It should be remembered that of this picture, and indeed of several of Rossetti’s finest and best-known works, certain indifferent replicas exist which have been frequently mistaken for their originals. The “Beata Beatrix” in the Birmingham Art Gallery was only half painted by Rossetti, and finished by Madox Brown. Again in the case of “The Blessed Damozel” of a much later date, the more familiar version is the inferior one. There was also a smaller replica of “Dante’s Dream,” shown in London at the Guildhall Loan Exhibition of 1892. Moreover, it was Rossetti’s habit to execute most of his pictures in more than one medium; thus many of his early pen-and-ink drawings were presently reproduced in water-colour; the water-colour designs of 1852–1862 were afterwards transferred to oils; and most of the important oil-paintings of his maturity were duplicated in coloured chalk; some even passing through the pencil, ink, and water-colour stages also. Not infrequently it happened that the chalk version surpassed all the others, as, for instance, in the grand “Pandora” of 1878–79, the most powerful of all his drawings in that medium, and perhaps the greatest of his symbolic figures. Very often, too, he would begin a picture on a very small scale, and gradually enlarge it through successive stages to its final size, as in the case of “Monna Rosa,” concerning which he writes on the 18th of June, 1867, to his patron, Mr. F.R. Leyland, one of the most constant and sympathetic of his buyers and friends,—“The picture is much advanced and in every way much altered, as I have again had it considerably enlarged! To begin a fresco as a pocket-miniature seems to be my rule in Art.”
The domestic calamity of 1862 rendered a change of residence imperative to the young widower, left desolate amid surroundings charged to the utmost with poignant memories of the past. The old rooms in Chatham Place became unbearable to Rossetti, full as they were of associations of courtship as well as of married life. He sojourned for a time in chambers in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and in the autumn of the same year he moved to No. 16, Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, where he lived intermittently up to the time of his death. It was a fine old house, well suited to be an artist’s abode; and especially fortunate in a large garden, which became a valuable resource to Rossetti in those sad days in store for him when any emergence from the seclusion of home grew more and more distasteful to his mind.
By the end of October Rossetti seems to have been established in his new dwelling, which thenceforth it was his pleasure to adorn with all the quaint old curios he could lay his hands on. In the natural revulsion of overwrought feeling, he threw himself upon decorative hobbies of many kinds; developed a passion for blue china and antique pottery; cultivated oriental textures and old oak; and haunted second-hand furniture warehouses with the pertinacious enthusiasm of the devout lover of a bargain. His shelves groaned under their picturesque load of reliquary wares and studio-properties gathered from every age and clime. Here, too, flourished a whole colony of curious animals, such as he delighted to indulge with unbridled license in his domains,—to the produce of countless anecdotes of their pranks, and of the embarrassment of their victims.
The house was shared for some time with three brother-poets,—Swinburne, George Meredith, and W.M. Rossetti. The last-named was for a considerable period a constant inmate; the others, less domesticated, and of strong peculiarities (as is the way of genius) of habit and of taste, presently departed, and their places knew them only as visitors to the brilliant haunt of many other literary celebrities of the day. It has been observed that the most intimate friends of Rossetti’s later years were drawn from the ranks of literature rather than art,—a circumstance which need not, however, be too closely paralleled with his own frequent and increasingly successful reversions to the poetic field. It must be remembered that the Pre-Raphaelite movement presents a combination of the highest poetry with the highest pictorial and decorative art incomparable with anything since the days of Michaelangelo. It was natural that the poetic wing of Pre-Raphaelitism, so to speak, should attach itself more and more firmly to the great group of independent and specialistic poets of the age, of whom no counterparts in original genius are to be found outside Pre-Raphaelitism in modern English art. As early as 1855 we find Rossetti well acquainted with Tennyson and in close friendship with Browning and Mrs. Browning; afterwards with William Morris, several of whose poems were inspired by Rossetti’s pictures; whose first volume, “The Defense of Guenevere,” was dedicated “To my Friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Painter,” in 1858; and whom Rossetti pronounced to be “the greatest literary identity of our time;” then with Swinburne, whom he placed “highest in inexhaustible splendour of execution,” and whose first-fruits in the tragic drama, “The Queen Mother,” in 1860, were similarly inscribed; and later still with Philip Bourke Marston, the blind poet; with George Meredith, Edmund Gosse, John Payne, and many others of the choicest if not the most popular qualities of song. From among the earliest of those memorable friendships there is preserved to us a fascinating record of one autumn evening, typical of many more, when the Rossettis and the Brownings assembled together to listen to Tennyson as he read from manuscript his latest poem;—it is the now familiar pen-and-ink sketch of “Tennyson Reading Maud;” one of those marvellously vigorous and convincing thumb-nail drawings which it was Rossetti’s wont to evolve, in his inimitable method, from the initial focus of a single blot.
