even when replicas had become a regular and
lucrative form of business.  In the end, however, he was prevailed
upon to paint more than one repetition of the subject, none however
equal in quality to the original.

To 1863 belongs a small oil picture called _Helen of Troy_, a
full-faced study, head and shoulders only, of a rather pretty model,
with masses of rippling yellow hair.  The last of the _St. George_
subjects also belongs to this year, and represents St. George in the
act of slaying the dragon; a water-colour version of one of the
incidents in a series designed for windows, but treated a little
differently.  Next come three small subjects: _Belcolore_, a very
finely painted head of a girl biting a rosebud; _Brimfull_, a
water-colour sketch of a lady stooping to sip from a glass; and
thirdly, a picture called _A Lady in Yellow_, belonging to Mr.
Beresford Heaton.  We are now entering upon the period when Rossetti
ceased to paint small heads and began to devote himself to larger
single figure subjects, lavishing upon them the wealth of his fine
imagination, and surrounding them with quaint and beautiful
accessories such as he alone knew how to select.  The first picture
of this type, and in point of execution one of the very finest, is
_Fazio's Mistress_, a small oil painting dated 1863, but considerably
altered ten years later, when Rossetti renamed it _Aurelia_.

The year 1864 contains two or three more prominent examples of
Rossetti's attraction towards a luxuriant and seductive type of
feminine beauty.  The most important is _Lady Lilith_, which embodies
perhaps the fullest expression of Rossetti's power in this direction.
Adam's mythical first wife is shown as a beautiful woman leaning back
on a couch combing her long fair hair, while with cold
dispassionateness she surveys her features in a hand mirror.  "Body's
Beauty" Rossetti called the picture afterwards, contrasting it with
his conception of "Soul's Beauty," the _Sibylla Palmifera_ of 1866-70.

Still in the same vein--of "Women and Flowers"--is the next great
picture begun in 1864, the _Venus Verticordia_.  The principal
version of this, an oil painting, was not finished until some time in
1868.  The earliest in point of date is a little water-colour
commissioned as a replica, which was delivered during the year.  The
picture represents the goddess of beauty undraped and standing in a
bower of clustering honeysuckle which hides her to the waist.  In her
left hand she holds an apple, in her right a dart upon which is
poised a sulphur butterfly.  Others are hovering round.  Behind is
the grove of Venus, and a blue bird winging its way through space.

The remaining productions of 1864 are all in water-colour.  They
include _Morning Music_, _Monna Pomona_, _Sir Galahad_, _Sir Bors_,
and _Sir Percival_--belonging to Rossetti's earlier manner; _Roman de
la Rose_, and _The Madness of Ophelia_, a scene representing Laertes
leading Ophelia away, whilst the king and queen are looking on.

In 1865 was painted the _Blue Bower_, a picture of the _Lilith_
group, done from the _Lilith_ model, and representing in a setting of
gorgeous blue and green harmonies a woman playing upon a dulcimer.
_The Merciless Lady_, which was painted in 1865, is a return to
Rossetti's early romantic compositions, and is a particularly
charming specimen.  Nor was it his only water-colour of this year,
though indisputably the best.  For Mr. Craven he painted the subject
called _Washing Hands_--with the exception of _Dr. Johnson at the
Mitre_, his one experiment in (eighteenth century costume.

Another called _A Fight for a Woman_, is one of Rossetti's most
spirited drawings.  In point of invention this design goes back to
very early days, as is proved by the existence of tentative sketches
dating from about 1853.  To the same date belongs the oil painting
called originally _Bella e Buona_, but renamed by Rossetti _Il
Ramoscello_ in 1873, when it was taken back by him for retouching.
It is a half-length figure, dressed in slate green, and holding an
acorn branch.

[Illustration: THE BELOVED.]

We now come to one of the most beautiful pictures, if not the most
beautiful, that Rossetti ever painted--_The Beloved_.  No one who has
not seen it, with a warm sunlight bringing out its colour, can form
the most remote conception of its brilliance.  "I mean it to be like
jewels," wrote Rossetti to its late owner, Mr. Rae; and jewel-like it
flashes.  The picture itself is described in a later chapter, amongst
those selected for illustration.

In 1866, the year in which the _Beloved_ was finished, Rossetti
started upon a second great picture of the same type, the _Monna
Vanna_, a three-quarter length figure draped in magnificent gold and
white brocade, and toying with a large fan.  This was commissioned by
Mr. Rae, as was also _Sibylla Palmifera_, the third of the series,
begun about the same time but not completed until 1870.  Rossetti's
sonnet entitled "Soul's Beauty" describes the subject--a Sibyl seated
on a throne and bearing a branch of palm.

The record of 1866 closes with an oil portrait of the painter's
mother, towards whom at all periods of his life his devotion was
exemplary; a large crayon drawing of Christina Rossetti, with her
thoughtful face resting on her hands; and two designs for her second
volume of poems, "The Prince's Progress."

