Dante Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite movement

by Esther Wood

In the autumn of 1850 Rossetti began, during his stay with Hunt and F.G. Stephens at Sevenoaks, a number of sketches with a view to a large and elaborate picture of “Kate the Queen,” from Browning’s well-known lyric. But he could never satisfy himself with the design, and after much toil, disheartenment, and perplexity, the subject was abandoned, like many more promising themes which from time to time inspired Rossetti. The entire year, save for the success of “Ecce Ancilla Domini,” had been one of disappointment to him, and of disconsolate struggles for a new departure. He had made many futile attempts at designs for “The Germ,” but none pleased him, and now he was casting about for new matter and media. For, as his standard of excellence rose higher, he began to feel more acutely his technical shortcomings,—the results partly of his incomplete training and desultory study in youth, partly of singular ill-luck in his figure-models, and partly also of a curious constitutional deficiency—not of industry per se, but of the faculty to direct and apply his industry along right lines. No modern artist has disproved more completely than Rossetti the barren platitude which defines genius as “the capacity for taking infinite pains.” Comparison between Rossetti and Browning in their struggle with mental tendencies unfavourable to lucid and well-ordered art is too obvious to demand pursuit in detail. Both took the prescribed “infinite pains,” but neither in the most profitable directions. Browning was over-charged with thought; Rossetti with imagination; and both were cumbered with the difficulties of artistic speech. The art of Browning has frequently been pronounced crude, raw, and “undigested.” One would hesitate to apply such terms to any work of Rossetti’s; for his, even at its most elemental stages, generally erred in the direction of strained and laboured purism, being over-wrought rather than unripe in conception or performance. In both artists, an exuberant activity of output was combined with a curious inability to undergo the full discipline of just and coherent expression. Browning’s prolific and incorrigible chaos of diction and metre, and Rossetti’s want of balance and sobriety in draughtsmanship, are but instances of the too frequent impediments of genius in the process of transmission. Rossetti, when he attained perfection in technique—and that he did so absolutely and repeatedly can no longer be questioned—seemed to stumble on it, as we have already suggested, by a sort of exquisite chance, a divine surprise, rather than a logical issue. And, manfully as he strove to recover in technical science, and did indeed recover to a marvellous degree, the lost ground of early days in a splendid maturity, his sense of perfect drawing was too fine for him not to suffer keenly—so long as that sense remained unimpaired—from that inability to realize at will his own ideals of perfection, which to every true worker is the only thing to be called failure.

Distracted as Rossetti was throughout his life by the very richness and fertility of his own genius, torn ever between divided aims and conflicting purposes, the more mutually obstructive because of the restless and hyper-sensitive nature which was the field and victim of their strife, the difficulty of concentrating that genius upon the highest aim and purpose within its proper sphere was never more stubborn than at this period. So largely did the poetic impulse, in his youth, predominate over the pictorial method, that, as he himself declares in a letter written in retrospect, it was not until 1853, when he was twenty-five years of age, that he definitely adopted painting as his life-study and profession, and relegated his literary efforts to a subordinate place. Subordinate they were in name and for a time only: to be put forth with fresh ardour and greater mastery at intervals of his painting, and to surpass it in some respects in the essentials of fine art. Rossetti had yet to learn that he, even more than Hunt and Millais, was primarily and supremely a colourist in the broadest sense of the word.

But a still deeper and more abiding influence from the literature of the past was by this time ascendant in Rossetti’s mind. The love of Dante, already inherent in him, was nurtured by many tender associations of youth: it now increased and swayed him as a direct and urgent spiritual power. In 1845 the vague spell of the old name upon the young namesake had changed, for the latter, into an eager study of his great poetic inheritance. The magic and majestic visions of the “Purgatorio” and “Paradiso,” and still more, the unforgettable life-tragedy of their seer, had sunk deeply into Rossetti’s thought, until, from his own recreative alembic of fantasy, he began, about 1850, to bring them forth again on paper and canvas, in a rich and profuse miscellany of rough sketches and brilliant vignettes and colour-studies, too often left unfinished at a point of high promise and alluring suggestions of success.

It is not difficult to trace, through the strange parallels of circumstance and destiny, the sombre charm that bound the exiled poet of the fourteenth to him of the nineteenth century. It has been said that no ascendancy of a great poetic personality over one born in a later age has been more potent and fruitful in art than that of Dante Alighieri over Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In 1849–50 we find the latter sketching, first in ink and then in colours, the historic or legendary meeting of Dante and Beatrice Portinari at a marriage feast, when Beatrice is said to have laughed with her companions at the shyness and confusion of the young patriot-guest. The second of these sketches was severely criticised when exhibited in 1851–52, on account of a daring juxtaposition of bright light green and bright light blue in the colour scheme. This bold experiment was afterwards defended by Ruskin by analogy with the natural disposition of green grass, etc., against a summer sky.

