In 1861 was painted, on a little panel, 10 by 8 inches, a portrait of Mrs. Rossetti, called Regina Cordium or The Queen of Hearts, showing just the head and bare shoulders, on a gold ground, behind a parapet on which rests one hand holding a purple pansy. A more important outcome of the year is the fine composition known as Cassandra. The subject is a scene on the walls of Troy just before Hector's last battle. Rossetti wrote two sonnets for the drawing which will be found in his volume of "Poems."
About this time (1861-1862) the firm of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co. was just being started, with William Morris, Rossetti, Faulkner, Burne-Jones, Madox Brown, Webb, and others as the active promoters of a venture which was to reform the arts of decoration and furniture making. Tapestry, furniture, wallpapers, stained glass, painted panels, and later on carpet-weaving and dyeing, were among the industries to which this band of highly original artists and designers turned their attention. The Anglo-Catholic movement and the demand for decoration of an aesthetic and sensuous kind gave the new firm plenty to do, amongst their first commissions being the embellishment of two new churches then being built by Bodley, St. Martin's on the Hill, Scarborough, and St. Michael's at Brighton. For the former Rossetti executed a design for two pulpit panels and several windows, achieving from the very first a mastery over this branch of art which few designers have surpassed. It is characteristic of his original mind that he went right back to the fundamental principles of vitraux, paying no attention whatever to the elaborations which had grown round them, and recognizing that a picture which was transparent, that is, seen by transmitted light, must be conceived in flat tones and not made to give the illusion of shading, as can be done in the case of a surface from which the light is reflected.
The Paolo and Francesca water-colour is generally attributed to the year 1861, although no particular authority exists for this beyond an auctioneer's catalogue. This beautiful little water-colour represents the first compartment of the double subject. In it Paolo and Francesca are seated before a window bearing the arms of Malatesta. Outside is a bright and sunny landscape. The lovers have stopped in the midst of their reading to give the fatal kiss that sealed their doom.
In 1861 or 1862 Rossetti designed two woodcuts for his sister Christina's "Goblin Market," published by Messrs. Macmillan. In 1865 he drew two more designs for "The Prince's Progress." The covers for these two little volumes, as well as for his own when they appeared, were designed by Rossetti, and are as original and effective and tasteful as his decorative work invariably was.
CHAPTER VII
SETTLING AT CHELSEA. WORK, 1863 TO 1874
After the tragic death of his wife, on February 11th, 1862, Rossetti could no longer bear to occupy the rooms they had inhabited at Chatham Place, and began to seek for others. In the meantime he took lodgings for a few months in a house in Lincoln's Inn Fields. He had a fancy for getting away from the crowd of London, and yet for being near the river, which caused him to examine one or two old houses in the then by no means fashionable neighbourhoods of Hammersmith and Chelsea. He finally decided in favour of No. 16, Cheyne Walk, a house which from some traditional association with Queen Elizabeth became known as Tudor House and is now called Queen's House. It is also said to have been described by Thackeray in "Esmond" as the home of the old Countess of Chelsey. Here he started a joint ménage with Mr. Swinburne, Mr. George Meredith, and (at casual intervals) his brother. Mr. Meredith's subtenancy was not of long duration; in point of fact he never really occupied his rooms. But Mr. Swinburne remained long enough to have shared very considerably the traditions which soon grew up round Tudor House, and whilst there wrote the most famous of his dramas, "Atalanta in Calydon," as well as many of the "Poems and Ballads," and a portion of "Chastelard." The gloom which at first had threatened Rossetti gradually wore away before the robustness of his nature; settling into and furnishing his house on new, and at that time practically unheard-of, principles, afforded abundant distraction; and for some years, until his own illness intervened, Rossetti played the genial and charming host to many old friends of his intimate group, and to an increasing circle of new ones who were attracted by sympathy or by the growing glamour of his name.
One of the charms of the house at Chelsea was its long garden, more than an acre in extent, with an avenue of trees on to which the studio looked. As time went on this garden became tenanted with a miscellaneous assortment of birds and animals, round which a veritable saga of anecdote has gathered. These, with his affection for bric-Ã -brac, his spontaneous generosity, his ever-ready wit, his love of good stories, and his endless flow of vers d'esprit, form a contrast to the somewhat sombre atmosphere in which he sought his inspirations, and in which, owing to the seclusion of his later years, he was popularly supposed to live.
To resume the thread of Rossetti's work, the well-known picture of Beata Beatrix, now in the National Collection, bears date 1863, but was only partially painted in that year, the completion being long delayed. One reason for the difficulty may have been that Rossetti desired to make this picture a living memorial of his wife, and that no regular studies of the face had been done for it. What he felt about it we may gather from the fact that for some years he refused to send out a replica, even when replicas had become a regular and lucrative form of business. In the end, however, he was prevailed upon to paint more than one repetition of the subject, none however equal in quality to the original.
To 1863 belongs a small oil picture called Helen of Troy, a full-faced study, head and shoulders only, of a rather pretty model, with masses of rippling yellow hair. The last of the St. George subjects also belongs to this year, and represents St. George in the act of slaying the dragon; a water-colour version of one of the incidents in a series designed for windows, but treated a little differently. Next come three small subjects: Belcolore, a very finely painted head of a girl biting a rosebud; Brimfull, a water-colour sketch of a lady stooping to sip from a glass; and thirdly, a picture called A Lady in Yellow, belonging to Mr. Beresford Heaton. We are now entering upon the period when Rossetti ceased to paint small heads and began to devote himself to larger single figure subjects, lavishing upon them the wealth of his fine imagination, and surrounding them with quaint and beautiful accessories such as he alone knew how to select. The first picture of this type, and in point of execution one of the very finest, is Fazio's Mistress, a small oil painting dated 1863, but considerably altered ten years later, when Rossetti renamed it Aurelia.