In 1867 Rossetti painted the oil _Christmas Carol_ for Mr. Rae, an
entirely different subject from the early water-colour.  This is a
half-length figure of a girl, draped in a gold and purple robe of
Eastern stuff, and playing upon a species of lute.  Two small but
pretty pictures of the same date are _Joli Cœur_ and _Monna Rosa_.
The first represents a coy-looking maiden fingering her necklace,
whilst _Monna Rosa_ is chiefly a study in beautiful colour,
representing a lady in a dress of pale emerald green, with golden
fruit worked upon it, plucking a rose from a tree planted in a blue
jar.

The next item of 1867 is the exquisite _Loving Cup_.  The subject is
a lady raising a golden cup to her lips, and standing against a
background of fair embroidered linen, surmounted by a row of heavy
brazen plates.

The year 1868 was cut into by Rossetti's breakdown in health and
sudden anxiety about his eyesight.  Nevertheless, he painted the
portrait of Mrs. William Morris, in a blue dress, seated at a table
before a glass of flowers, which many competent judges regard as one
of his very finest pictures, and which was the prelude to that long
series of noble canvases by which he has become best known to the
public.  Mrs. Morris has lent her portrait to the National Gallery,
where it hangs (at Millbank) beside the _Ecce Ancilla_ and the _Beata
Beatrix_.  Other productions of the same year, which closes the
period of Rossetti's best work, were _Bionda del Balcone_; _Aurea
Catena_, a fine drawing of Mrs. Morris; two studies for a future
picture, _La Pia_, and some small replicas of no particular
importance.

The insomnia which began to attack Rossetti in his thirty-ninth year,
and which was the indirect cause of his subsequent breakdown, led him
in 1869 to drop work for a time and to take a holiday at Penkill
Castle in Ayrshire, the residence of an old friend.  The visit is of
interest, because it was not until this occasion that he gave a
serious thought to the publishing of his early poems, some of which
were still going about in manuscript in a more or less finished
condition, though others were buried in his wife's grave.  As a
relief from the strain of painting, moreover, he began to write
again.  His first idea was to have the poems, such of them as he
could collect or recall from memory, set up in type to keep by him as
a nucleus for a possible volume; gradually, however, the idea of
publishing outright grew or was forced upon him; and the last
obstacle to this, the loss of so much of his early work, was finally
removed one day in October, 1869, when, after a consent wrung from
him very reluctantly, the grave was opened, and the manuscript poems
recovered.  In 1870 the book appeared, having as publisher Mr. F  S.
Ellis, of King Street, Covent Garden.  The poems proved an immediate
and lucrative success, and were favourably reviewed except for the
single attack made upon them in a pseudonymous article by the late
Mr. Buchanan.  The effect of even one attack, however, and it was
admittedly a very unfair and bitter attack, on a man of Rossetti's
temperament, suffering from nervous fancies, and troubled by want of
sleep, was disastrous.  He viewed as a great conspiracy against him
what other men, in sounder health, would have been able to disregard,
and the effect was unhappily permanent.  He had begun to acquire the
habit of taking chloral as a cure for sleeplessness, without knowing,
what is well known now, its lamentable after-effect, and for a short
time, if one may accept his brother's judgment, Rossetti was hardly
to be regarded as sane.  A severe breakdown caused him to be removed
once more to Scotland, where after a complete rest he was enabled to
resume painting, and in September, 1872, he joined with Mr. and Mrs.
Morris in taking the old Elizabethan Manor House of Kelmscott, on the
borders of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.  His work here consisted
to a large extent in repainting many of his old pictures, which he
had sent to him for the purpose.  In this way he worked upon the
_Lilith_, _Beloved_, _Monna Vanna_, and other important canvases,
including even the little early _Ecce Ancilla Domini_.  Rossetti left
Kelmscott in July, 1874, and returned to London; and that was the end
of his connection with the quiet Gloucestershire retreat, which
thenceforward became associated solely with the life of William
Morris.

During the years 1869 to 1871, and the two following which Rossetti
spent at Kelmscott, he was at work on a number of fairly important
new canvases in addition to the retouching of old ones.  A sprinkling
of crayons and small pictures also has to be mentioned.  These
include the _Rosa Triplex_, a study of three heads from one sitter,
now in the Tate Gallery, and _Penelope_, a crayon drawing of a seated
figure, which is unique in the respect that it was done from a
favourite model of Sir Edward Burne-Jones.

Throughout the year 1870, with one or two exceptions, Mrs. Morris's
is the face which figures in Rossetti's work.  It is to be seen, for
instance, in the fine picture called _Mariana_, really a first
attempt at the portrait in the Tate Gallery lent by Mrs. Morris, to
which a second figure was subsequently added.