In 1865 we find Rossetti writing to the “Athenæum” to correct a statement which seems to have been made to the effect that he, known chiefly as a water-colour painter, was now attempting a return to oils. The artist protested that he was then, and always had been, an oil-painter; and indeed, as we have seen, he was just now at his zenith of power in that medium, though the contrary impression made on the public is easily explicable in the light of his water-colour work of the previous decade, and of the Russell Place Exhibition of 1856.
By this time the irreparable loss of the one loved model of his early prime was in some degree mitigated, from the artistic side, by the good fortune which secured for him henceforward some of the most beautiful sitters known to the artistic world of the day; women of high culture and distinction, who added to their willing service in the studio the grace of personal friendship and, in several instances, of patronage of the most sympathetic kind. The austere and robust beauty of Miss Herbert, the accomplished actress to whom he was introduced in 1859, lay, as has been already said, entirely apart from his most cherished ideals, and seldom appears in his symbolic paintings. But Mrs. Aldham Heaton, a frequent and valued purchaser, and a lady of presence more congruous with his favourite type, sat for what appears to have been a second “Regina Cordium” in 1861; while in 1864 was commenced his long and most artistically fruitful acquaintance with Miss Wilding, the beautiful girl who served as the model for “Sybilla Palmifera,” “La Ghirlandata,” “Dis Manibus,” “Veronica Veronese,” “The Sea-Spell,” and several others of his most delicate and spiritual faces, including a third “Regina Cordium” in 1866. Miss Spartali, afterwards Mrs. Stillman, was also a favourite model for some years, and sat for “Fiametta” (distinct from “A Vision of Fiametta” in 1878), and for the lady on the right of the funeral couch in “Dante’s Dream,”—a work which remained on hand throughout this period.
Apart from the models of his principal pictures, Rossetti painted at different times a goodly number of female portraits, commencing the list of sitters with his mother and younger sister (the elder died at a somewhat early age), and including Lady Mount Temple, who became, with her husband, one of the few intimate friends of his seclusion in later years, Miss Alice Boyd, the kindly hostess of some of his happiest visits to Scotland, yet to be recorded, Mrs. William Morris and her daughters—among them Miss May Morris, now Mrs. Halliday Sparling, who also appears in the “Rosa Triplex” of 1869 and 1874, Mrs. Burne-Jones, Mrs. Dalrymple, Mrs. H.T. Wells, Mrs. Leathart, Mrs. Lushington, Mrs. Virtue Tebbs, Mrs. C. A. Howell, Mrs. Coronio, Miss Heaton, Miss Williams, Miss Kingdon, the Misses Cassavetti, Miss Baring, and Mrs. Banks.
Twice during these years of the gradual maturing of his technical power in oils did Rossetti make excursions into a distinctive branch of decorative art, the practice of designing for stained-glass. As early as 1860, William Morris, Burne-Jones, and a few others interested in this much-neglected craft established a firm which was known for some time under the name of Morris and Co., and for which in 1861 Rossetti executed a series of seven effective cartoons for church windows illustrating the “Parable of the Vineyard,” or the “Wicked Husbandmen.” Both designs are of extraordinary vigour and dramatic intensity; strongly mediæval in directness and simplicity, but with a large coherence and fulness of conception, and a harmonious richness of workmanship breathing a more modern spirit into the ancient tale. The dignity and earnestness of the drawing places it on a level with the best work of his purely romantic period, but its technical finish shows the more perfect balance between conception and execution which he was rapidly attaining in his maturity. The designs are now to be seen in the church of St. Martin on the Hill, Scarborough.
A similar work was undertaken by Rossetti six years later, when it was proposed to dedicate a memorial window to his aunt, Miss Margaret Polidori, in Christchurch, Albany Street, Regent’s Park, where she had long been a regular attendant until her death in 1867. Rossetti chose for his subject “The Sermon on the Plain.” This design also was executed in stained-glass by the firm of Morris and Co., and placed in the church in 1869.
By this time Rossetti’s commissions for pictures had happily become so numerous as to justify his seeking competent assistance in his studio. His friend Mr. Knewstub, at first a pupil, filled for some time the office of assistant. Then Mr. Henry Treffry Dunn was engaged in 1867, and remained with Rossetti almost up to the date of his death. It seems to have been in the years 1867–68 that his health, never fully re-established after the physical and mental prostration of 1862, began to give way beneath that most terrible and relentless of nervous maladies, the special curse of the artistic temperament—insomnia. To that slow and baffling torment, by which Nature sometimes seems to be avenging herself in a sort of frenzied jealousy upon her own handiwork, Rossetti’s highly wrought sensibilities and overwhelming imagination made him the more easy prey. His whole being was constitutionally endowed with that fatal faculty of visualizing the invisible, of suffering more acutely under imagined than under realized pains (though both were laid upon him) which, like an all-consuming fire, burns itself out only with the life that feeds it. Of such sleepless nights as thus become the terror of their victims, haunted with all memories and all fears, Rossetti has left us many a painfully vivid word-picture in his poetry; supremely, perhaps, in that most tragic sonnet, “Sleepless Dreams”—