Yet the water-colours of the second period, capricious and experimental in treatment as many of them are, include some of the most valuable, because the most characteristic and significant, of Rossetti’s work in the realm of pure romance. In these rough and often hasty sketches, sometimes less than twelve by twenty inches in size, his imagination seems to have been exercising itself upon the poetic subjects that haunted him by turns with the vividness of actual life, more vital and urgent than the realities of every day. Several, indeed, of the finest of these water-colours are now dated, on good authority, as early as 1848–49; such as the lovely little sepia sketch, “The Sun may Shine and we be cold,” given to his friend, Alexander Monro, a young Scottish sculptor of high promise, whose early death from consumption removed an artist who could ill be spared from the small and never very strong sculpture-branch of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. To this period also belong some of the most important of the Dante subjects. From 1849 is dated “A Parable of Love,” one of the best of Rossetti’s early drawings in pen and ink. The lady is seated at an easel on which she has been painting her own portrait from a mirror at her side. Her lover, bending over her from behind, lays his hand upon hers to guide the brush anew. Mr. Woolner served as the model for the lover. A pen-drawing from Browning’s “Sordello,” entitled “Taurello’s First Sight of Fortune,” also belongs to 1849, together with the powerful little sketch, “The Laboratory,” from the same poet, showing a strange, brilliant, witch-like or almost serpent-like woman in an alchemist’s shop, procuring from him some fateful elixir wherewith to play upon her rival and avenge herself upon the lover, once her own.
One of the most beautiful water-colours of 1850 is the “Morning Music;” a dainty little half-length figure of a white-clad girl seated at her toilet, another maiden brushing her long bright hair, while her lover stands, making music from some archaic instrument, at her side. At this time also Rossetti made the first sketch of a subject which fascinated him with peculiar force almost throughout his artistic career, and to which he returned again and again in several media, even within a short time of his death, but without ever achieving a finished picture—“Michael Scott’s Wooing.”
In 1851 were made the best of several water-colour drawings from the subject of “Lucretia Borgia,” and the first pen and pencil sketches of a subject suggested by the famous Döppelgänger legends of northern Europe. The design for “How they met themselves” remains among the very highest of Rossetti’s conceptions in pure romance. The final pen-and-ink version was not done till 1860, nor the water-colour till 1864. The subject demands further study in a separate chapter, together with the principal Dante sketches in this group. Several drawings from Shakespearean subjects, including “Benedick and Beatrice” (“Much Ado about Nothing”) and “Orlando and Adam in the Forest” (“As You Like It”), were also executed about this time.
Mr. F.G. Stephens traces some interesting modifications of Rossetti’s technique between the years 1850 and 1853 to the influence of his comrades in the course of associated work. From Millais he seems to have gained something of the easy grace and suavity of style which was lacking in his first too strenuous work; from Holman Hunt, the scrupulous and laboured detail which readily became as exhaustively (and sometimes exhaustingly) symbolic as Hunt’s own; and from Ford Madox Brown a certain robust breadth and dramatic mastery which was needed to lift his subjective creations into a large and quickening atmosphere. Probably it was the influence of Madox Brown that led him to the field of stern and practical social problems, of everyday romance; to deal with the eternally crucial relationship of frail womanhood to passionate manhood, and all its sweet and bitter and profound significance upon the life of humanity, as he dealt with it in the wonderful “Hesterna Rosa” (“Yesterday’s Rose”) of 1851, in “The Gate of Memory” six years later, and in the great realistic picture, “Found,” which was begun in 1852, but which, after many vicissitudes of neglect, spasmodic effort, and frequent despair, remained still unfinished at the painter’s death. It may be wished that Rossetti had pursued more thoroughly the motif which thus yielded some of the most remarkable and suggestive of his designs. This group, however, again affords a subject for consideration on a future page.