In 1871 he painted the picture of _Pandora_, of which Mr. Swinburne
says, in his "Essays and Studies," that "it is amongst the mightiest
of all Rossetti's works in its God-like terror and imperial trouble
of beauty."  The figure is clad in a long robe of Venetian red, and
is holding the fateful casket, from which issues a red smoke, curling
all round into clustering shapes, like flame-winged seraph curses.
_Water-willow_, a little quarter-length figure with a river landscape
behind, done in the same year, is interesting from the fact that it
is a portrait of Mrs. Morris, and that the view represents Kelmscott.

We now come to the picture of _Dante's Dream_, begun in 1870 and
finished towards the close of 1871, Rossetti's most important work in
the opinion of many people, and considerably his largest.  The
subject is that of the little early water-colour painted in 1856,
namely the vision related by Dante as having come to him of Beatrice
lying in death, and the angels bearing upward her soul in the form of
"an exceedingly white cloud."  The picture is more fully described
elsewhere.

[Illustration: MARIANA.]

Impressive as _Dante's Dream_ may be, it is not to be classed on all
grounds with Rossetti's finest work.  Yet it has been the object of
boundless admiration.  It has even been said that if no other of
Rossetti's works survived but this and the _Beata Beatrix_, they
alone would be enough to ensure him a place among the few great
artists of the world.

The next great subject in point of date, namely _Proserpine_, has a
complicated history attached to it.  Rossetti began the picture upon
canvas four times in 1872, with ill-success.  He took it up again in
1873 and painted a fine version which was spoilt in straining.  This
was replaced in the same year by a second fine one which arrived at
its destination damaged by an accident in transit.  A third large
picture had therefore to be painted in 1874, which still exists, and
finally the damaged picture was patched and partially repainted in
1877, which is the date it bears in the corner.  This is the finest
and best known version, and is the one of which an autotype
reproduction has been published.  There are sundry other replicas and
crayon studies of the subject which have not been mentioned, but of
the earlier attempts nothing now seems to be left in the form of
pictures, the canvases having been cut down into the form of single
heads.  In all these pictures the subject is the same.  The ravished
bride of Pluto is seen standing in a corridor of Hades, lighted by a
bluish subterranean light, and holding in one hand the pomegranate of
which she ate one fatal seed that bound her for ever to her destiny.
In none of the pictures done from Mrs. Morris do we find so
appropriate the distant air of melancholy with which the painter
contrived to invest her features.

Of the other pictures painted at Kelmscott perhaps the most
successful is _Veronica Veronese_, supposed to be taken from a
passage in the letters of Girolamo Ridolfi, which describes how a
lady, after listening to the notes of a bird, tries to commit them to
paper, and finally to reproduce them on her violin.  In the picture
the Lady Veronica is robed in a rich gown of Rossetti's favourite
green, with yellow daffodils in a glass beside her.  The bird, a
canary, is perched on a cage above her.  She sits at a cabinet, on
which is a sheet with the musical notes she has been writing down;
and listening with dreamy blue eyes to the bird's song she lets her
thumb wander over the strings of the violin suspended on the wall
before her.

Before leaving the year 1872 there is a minor but interesting episode
to record.  In this year Rossetti took up an old background of trees
and foliage which he had painted in 1850, in his Pre-Raphaelite days,
when studying with Holman Hunt at Knole Park, near Sevenoaks.
Nothing had ever been done to it since; but now Rossetti painted in
two women playing instruments and a group of dancing figures, for
which very charming crayon studies were made, and called it _The
Bower Meadow_.  This interesting combination of early and late styles
now belongs to Sir J. D. Milburn, of Newcastle.

_La Ghirlandata_, the next great oil picture by Rossetti, is dated
1873, and is one of those which has already crossed the Atlantic to
the bourne whence works of art but seldom return.  The picture
represents a lady playing upon a garlanded harp, in the midst of a
forest clearing, where angel faces peer down upon her, and mystical
blue birds cleave the air.  The whole is a subtle blending of subdued
colour, where blue and green strive for the mastery.  Beautiful as it
is in these respects, _La Ghirlandata_ lacks the invention and the
interest of Rossetti's more vigorous early work.

_The Damsel of the Sanc Grael_, painted in 1874 for Mr. Rae, is a
very different picture from the little water-colour of 1856-7.  There
was a simplicity and primitiveness about the latter which accorded
well with the mediaeval sanctity surrounding the subject.  When
Rossetti came to paint the picture again in his later manner, he
represented the austere damsel of the holy mysteries as a handsome
girl with flowing chestnut hair, bright lips, and languishing eyes,
sumptuously robed in a red gown with a heavily-flowered mantle.  In
painting this picture Rossetti probably did not seek much beyond mere
beauty of form and decoration, in the attainment of which he has
succeeded perfectly; and the same may be said in part of a
better-known production of the same year, the much-praised _Roman
Widow_, which represents a lady seated by the marble tomb of her
husband.  A large unfinished canvas, painted simply in grisaille,
called _The Boat of Love_, was begun at this time but abandoned in
1881.  After Rossetti's death it was bought for the Birmingham
Corporation Art Gallery, where it is now exhibited.  It may be
mentioned that the Birmingham Gallery possesses an unequalled
collection of Rossetti's drawings, recently acquired (1906) through
the munificence of two or three local donors.

