The artistic development of Madox Brown does not, then, offer any abrupt or marked transition from the first crude workings to the perfected application of the Pre-Raphaelite idea. This he pursued steadfastly, and with an unhasting diligence and quiet independence of spirit which indicates his kinship of temperament to Holman Hunt rather than to his impulsive and volatile pupil Rossetti, or to the impressionable Millais of early days. The complete outward divergence between the art of Madox Brown and that of Rossetti after, let us say, the “Triptych” for Llandaff Cathedral, painted by the latter in 1859–1860, illustrates not only the consistent progress of the former in his own distinctive line, but also the extraordinary fertility and cumulative splendour of Rossetti’s genius, which could create for itself during the next fifteen years so much more original and versatile a habit wherewith to clothe the noble and exquisite visions that thronged his imagination, each with the urgency of “a presence that is not to be put by.”
“Pandora.”
From the chalk.
By permission of Mr. Theodore Watts.
For the last twenty years of Rossetti’s artistic life he was known, and should be judged, supremely as a colourist; and from 1862 to 1874 his technical power reached its highest level. After completing in oils the “Triptych” for the Llandaff altar-piece, “The Infant Christ Adored by a Shepherd and a King,” Rossetti began to pursue more carefully, and with increasing success both from the æsthetic and the professional point of view, the system of half-length or three-quarter length female figure-studies, chiefly symbolic in motive, which he had already attempted brilliantly in the “Bocca Baciata” (“The Kissed Mouth”) of 1859, and which afterwards yielded such imaginative and technical triumphs as “Beata Beatrix” (1863), “The Blue Bower,” one of the most brilliant and sensuous of his paintings (1864); “Lady Lilith,” the type of purely physical loveliness, described in his sonnet “Body’s Beauty” (1864); “Il Ramoscello” (“The Branchlet”), or “Bellebuona” (“Fair and Good”), a gem of pearl-white colouring (1865); “Monna Vanna,” a superb study in white and gold (1866); “Venus Verticordia,” personifying again the earthly Pandemos, with the apple of temptation in her hand (1864–1877); “The Beloved, or the Bride of the Canticles;” and “Sibylla Palmifera” (“Beauty the Palm-giver”), both typifying intellectual and spiritual beauty (1866–1873); “The Loving Cup” (1867); “Aurelia,” or “Fazio’s Mistress” (Angiola of Verona, loved by Fazio degli Uberti, mentioned by Dante), another somewhat sensuous model (1863–1873); “La Pia,” the unhappy and captive wife of Nello della Pietra (from Dante’s “Purgatorio”), seen in her prison overlooking the Maremma (1868–1881); “Mariana,” from Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure” (1869–1871); “Pandora opening her fatal casket” (1869–1875); “Proserpine,” empress of Hades, enchained to the nether world (1872); and “La Ghirlandata”—“The Garland Girl”—(1873). Into these splendid and highly finished studies of the mystic beauty of womanhood, Rossetti poured the full soul of his gospel of romantic love—the love of absolute Beauty absolutely worshipped to the utmost reaches of a consecrated sense,—“Soul’s Beauty” and “Body’s Beauty” now analyzed and set in contrast each with each, now reconciled and made at one in the last harmony of perfect life. And in these great creations—revelations rather, and perceptions of the inmost verities of things, Rossetti attains the consummation of imaginative art—the crowning of romanticism with the purged inheritance of the classic ideal. It has been claimed that romance treats of characters rather than types; prefers, as we have said, the particular to the universal; and that Rossetti’s women are but splendid models, lovely sitters brought by a happy chance into his path, and used by him as the illustrations of that individual beauty which appealed most strongly to his taste. But in these rich harvests of his technical maturity the very realism has discovered the ideal, and as in pure portraiture, the sincere essence of classicism is regained.