It was at this time also that another new and important personal influence came upon Rossetti’s life. James Collinson had now separated from the Brotherhood, and was succeeded, at all events probationally, by Walter Howell Deverell, through whom, by one of those strange chances which sometimes modify in a moment the destinies of a lifetime, Rossetti made the acquaintance of Miss Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal; a young girl of such remarkable beauty that Deverell at once asked her to sit to him as a model, and introduced her to Rossetti for the same purpose. The story runs to the effect that Deverell, who was himself of singularly handsome and winning presence, accidentally caught sight of Miss Siddal’s face, with its regular, delicate features and profusion of rich, dark auburn hair, in the background of a shop-window where she—the daughter of a Sheffield cutler—was engaged as a milliner’s assistant. To Deverell, being at that time in search of a model for his new picture, “Viola,” from Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night,” the sight of such a face was doubly welcome. He quickly made such frank and honourable advances as his graces of person and character facilitated, and Miss Siddal’s début in the studios of the Brotherhood brought not only to Deverell a perfect Viola, but to Rossetti an ideal and actual Beatrice. For the young artists soon found their model to be—in the old fairy-tale phrase—“as good as she was beautiful.” Of that goodness and beauty, that incomparable charm of talent and of character, of manner and temperament, which soon made her the centre of the warmest admiration and affection, enough has long since been written, by those who knew her, to render the tardy praise of less qualified historians alike needless and impertinent. The members of the Brotherhood vied with each other in the endeavour to immortalize her in their paintings. Rossetti, Hunt, and Millais did so with unqualified success. Rossetti, in his turn, discovered that she herself possessed extraordinary aptitude for art. He gave her lessons in drawing and painting, and the two worked together upon kindred ideals. Her presence in the studios was soon upon the footing of equal friendship and pleasant cameraderie. The vigour of her imagination is best seen in a water-colour drawing, “Sir Patrick Spens,” in Mr. Theodore Watts’s collection. It represents the wives of the men on the doomed ship waiting in agonized expectancy upon the shore.

Soon a different and deeper attachment sprang up between teacher and pupil. Her exquisite spirit, her gracious ways, appealed as deeply to Rossetti’s sensitive and passionate nature as did her beauty to his æsthetic judgment. His love for her was as the gathering up of all the scattered forces of his being into one consecrated worship. It may well be that the progress of courtship was not invariably favourable to the progress of art, but several rough portraits by Rossetti of himself and Miss Siddal, and of Rossetti by his fair companion, remain as pleasant witnesses of idle hours, and are at the same time drawn with singular vividness and force.

Early in 1851, or perhaps at the close of the previous year, Miss Siddal appears to have given sittings to Holman Hunt for the face of Sylvia in his picture of “Valentine and Sylvia,” already referred to. Rossetti sat with her as the Jester in Walter Deverell’s “Viola”—his most successful picture; taken from the scene in which the Duke asks the Jester to “sing again that antique song he sang last night.” The artist served as his own model for the Duke.

It appears probable that Rossetti and Miss Siddal were engaged as early as 1853, though the relationship was not openly avowed for a considerable period, and did not terminate in marriage until 1860. Rossetti’s pecuniary position, at the outset of his career, was naturally uncertain; nor did it materially improve with subsequent prosperity and fame; for his tastes and habits, according to the traditions of artistic Bohemia, were as luxurious and improvident as his earnings were precarious. Miss Siddal, too, was delicate in health. An early sketch of her, from Rossetti’s hand, and now in the South Kensington Museum, representing her as she stands by a window, in a gown of quaint simplicity and soberness, gives perhaps the truest impression of her personality that could be selected from the portraits of that period. The artless and yet somewhat austere pose, the fragile grace and slightly languid sweetness of aspect, afford a key to the criticism once passed to the effect that “she would have been a Puritan if she had not been an invalid.” The latter she never was in the sense of chronic inactivity, but of such delicacy as to give a peculiar tenderness to her service as a model, and unhappily both to delay and abbreviate the short period of married life.

To some critics it has been a source of regret that Rossetti should have come in youth so unreservedly under the spell of a type of beauty as exclusive as that of this well-beloved model. The rare blending of spiritual with sensuous charm which she presented in feature and expression so fully satisfied his own ideal of that harmony as to make him dwell upon, and perhaps specialize it, in a way which constituted a danger to his art; inducing him to read into other feminine types the individual characteristics of the one. Fortunate as he was in after life in obtaining for his models some of the most beautiful and cultured women in the artistic and literary circles of London, his tendency was almost always to look at them, as it were, in the light of that established ideal, and to conceive them as versions merely of that elemental loveliness which so dominated his thought. But it was inevitable that a temperament like Rossetti’s should specialize, through their very intensity, the dominant characteristics most familiar to his pencil and his brush. The case of Miss Herbert, an accomplished actress who gave him a number of sittings in the next decade, is perhaps the most striking exception to the rule; but her style of beauty was in too complete a contrast to that of Miss Siddal (being of a severe, robust, and Hellenic type) to allow of any compromise between the features of the two.

The combined influence of Browning and Tennyson among contemporary poets, and the increasing sway of Dante over the young painter, inclining him the more strongly in the direction of historic romance, produced, as we have seen, a somewhat desultory course of pen-and-ink sketches and water-colour studies during the next few years. The interval from 1850 to 1858 may be reckoned as Rossetti’s second period. After the completion of “Ecce Ancilla Domini,” he painted no important oil picture until the Llandaff “Triptych” of 1859, and the contemporary “Bocca Baciata,” which stands first in point of time, and high in point of merit, among the masterpieces of his maturity.