One other subject dated 1874 is intimately bound up with Kelmscott.
This is an oil picture called by a variety of names--_Marigolds_,
_Fleurs de Marie_, _The Gardener's Daughter_, etc., but representing
in actual fact a young girl standing in a room, and reaching up to
place a mass of yellow marigolds and lilies in a flower vase upon a
high cabinet of inlaid wood.  The model is said to have been the
gardener's daughter at Kelmscott, not that the detail signifies,
except as connecting the picture with the place.




CHAPTER VIII

CLOSE OF THE RECORD. 1874-1882

One of the first incidents to be recorded after Rossetti's return to
London in 1874 was the dissolution of the partnership of Morris,
Marshall, Faulkner and Co., and the re-construction of the firm under
the sole management of William Morris.  The dissolution was not
effected without some unpleasantness, resulting in the estrangement
of Morris and Brown.  Morris and Rossetti never actually quarrelled;
but from 1874 onwards the two men seldom saw each other, Rossetti's
recluse habits of life being possibly responsible to some extent for
the severance.

The latter part of 1875 and the first half of 1876 Rossetti spent at
Bognor, and after that he visited the Cowper-Temples (afterwards Lord
and Lady Mount Temple) at Broadlands in Hampshire, being then engaged
upon his picture of _The Blessed Damozel_.

In 1877 he had a very severe physical illness, due to an uraemic
affection which had been set up in 1872, and which eventually was the
active cause of his death.  He was removed to a little cottage near
Herne Bay, and at one time gave up all hope of resuming his
profession.  "At last," says Mr. William Rossetti, "the power and the
determination returned simultaneously; he drew an admirable
crayon-group of our mother and sister, two others equally good of the
latter, and yet another of our mother.  Weather had been favourable,
spirits and energy revived, and he came back to town nerved once more
for the battle of life and of art."  The group of Mrs. and Miss
Rossetti is now in the National Portrait Gallery.

After 1877 Rossetti seldom if ever went beyond the doors of No. 16,
Cheyne Walk, and as he suffered from fits of melancholy, and disliked
being alone, a few faithful friends formed the practice of coming to
visit him by turns.  Mr. Theodore Watts was a more constant
attendant, and had a bed at his disposal.  A good number of
acquaintances also frequented the house, some of them much more
intimate than others and dating back in their relations to about
1866.  Among these may be mentioned the artists J. M. Whistler and
Alphonse Legros, Frederick Shields, F. A. Sandys and Fairfax Murray.

In 1878, or thereabouts, Rossetti's devotion to poetry received a
fresh impulse, and he set himself assiduously to the production of
sonnets.  It was not until 1880, however, that he began really to
compile materials for a new volume.  In that year he wrote "The White
Ship," and in the year following "The King's Tragedy."  Finally, by
March of 1881 the copy for "Ballads and Sonnets" was complete, and
was accepted by Messrs. Ellis and White on the same terms as the
first book.  At the same time the latter, which was by now out of
print, underwent some material alterations and was re-published in a
new form.

The pictures for 1875 include _La Bella Mano_, which represents a
lady washing her "beautiful hands" in a scalloped basin of brass;
also some of the studies for the _Blessed Damozel_, a finished
pen-and-ink study for a great picture of 1877, the _Astarte Syriaca_,
and a large pencil drawing called _The Question_ or _The Sphinx_.

[Illustration: ASTARTE SYRIACA.  (By permission of the Art Gallery
Committee of the Manchester Corporation.)]

The following year was mainly devoted to the _Blessed Damozel_, an
attempt to realize on canvas Rossetti's early poem which first
appeared in "The Germ."  The picture is a very fine one.  Rossetti
filled in the background behind the stooping figure of the damozel
with a heavenly landscape, in which were countless pairs of embracing
lovers.  In 1877 he added a predella representing the earthly lover
gazing up through space, and in 1879 he painted a replica, omitting
the background of lovers and substituting two angel heads rather
suggestive of those which occur in _La Ghirlandata_.

The year 1877 contains but three items, two of which are, however,
the important oil-pictures _Astarte Syriaca_ and _The Sea-Spell_.
The third was a _Magdalen_ bearing the vase of spikenard.

_Astarte Syriaca_ is a massive figure, with face and hair strongly
reminiscent of Mrs. Morris.  It was bought at its first owner's death
for the Corporation Art Gallery of Manchester.

The two finished items of 1878--for as the years advance the output
grows less and less--are _A Vision of Fiammetta_ and a water-colour
study of a head called _Bruna Brunelleschi_.  _Fiammetta_ is a fine
and striking conception, representing on a life-size scale the lady
beloved by Boccaccio, to whom he addressed the sonnet which begins:
"Round her red garland and her golden hair, I saw a fire about
Fiammetta's head."  The sitter for _Fiammetta_ was Mrs. W. J.
Stillman.