But the year 1853 saw also the first outward signs of the breaking-up of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Thomas Woolner, the oldest member of the Brotherhood, at this time twenty-eight years of age, being still unable to earn a living in London by his art, now determined to emigrate to Australia, where some friends of his family were already established at Melbourne, and to try his luck at the gold-diggings, which were at that time a source of much excitement and speculation in English circles. Woolner had already achieved some unpretentious but exceedingly thoughtful and conscientious work in sculpture, but he had not met with much academic recognition, nor with any substantial favour from the art-patronising public. For many years a pupil of Behnes, he entered the Academy Schools in 1842, and contributed a large composition of life-size figures representing “The Death of Boadicea” to the Westminster Cartoon Competition of 1844. His contributions to the Royal Academy exhibitions in Trafalgar Square had included “Eleanor Sucking the Poison from the Wound of Prince Edward” (1843), “Alastor” (from Shelley, 1846), “Feeding the Hungry” (bas-relief, 1847), “Eros and Euphrosyne” and “The Rainbow” (1848), and portraits of Carlyle and Tennyson. At the British Institution he had also exhibited a statuette of “Puck” (1847) and “Titania Caressing the Indian Boy” (1848). He sailed for Australia in the spring of 1853, accompanied by a promising young sculptor named Bernhard Smith (who died somewhat prematurely in 1885), and followed shortly afterwards by E.L. Bateman, another close sympathizer with Pre-Raphaelite aims. Woolner returned to England early in 1857, and then executed the fine bust of Tennyson recently placed in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey. His later work, however, can hardly be classed with that of the Pre-Raphaelite band. He died on the 7th of October, 1892.
In the summer of the same year the Brethren agreed to paint together a group of their own portraits, in order to send them over as a gift to their distant comrade on the gold-fields of the Antipodes. Accordingly, they met one day at Millais’s studio in Gower Street. There were present Dante and W.M. Rossetti, F.G. Stephens, Millais, and Holman Hunt. Mr. W.M. Rossetti, ranks the results in the following order of merit:—The portrait of Stephens by Millais, of Millais by Hunt, of W.M. Rossetti by Millais, of Dante Rossetti by Hunt, and of Hunt by Dante Rossetti.
Rossetti himself, as we have already seen, produced but very few male portraits. The large oil-painting of his godfather, Mr. Charles Lyell, and the pencil drawings of his father and grandfather; the water-colour sketches of Browning and Swinburne, and the admirable life-size chalks of Mr. Ruskin, Mr. Theodore Watts (said by Mr. Swinburne to be his masterpiece in portraiture), Mr. F.R. Leyland, Dr. Gordon Hake, Mr. George Hake, and Mr. W.J. Stillman, two or three pencil drawings of Madox Brown, and the painting of Holman Hunt, as above recorded, seem to exhaust the list of his efforts in that field, if we exclude the consideration of many excellent likenesses which occur among his genre-pictures. W.M. Rossetti, for instance, sat more than once to his brother for the head of Dante, and many other important figures; in fact, there was a general practice of mutual accommodation among the Brothers in serving as models one to another.
Yet the immense influence of the Pre-Raphaelite movement upon English portraiture in the latter half of the nineteenth century would be difficult to over-estimate. It must be remembered that the first principle of Pre-Raphaelitism—namely, that nature, including human nature, is to be painted truthfully and unflinchingly as it presents itself to the painter’s eye—strikes directly at the root of the conventional habit, which aimed at “idealizing” the subject into something far superior to the present reality. Still, as “the eye sees what it brings the power to see,” so the rightly-trained artist sees infinitely more than the casual observer, and his purest realism becomes the highest ideality. For in order to represent nature truly, something more is demanded than imitation. Diderot tells a story of a painter well known to him and to fame, who, on beginning work upon a new subject, always went down upon his knees and prayed to be delivered from the model. There was a grain of truth in his notion. To be delivered from the letter in order to apprehend the spirit, yet to follow faithfully the visible in order to attain the invisible, is the task of the portrait-painter. The mistake of the pseudo-classic idealists, as of the impractical folk in other walks of life, is to suppose that by aiming at the spirit they are absolved from the letter altogether; not perceiving that to gain the spirit they must reach through the letter, and beyond it. Every true portrait-painter is an idealist in this highest sense, that he perceives and reproduces the inmost and essential Self of his sitter, and in supreme moments resolves, as Spinoza would have it, the “potential human” into the “actual divine.” He portrays scrupulously the outward aspect, but interprets the whole by that pervading spirit from within to which the outward aspect has given him—as a seer—the key. The face he paints is not transfigured by his own imagination, his own conceit, however fair, of what that face might or ought to be; but it is revealed in its own distinct and actual being by a witness which, if truthful, must be as generous as stern. It is the immortal and inevitable “Thou Thyself” of which Rossetti sings:
“I am Thyself—what hast thou done to me?
—And Thou Thyself to all eternity!”