A peculiar pathos must for ever be associated with one of the first, and, in the judgment of many, the most beautiful, of these half-length oils, the exquisite “Beata Beatrix,” now in the National Gallery. It is the supreme pictorial record of that central tragedy of Rossetti’s life, even more intimately revealed to us in his verse, which set him at the side of Dante among mourning poets. On the 23rd of May, 1860, Rossetti married, at Hastings, the beautiful and gifted woman of whom his courtship had lasted nearly ten years. The wedding had been delayed again and again through the uncertain health of Miss Siddal and the precarious circumstances of the brilliant but wayward young painter’s life. It was now accomplished with every augury of long-anticipated joy. The honeymoon was spent in a brief tour through Belgium, concluding with a few days in Paris, where Rossetti made his little impromptu sketch—so entirely out of his wonted trend of themes—“Dr. Johnson and the Methodist Ladies at the Mitre;” a pen-and-ink drawing which he afterwards repeated in water-colours.
Thence to the old rooms in Chatham Place, Blackfriars, partially rebuilt and redecorated for the happy event, Rossetti brought home his bride. The face of the long-desired wife now haunts the painter’s easel more continually than before, and recurs with ever-varying charm in nearly all his sketches and the very few finished pictures of the next two years. To this period belong “Lucretia Borgia” (entirely distinct from the “Borgia” of 1851); “The Heart of the Night” (from Tennyson’s “Mariana in the South”); the beautiful “Regina Cordium”—“Queen of Hearts” (a title also used for other portraits at different dates); “Bethlehem Gate,” and the best of several subjects dealing with the legend of “St. George and the Princess Sabra,” together with “Monna Pomona” and “The Rose Garden” of 1864, “Sir Tristram and Iseult Drinking the Love Potion” (1867), “Washing Hands” (1865), and many replicas of the Dante pictures of the previous decade. And in the numerous rough and half-finished portrait sketches, nameless but unmistakable, of Rossetti’s “Queen of Hearts” during those two brief years, the shadow of the coming bereavement can be traced in the gradually sharpened features, the more and more fragile hands, the look of increasing pallor and weariness in the earnest face which rests, in one of the latest drawings, on the pillow all too suggestive of its habitual place. On the 2nd of May, 1861, Mrs. Rossetti gave birth to a still-born son. From the consequent illness she rallied considerably during the autumn of that year, and the immediate cause of her death in February, 1862, was, unhappily, an overdose of laudanum, self-administered after a day of fatigue, during the brief absence of her husband from the house. Of the circumstances of the fatal mischance, in so far as they can ever be gleaned from that calamitous hour, of the utterly unexpected shock awaiting Rossetti’s return, and of the grief-stricken apparition which aroused the household of Mr. Madox Brown on Highgate Hill at dead of night with incoherent news of the fatality, enough has already been written by those whose sad privilege it was to share in some measure with the overwhelmed sufferer the long pain of that supreme bereavement. The pathetic incident that added to the sadness of the burial, when the young widower hastily gathered up all his poetic manuscripts of the past ten years and laid them beside the fair face in the coffin, a symbol of that best part of himself which he felt must go also to that untimely grave, has become an oft-told tale; and may now be laid in the reverent silence of affection and regret. Nor can the agony and prostration of the succeeding months be fitly recorded save in his own chronicles of song—the great elegiac “Confessio Amantis” of the “House of Life” sonnets.
Recruiting at last in slow degrees his powers upon brush and canvas, he dedicated their first-fruits to the painting of that most beautiful and faithful memorial of the beloved dead—“Beata Beatrix,” the Blessed Beatrice—Dante’s Beatrice; for the immortal story loved in youth had now redoubled its hold upon his heart. The picture was commissioned by Lord Mount Temple, who was from this time one of Rossetti’s most generous patrons and intimate friends. It was begun at Mr. Madox Brown’s house, “The Hermitage,” on Highgate Hill, but finished at Stobhall, in Scotland, whither Mr. Brown and an equally devoted friend, Dr. John Marshall, had taken the painter in the hope of restoring his now shattered health and assuaging the sorrow that had occasioned its collapse. Rossetti afterwards said of the “Beata Beatrix” that no picture had ever cost him so much to paint, but that in no other task had he been conscious of so perfect a mastery of his instruments.
“Beata Beatrix.”
From the National Gallery.