_La Donna della Finestra_ was painted in 1879.  This "Lady of the
Window," also known as "The Lady of Pity," is she who in Dante's
"Vita Nuova" is described as looking down upon the poet one day when
he was overcome with grief.  The head is taken from Mrs. Morris, much
modified by the conventions which Rossetti at this time introduced
into all his faces.  Not the least charming feature of the picture is
the clustering mass of beautifully painted fig-leaves growing up to
the balcony in which the lady sits.

During 1880 and 1881 Rossetti was occupied with three large pictures,
_The Day Dream_, _The Salutation of Beatrice_, and _La Pia_; with
_Found_, which had been re-commissioned by Mr. William Graham; and
with several replicas, of which the most important was the smaller
_Dante's Dream_.

_The Day Dream_ is a portrait of Mrs. Morris seated in the lower
branches of a sycamore tree.  _La Pia_, the last original picture
painted by Rossetti, depicts the story of Pia de' Tolomei, told in
the fifth canto of the "Purgatorio."  In Rossetti's canvas she is
seen, sitting forward in a window, gazing out over the poisonous
Maremma from the fortress where her husband had placed her to die.
_Found_, which was one of the first pictures Rossetti attempted, was
never completed.  After Rossetti's death, as already mentioned, Sir
Edward Burne-Jones added a little work to it, and in this condition
it was taken over by the purchaser.  It is now in America.

With this we come to an end of Rossetti's work as a painter.  It
remains briefly to close the record of his life.

In September, 1881, Rossetti, accompanied by Mr. Hall Caine,
undertook an expedition to the lake district of Cumberland; but after
a month his health, which at first had appeared to benefit, became
alarmingly bad, and he returned hurriedly to London.  After a partial
recovery from this illness his work was once more interrupted in
December by an attack of nervous paralysis, traceable to the effects
of the drug he had been taking.  In February, 1882, he was taken to
Birchington-on-Sea, where a cottage had been placed at his disposal,
and here he died on the 10th of April.  He was buried, quietly and
simply, in the little churchyard at Birchington, where a stone
monument has been erected by his family in the form of a Celtic cross
designed by Madox Brown.  A memorial window embodying his own early
design of _The Passover_, adapted by Mr. Shields, was also set up in
the adjoining church.

So passed away, in the fifty-fourth year of his life, one of the most
original artists of our time; I will not say one of the greatest
painters, for that would invite controversy as to points in which he
was, and knew himself to be, deficient.  But as an artist, as one who
saw, and could interpret and depict beautiful things in a beautiful
way, there can be no two questions about Rossetti's greatness.  Never
before has one man blended so perfectly the sister gifts of poetry
and painting that it was impossible to pronounce in which he was
superior.

To complain, as some have done, of the mediaeval quality of his
subjects is foolish.  As well complain that fairy tales are old.
Rossetti was mediaeval in his thoughts and tastes.  Without any
affectation or straining for effect he lived his intellectual life in
a mystical, richly-coloured world of romantic knights and ladies.
These, and not the hedgerows or buttercups of to-day, were what came
to the surface in his creative moods.  We have witnessed in these
latter years a great revival of romance, springing up in various ways
all over the continent of Europe.  Of this revival in England, on the
side of pictorial art, Rossetti was the fountain head.  The gentle
melancholy that pervades his work was derived from his namesake
Dante, to whom he was doubly allied by ties of birth and sentiment.
"He was moreover driven by something like the same unrelaxing stress
and fervour of temperament, so that even in middle age it seemed
scarcely less true to say of Rossetti than of Dante himself:

  'Like flame within the naked hand,
  His body bore his burning heart.'"


The direction of his influence, and of the Pre-Raphaelite movement
generally, has been worked out in a scholarly manner by Mr. Percy
Bate, in a book called "The English Pre-Raphaelite Painters," where
an attempt is made for the first time to trace the artistic lineage
of such diverse executants as Mr. Spencer Stanhope, Mr. Walter Crane,
Mr. Strudwick, Mrs. de Morgan, Mr. Byam Shaw, and others.  On many of
these the influence of Burne-Jones is more evident than that of
Rossetti; but Burne-Jones himself owed much to Rossetti at the
critical period of his career.

The subject of Rossetti's art is one that presents difficulty, on
account of the semi-privacy which surrounded it during the painter's
lifetime.  The subject of Rossetti himself is more difficult still.
It has become a sort of fashion to decry the man, and to forget the
genius, among some who knew him only in his latest years--perhaps by
hearsay mainly.  Stories of his want of consideration for others, his
egotism, his shabby treatment of patrons, his ungoverned temper, are
reeled off with a sort of zest, as though they summed up the man.
But in Rossetti good and bad were, as usual, inextricably mixed up,
with a strong preponderance towards the former.  There were periods
when his brilliant, impulsive, magnetic personality swamped the most
audacious faults.  For a man to stand out above his fellows is often
enough a signal for petty jealousy and stone-throwing.  But in such
cases, one may remark, it is not always a David who prepares the
sling, nor is it always the giant who is on the side of the
Philistines.




