Dante Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite movement

by Esther Wood

“Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon the Pharisee.”

From a drawing.

By permission of Lord Battersea and Overstrand.

Mary Magdalene

“St. Luke the Painter,” in 1857, is notable as being Rossetti’s first success in coloured chalk; a medium which he affected more freely in after years, and with extraordinary power and felicity; the medium, in fact, in which some of the noblest of his later half-length symbolic figures were executed.

After the year 1850 Rossetti almost ceased to exhibit in picture galleries. A very few of his pictures, including the “Bocca Baciata” and a version of “Lucretia Borgia,” were thenceforth seen in the Hogarth Club, a small society of artists and amateurs to which he belonged, and others afterwards in the Arundel Club, which he joined in 1865. An important exception, however, was made to this rule of seclusion in 1856, when a small but highly representative Pre-Raphaelite Exhibition was opened at 4, Russell Place, Fitzroy Square. Among Rossetti’s contributions were the first water-colour draft of “Dante’s Dream,” already alluded to, and its pendant, “The Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice,” “Hesterna Rosa,” “The Blue Closet,” and “Mary Magdalene.” The other exhibitors were Millais, Holman Hunt, Madox Brown, Arthur Hughes, Charles Collins, William Davis, W.L. Windus, Inchbold, Seddon and Brett. The “Dante’s Dream” re-appeared at the Liverpool Academy in 1858, together with “A Christmas Carol,” and “The Wedding of St. George”; “Fair Rosamund,” and “The Farmer’s Daughter” (study for “Found”) went to the Royal Scottish Academy in 1862; and “Mary in the House of John” appeared at the Fine Art Society’s Galleries in 1879. A version of “Pandora,” in 1877 or 1878, and a lovely little water-colour, “Spring,” in 1879, were lent by their purchasers to the Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts; “Tibullus’s Return to Delia” was similarly lent to the Albert Gallery Exhibition at Edinburgh in 1877; and in 1881 the Loan Exhibition at the Royal Manchester Institution included four important water-colours—“Proserpine,” a “Lucretia Borgia,” “Hesterna Rosa,” and “Washing Hands;” and five oils—“Proserpine,” “Two Mothers,” “Joli Cœur,” “A Vision of Fiametta,” and “Water-Willow.” These instances complete the brief list of Rossetti’s pictures exhibited in public galleries during the lifetime of the artist.

In the year 1854, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, already practically broken up by divergence of method in the leading painters, and changes of aim and sphere among the lesser lights of the revolutionary dawn, may be said to have been finally dispersed by the lamented death of Walter Deverell, and the departure of Holman Hunt for a lengthy sojourn in the East, there to paint directly from nature—according to the much boasted but oft-broken rule—the backgrounds and appurtenances of those Biblical subjects to which he was now strongly drawn. The death of Deverell at an early age was a heavy personal bereavement to Rossetti, and an occasion of genuine grief to all the Brotherhood, with whom he was exceedingly popular. Nor was the loss to art easily reparable, or the work of his surviving comrades unaffected by the removal of a painter of such singular purity and grace. He was a son of the Secretary of the Schools of Design, which were the precursor of the South Kensington Science and Art Department.

Rossetti and Millais were thus, in 1854, left alone as practical painters; W.M. Rossetti having been from the first exclusively a littérateur, while F.G. Stephens, after having produced in youth some work of high quality on strictly Pre-Raphaelite lines, had by this time adopted the same sphere of energy, especially in the realm of the art-critic.

But the phase of doubt and hesitation, of compromise (in no invidious sense) between the first inflexible attitude of revolt and the further impulse of re-construction, which had overtaken the Brotherhood in 1851, was by no means the special ordeal of Rossetti. It came soon afterwards upon Millais with an equal import and significance; as though each must pass, in individual experience, through the several stages of destructive and re-creative energy, first of protest, then of reform, and afterwards of reconciliation and progress, which they had recognized in the history of the past, and which their own work as a whole afforded to the history of the nineteenth century. They had to exemplify, each for himself, the resolute overthrow of partial and degenerate principles, and the pursuit, more or less successful, of a further and perhaps undefined ideal, or the reaction towards that very order against which their own strenuous protest had been set. And it is remarkable that, in the case both of Rossetti and of Millais, the painter should have reached his highest level of excellence in art precisely at the moment when his methods were the most unsettled and his principles the least assured. The most discerning critics now agree in placing the high-water mark of Rossetti’s genius in the midst of this transition period, ranging from 1850 to 1860, or, if the decade may be stretched by a license of etymology, covering the “Beata Beatrix” of 1863. And it is scarcely disputable that the supreme achievements of Millais lie within a narrower space, comprising chiefly the “Hugenot” and “Ophelia” of 1852, “The Order of Release” of 1853, “Autumn Leaves” and “The Blind Girl” of 1856, and “The Eve of St. Agnes” in 1863, which really belongs in conception and spirit to the Keats epoch, if we may so call it, which gave birth to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Just as in the dawn of the Italian Renaissance the point of absolute greatness in art was gained at the momentary coalition of the old forces with the new, when the classic spirit was conquered and absorbed by the spirit of romance, and the romantic spirit still beat tremulously about the new world’s doors, so in the struggle of the modern Pre-Raphaelites to reconcile the new impulse with the heritage of the past, the triumph came in the midst of the conflict rather than after the victory. Just as Leonardo and Michaelangelo gathered up and combined the discordant elements of the strife around them into a noble harmony of art, so did the Pre-Raphaelites attune and interpret the diverse forces of their own revolution when they felt its import most acutely, and least knew whither it would lead them. And to almost opposite poles of thought and sentiment were Millais and Rossetti led.