Rossetti

by H. C. Marillier

The record of 1866 closes with an oil portrait of the painter's mother, towards whom at all periods of his life his devotion was exemplary; a large crayon drawing of Christina Rossetti, with her thoughtful face resting on her hands; and two designs for her second volume of poems, "The Prince's Progress."

In 1867 Rossetti painted the oil Christmas Carol for Mr. Rae, an entirely different subject from the early water-colour. This is a half-length figure of a girl, draped in a gold and purple robe of Eastern stuff, and playing upon a species of lute. Two small but pretty pictures of the same date are Joli CÅ“ur and Monna Rosa. The first represents a coy-looking maiden fingering her necklace, whilst Monna Rosa is chiefly a study in beautiful colour, representing a lady in a dress of pale emerald green, with golden fruit worked upon it, plucking a rose from a tree planted in a blue jar.

The next item of 1867 is the exquisite Loving Cup. The subject is a lady raising a golden cup to her lips, and standing against a background of fair embroidered linen, surmounted by a row of heavy brazen plates.

The year 1868 was cut into by Rossetti's breakdown in health and sudden anxiety about his eyesight. Nevertheless, he painted the portrait of Mrs. William Morris, in a blue dress, seated at a table before a glass of flowers, which many competent judges regard as one of his very finest pictures, and which was the prelude to that long series of noble canvases by which he has become best known to the public. Mrs. Morris has lent her portrait to the National Gallery, where it hangs (at Millbank) beside the Ecce Ancilla and the Beata Beatrix. Other productions of the same year, which closes the period of Rossetti's best work, were Bionda del Balcone; Aurea Catena, a fine drawing of Mrs. Morris; two studies for a future picture, La Pia, and some small replicas of no particular importance.

The insomnia which began to attack Rossetti in his thirty-ninth year, and which was the indirect cause of his subsequent breakdown, led him in 1869 to drop work for a time and to take a holiday at Penkill Castle in Ayrshire, the residence of an old friend. The visit is of interest, because it was not until this occasion that he gave a serious thought to the publishing of his early poems, some of which were still going about in manuscript in a more or less finished condition, though others were buried in his wife's grave. As a relief from the strain of painting, moreover, he began to write again. His first idea was to have the poems, such of them as he could collect or recall from memory, set up in type to keep by him as a nucleus for a possible volume; gradually, however, the idea of publishing outright grew or was forced upon him; and the last obstacle to this, the loss of so much of his early work, was finally removed one day in October, 1869, when, after a consent wrung from him very reluctantly, the grave was opened, and the manuscript poems recovered. In 1870 the book appeared, having as publisher Mr. F S. Ellis, of King Street, Covent Garden. The poems proved an immediate and lucrative success, and were favourably reviewed except for the single attack made upon them in a pseudonymous article by the late Mr. Buchanan. The effect of even one attack, however, and it was admittedly a very unfair and bitter attack, on a man of Rossetti's temperament, suffering from nervous fancies, and troubled by want of sleep, was disastrous. He viewed as a great conspiracy against him what other men, in sounder health, would have been able to disregard, and the effect was unhappily permanent. He had begun to acquire the habit of taking chloral as a cure for sleeplessness, without knowing, what is well known now, its lamentable after-effect, and for a short time, if one may accept his brother's judgment, Rossetti was hardly to be regarded as sane. A severe breakdown caused him to be removed once more to Scotland, where after a complete rest he was enabled to resume painting, and in September, 1872, he joined with Mr. and Mrs. Morris in taking the old Elizabethan Manor House of Kelmscott, on the borders of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire. His work here consisted to a large extent in repainting many of his old pictures, which he had sent to him for the purpose. In this way he worked upon the Lilith, Beloved, Monna Vanna, and other important canvases, including even the little early Ecce Ancilla Domini. Rossetti left Kelmscott in July, 1874, and returned to London; and that was the end of his connection with the quiet Gloucestershire retreat, which thenceforward became associated solely with the life of William Morris.

During the years 1869 to 1871, and the two following which Rossetti spent at Kelmscott, he was at work on a number of fairly important new canvases in addition to the retouching of old ones. A sprinkling of crayons and small pictures also has to be mentioned. These include the Rosa Triplex, a study of three heads from one sitter, now in the Tate Gallery, and Penelope, a crayon drawing of a seated figure, which is unique in the respect that it was done from a favourite model of Sir Edward Burne-Jones.

Throughout the year 1870, with one or two exceptions, Mrs. Morris's is the face which figures in Rossetti's work. It is to be seen, for instance, in the fine picture called Mariana, really a first attempt at the portrait in the Tate Gallery lent by Mrs. Morris, to which a second figure was subsequently added.

In 1871 he painted the picture of Pandora, of which Mr. Swinburne says, in his "Essays and Studies," that "it is amongst the mightiest of all Rossetti's works in its God-like terror and imperial trouble of beauty." The figure is clad in a long robe of Venetian red, and is holding the fateful casket, from which issues a red smoke, curling all round into clustering shapes, like flame-winged seraph curses. Water-willow, a little quarter-length figure with a river landscape behind, done in the same year, is interesting from the fact that it is a portrait of Mrs. Morris, and that the view represents Kelmscott.

We now come to the picture of Dante's Dream, begun in 1870 and finished towards the close of 1871, Rossetti's most important work in the opinion of many people, and considerably his largest. The subject is that of the little early water-colour painted in 1856, namely the vision related by Dante as having come to him of Beatrice lying in death, and the angels bearing upward her soul in the form of "an exceedingly white cloud." The picture is more fully described elsewhere.