OUR ILLUSTRATIONS

Rossetti's record as a painter divides itself naturally into three
periods, beginning with a fairly numerous series of small romantic
water-colours, which to many people represent the most charming, if
not the most mature, feature of his work.  The subjects for these
were selected largely from Browning, from the "Vita Nuova" of Dante,
and from the Arthurian legends, themes which appealed irresistibly to
his imaginative mind, and which formed a common link between the
members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the later group of
young Oxford men which included William Morris and Burne-Jones.
Practically the only oil pictures painted by Rossetti during this
period were the _Girlhood of Mary Virgin_, and the little _Ecce
Ancilla Domini_, now in the Tate Gallery at Millbank.  This period
came to an end in 1862, with the death of Rossetti's wife, and the
beautiful _Beata Beatrix_ (also in the Tate Gallery) which was really
a memorial of her pure features, was followed by a number of
magnificent canvases painted from models of a rich and sumptuous
type, amongst which may be specially mentioned _The Beloved_, _Monna
Vanna_, and _Sibylla Palmifera_, _Lady Lilith_, the _Venus
Verticordia_, _The Loving Cup_, _Veronica Veronese_, _The Bower
Meadow_, _La Ghirlandata_, _Sea Spell_, and _La Bella Mano_.  Lastly
comes a large group of single figure subjects painted from, or based
on, the dark and almost exotic features of Mrs. William Morris.  Of
these may be named in particular _Mariana_, _Pandora_, _Proserpine_,
_Astarte Syriaca_, _La Donna della Finestra_, _The Day Dream_, and
Rossetti's last finished picture _La Pia_.

Owing to an invincible dislike for exhibitions, and the secrecy which
in consequence hung over Rossetti's work, the two earlier groups were
hardly seen by the public at all until after his death, and his fame,
when it spread, was based chiefly upon the large canvases of the
latest group, which may account for the very general belief that
Rossetti painted only from one type of sitter, with somewhat
exaggerated characteristics, a further error which may be explained
by the mannerisms which undoubtedly beset him towards the close of
his life, when his health had failed permanently and his eyesight was
no longer at its best.

Of the earliest pictures, painted for the most part when Rossetti was
little more than a boy, the following are selected for illustration:


(1) _Ecce Ancilla Domini_, which was exhibited in 1850 and helped to
bear the brunt of the vigorous onslaught which was made in that year
upon the pictures of the newly formed Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
There is nothing which could possibly shock us now in the simple,
girl-like figure of Rossetti's Virgin, crouching in half-awakened awe
upon her pallet couch before the grave-faced angel who is holding out
to her a lily.  In many ways it is a far more reverent treatment of
the scene than one is accustomed to in old Italian canvases with
their sumptuously robed madonnas and angels gay with peacock-wings
and jewelled trappings.  The painting, too, is a masterpiece for so
young and inexperienced an artist, full of skill in the handling of
white draperies and restrained in the use of colour.  The only bright
notes in the picture are the crimson cloth worked with a lily, upon a
stand at the foot of the bed, and the blue curtain at its head.
Everything else is subdued and faint with the clear light of an
English, not an Eastern, dawn, seen through the open window which
frames the golden head of the angel.


(2) _The Blue Closet_.  This was painted in 1857, and formed one of a
notable series of small water-colours which once belonged to William
Morris.  Although neither Dantesque nor Arthurian in subject, it is
strongly akin to the latter class in its feeling for mediaeval
chivalry and dress, and has been chosen because both in colouring and
composition it is one of the most perfect examples of Rossetti's
early work.  It represents two queens, the one on the left in red
with green sleeves, and the one on the right in crimson and gray,
playing upon opposite sides of an inlaid clavichord or dulcimer.  Two
other ladies stand behind them singing.  Blue tiles on the wall and
on the floor suggest the title, which in its turn gave rise to one of
William Morris's poems.

The next illustration given, as typical of Rossetti's intermediate
period is--


(3) _Beata Beatrix_, which was bequeathed to the National Collection
by Lady Mount Temple, to whom it formerly belonged.  This is so well
known from reproductions that it is unnecessary to describe it in
detail, further than to say that it represents symbolically the death
of Beatrice as set forth in the "Vita Nuova."  Beatrice is not dead,
but is seated on a balcony in a trance, whilst standing a little way
in the background watching her are Dante and the figure of Love.  A
crimson bird, the messenger of Death, is letting fall a poppy into
her lap.  Beatrice is robed in pure green, such as Rossetti loved to
paint, with faint purple sleeves.  A dial marks the fateful hour
which was to bear her, on that 9th of June, 1290, "to be glorious
under the banner of the blessed Queen Mary."  On the frame, designed
by Rossetti himself, are the first words of the lamentation from
Jeremiah, _Quomodo sedet sola civitas_: "How doth the city sit
solitary that was full of people."  There is a replica of this
picture in the Corporation Art Gallery of Birmingham, but it was an
unfinished one which was worked on after Rossetti's death by Madox
Brown.

