(2) The Death of Breuse sans Pitié, one of the crudest and least successful of Rossetti's water-colours.
(3) The Chapel before the Lists, a scene suggested by Malory of a lady helping to arm a kneeling knight, her long white head-dress, as she stoops to kiss him, falling like a mantle down her blue dress. Upon the pointed shield of the knight is a figure of a maiden in distress. Beyond the chapel is a tented field, and knights going forth to joust.
(4) The Tune of Seven Towers, a quaint little scene, very characteristic of Rossetti's fertility and originality of invention. A lady in red with mediaeval head-dress is sitting in a high oaken chair, which above towers up into a sort of belfry, and is playing upon a musical instrument which also forms part of the chair. A man in green doublet, with long boots, sits sideways on a stool close by watching her, and a second lady stands mournfully behind. A banner hangs down at the right from a pole which cuts the picture diagonally in half.
(5) The Blue Closet, illustrated and described elsewhere.
THE BLUE CLOSET.
The Wedding of St. George, in the same collection, belongs to this year, but was not acquired from Mr. Morris. The old story of St. George and the Dragon had a powerful influence upon the romantic school to which Rossetti belonged. Burne-Jones's variations upon it are well known, and Rossetti also, besides treating it as a whole in a series of designs for stained glass windows, painted St. George more than once at typical stages of the adventure. In this earliest version he is resting from his feat, clad in armour, with a gorgeous surcoat, whilst the princess kneels and leans her head upon his breast, cutting off a long dark lock of hair which she has bound upon the crest of his helmet. The dragon's head, a monstrous object, stands grotesquely in one corner in a box with ropes attached for drawing it along. In the background is a hedge of flowers and attendant angels playing on bells.
The artistic and romantic impulses stirring in England at the midpoint of the century had, as we have seen, produced one notable movement in the shape of the "Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood." Five or six years later they gave rise to another, not less important, and shortly afterwards a fusion of the two took place. The second of these "Brotherhoods"—the word was actually adopted for a time—had its origin at Exeter College, Oxford, in the personalities of William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, and resolved itself at first, like its forerunner, into a "crusade and holy warfare against the age," with an added religious tinge which was hardly visible in the other. The Oxford group, like the "P.R.B.," published a magazine to illustrate, not to preach, their principles, and had as a tangible link with Rossetti the same warm appreciation of the beauties of the Arthurian legend first introduced to their notice by Burne-Jones.
In the Christmas vacation of 1855 Burne-Jones came up to London, and after attending a meeting of the Working Men's College in order to see Rossetti, whom he and Morris had already begun to worship, he was introduced to him at Vernon Lushington's rooms in Doctors' Commons. The next day he visited Rossetti in his studio at Blackfriars, and saw him working on Fra Pace. Thus was laid the foundation of an alliance which even more potently than the "P.R.B." has changed the face of art in England, and which resulted in the formation of a group that for combined poetic, literary, and artistic power is unapproached in the history of the nation. Incidentally, it was this visit that determined Burne-Jones—hankering after art, but predestined for the Church—to become a painter; and no one can fail to be struck with the evidence of Rossetti's influence upon his early work.