Our next illustration is from a pen-and-ink drawing, and is typical
of a branch of work in which Rossetti excelled almost as notably as
Burne-Jones.  It represents:


(4) _Mary Magdalene at the house of Simon the Pharisee_.  The date of
this famous drawing is 1853, but it was not actually finished until
some years later.  The scene represents a procession of revellers,
amongst whom is the Magdalene with her lover.  In passing the door of
Simon she sees within it the face of Christ, and striving to leave
her companions she tears off the garland from her head and presses up
the steps.  Christ is watching her, and waits for her to reach him,
whilst the others try to bar her passage.  A young doe is cropping
the bush which grows against the wall of the house.


(5) _The Beloved_, painted in 1866, is probably the most perfect of
all Rossetti's pictures.  The subject is the Bride of the Psalms
advancing to her lover.  "She shall be brought unto the king in
raiment of needlework; the virgins that be her fellows shall bear her
company."  In the centre of the group is the bride, arrayed in such
gorgeous stuffs as only Rossetti could imagine, of an indescribable
green with flowing sleeves gorgeously embroidered in gold and red.
On her head is an ornament of scarlet oriental featherwork which
flashes like a jewel.  Four dark-haired maidens accompany her, whose
heads form a frame to her own beauty, and in front a little negro
boy, with jewelled collar and headband, bears a golden vase of roses.
The figures, though life-size, are only painted half-length.  The
faces are not of the type usually associated with Rossetti, and form
a sufficient answer in themselves to those who think that he never
painted from more than one model.  The bride's, in particular, is a
face of extraordinary beauty.  _The Beloved_ is one of a fine trio of
pictures commissioned by the late Mr. George Rae of Birkenhead, the
other two being _Monna Vanna_ and _Sibylla Palmifera_.  As stated
already, they represent Rossetti's prime, when his work was
technically at its best, and before his health had broken down and
driven him into forced or morbid mannerisms.


(6) _Mariana_.  This picture belongs to 1870, and was at one time in
the great Graham collection.  The title is taken from "Measure for
Measure," and has no connection with Tennyson's poem.  It was begun
originally in 1868, as a portrait of Mrs. Morris, and in most
essentials resembles the beautiful picture lent by her to the Tate
Gallery.  Rossetti discarded the canvas at the time in favour of the
latter version, but took it up again afterwards, painted in the
figure of the boy singing, and gave it the Shakespeare name with the
legend from the page's song, "Take, O take those lips away."  In the
Tate picture Mrs. Morris is seated at a table before a jar of roses;
here the lady is holding an embroidery frame, but in each case she
wears a gown of marvellous blue with contrasting chains and jewels.


[Illustration: DANTE'S DREAM.]

(7) _Dante's Dream_.  This, from its size and on other grounds is
regarded by many critics as the most important of Rossetti's
pictures.  It is certainly the most popular, and if frequent
reproduction be any gauge, stands high amongst all modern pictures in
this respect.  Its painting occupied the greater part of 1870 and
1871, and was a great physical strain, so much so that in the year
following Rossetti suffered from a severe break-down which
permanently affected his health.  The subject, and practically the
composition also, are the same as in a small water-colour of 1856,
and represents the vision related by Dante in the "Vita Nuova" as
having come to him of Beatrice lying in death and angels bearing
upward her soul in the form of "an exceedingly white cloud."  Love,
in a flame-coloured robe, is leading him up to the bier, and scarlet
birds, typifying love, are flying in and out of the house.  Two
handsome maidens, in flowing gowns of green, are holding up the ends
of the pall which covered the bier, while Love bends down and kisses
the pale face of the dead lady.  Beyond the arched doorway is seen a
glimpse of Florence with the Arno.  The picture when finished proved
too large for its owner's room, and changed hands more than once
before it finally found a resting-place in the Walker Art Gallery at
Liverpool.  Rossetti painted a second rather smaller picture, to
replace it, and added two predellas to the subject.


(8) _Astarte Syriaca_ is a vision of the Syrian Venus, massive and
splendid in form, with vague eyes typical of her mysteries.  She
stands, facing the spectator, in a robe of gorgeous green, which half
reveals the outlines of her body, clasping with both hands her
jewelled girdle.  On either side behind her are attendant spirits
bearing torches.  The picture is a good example of Rossetti's latest
work.  It was commissioned by the late Mr. Fry and painted in 1877.
It now adorns the Corporation Art Gallery of Manchester.




CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF CHIEF PICTURES


OWNER

1847.  Portrait of the Artist (pencil).  _National Portrait Gallery._

1849.  The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (oil).  _Lady Jekyll._

       The Laboratory (water-colour).  _C. F. Murray._

1850.  Ecce Ancilla (oil).  _Tate Gallery._

1851.  Borgia (water-colour).

1852.  Giotto painting Dante (water-colour).  _Sir John Aird._

1854.  Found (unfinished oil).  _S. Bancroft, Jun._

       Arthur's Tomb (water-colour).  _S. Pepys Cockerell._

1855.  Paolo and Francesca (water-colour diptych).  _Rae Collection._

       Rachel and Leah (water-colour).  _Beresford Heaton._

1856.  Dante's Dream (water-colour).  _Beresford Heaton._

       Fra Pace (water-colour).  _Lady Jekyll._

1857.  Designs for Moxon's Tennyson (wood-cuts).  _Birmingham Art
           Gallery._

       Chapel before the Lists (water-colour).  _Rae Collection._

       The Tune of Seven Towers (water-colour).  _Rae Collection._

       The Blue Closet (water-colour).  _Rae Collection._

       Wedding of St. George (water-colour).  _Rae Collection._

       Christmas Carol (water-colour).  _C. F. Murray._

1858.  Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon (pen-and-ink).
           _C. Ricketts._

       Before the Battle (water-colour)  _Prof. Norton._

1859.  Bocca Baciata (oil).  _C. F. Murray._

       Salutation of Beatrice (oil).  _F. J. Tennant._

1860.  Bonifazio's Mistress (water-colour).  _C. F. Murray._

       Lucrezia Borgia (water-colour).  _Rae Collection._

       Seed of David (oil triptych).  _Llandaff Cathedral._

1861.  Dr. Johnson at the Mitre (water-colour).  _C. F. Murray._

1861.  Paolo and Francesca (water-colour).  _W. R. Moss._

       Regina Cordium (oil).  _Arthur Severn._

       Parable of the Vineyard (Morris windows).  _St. Martin's,
           Scarborough._

       Crucifixion (Morris window).  St. Martin's, Scarborough.

1862.  St. George and the Dragon (cartoons for Morris windows).
           _Birmingham Art Gallery._

       Tristram and Yseult (cartoons for Morris windows).

1863.  Beata Beatrix (oil).  _Tate Gallery._

       Belcolore (oil).  _C. F. Murray._

       Fazio's Mistress (oil).  _Rae Collection._

1864.  Lady Lilith (oil).  _S. Bancroft, Jun._

       Venus Verticordia (oil).

       Venus Verticordia (water-colour).  _Rae Collection._

       Sir Galahad, Sir Bors, and Sir Percival
           (water-colour).  _Beresford Heaton._

       Madness of Ophelia (water-colour).  _Mrs. C. E. Lees._

       How they met Themselves (water-colour).  _S. Pepys Cockerell._

       Joan of Arc (water-colour).  _Beresford Heaton._

1865.  The Blue Bower (oil).  _Perrins Collection._

       The Merciless Lady (water-colour).  _C. F. Murray._

1866.  The Beloved (oil).  _Rae Collection._

       Monna Vanna (oil).  _Rae Collection._

1866-70.  Sibylla Palmifera (oil).  _Rae Collection._

1867.  Christmas Carol (oil).  _Rae Collection._

       Joli Cœur (oil).  _Miss Horniman._

       The Loving Cup (oil).  _T. Ismay._

1868.  Portrait of Mrs. Morris (oil).  _Lent to Tate Gallery._

1869.  Rosa Triplex (crayon).  _Tate Gallery._

1870.  Mariana (oil).  _F. W. Buxton._

1871.  Pandora (oil).  _Charles Butler._

1872.  The Bower Meadow (oil).  _Sir J. D. Milburn._

       Veronica Veronese (oil).  _W. Imrie._

1873.  La Ghirlandata (oil).  _J. Ross._

       Proserpine (oil).  _Charles Butler._

1874.  The Roman Widow (oil).  _F. Brocklebank._

       Damsel of the Sanc Grael (oil).  _Rae Collection._

       The Boat of Love (grisaille).  _Birmingham Art Gallery._

       Marigolds (oil).  _Lord Davey._

1875.  La Bella Mano (oil).  _Sir C. Quilter._

       The Question (pencil).  _Birmingham Art Gallery._

1876.  The Blessed Damozel (oil).  _Perrin's Collection._

1877.  Astarte Syriaca (oil).  _Manchester Art Gallery._

       The Sea Spell (oil).

       Portraits (Mrs. Rossetti and Christina Rossetti) (crayon)
           _National Portrait Gallery._

1878.  Fiammetta (oil).  _Charles Butler._

1879.  Donna della Finestra (oil).  _W. R. Moss._

       The Blessed Damozel (oil).  _Hon Mrs. O'Brien._

1880.  Dante's Dream (oil).  _W. Imrie._

       The Day-dream (oil).  _Ionides Collection: South
           Kensington Museum._

1881.  Dante's Dream (oil).  _Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool._

       La Pia (oil).  _Russell Rea._



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