MARIANA.
Impressive as Dante's Dream may be, it is not to be classed on all grounds with Rossetti's finest work. Yet it has been the object of boundless admiration. It has even been said that if no other of Rossetti's works survived but this and the Beata Beatrix, they alone would be enough to ensure him a place among the few great artists of the world.
The next great subject in point of date, namely Proserpine, has a complicated history attached to it. Rossetti began the picture upon canvas four times in 1872, with ill-success. He took it up again in 1873 and painted a fine version which was spoilt in straining. This was replaced in the same year by a second fine one which arrived at its destination damaged by an accident in transit. A third large picture had therefore to be painted in 1874, which still exists, and finally the damaged picture was patched and partially repainted in 1877, which is the date it bears in the corner. This is the finest and best known version, and is the one of which an autotype reproduction has been published. There are sundry other replicas and crayon studies of the subject which have not been mentioned, but of the earlier attempts nothing now seems to be left in the form of pictures, the canvases having been cut down into the form of single heads. In all these pictures the subject is the same. The ravished bride of Pluto is seen standing in a corridor of Hades, lighted by a bluish subterranean light, and holding in one hand the pomegranate of which she ate one fatal seed that bound her for ever to her destiny. In none of the pictures done from Mrs. Morris do we find so appropriate the distant air of melancholy with which the painter contrived to invest her features.
Of the other pictures painted at Kelmscott perhaps the most successful is Veronica Veronese, supposed to be taken from a passage in the letters of Girolamo Ridolfi, which describes how a lady, after listening to the notes of a bird, tries to commit them to paper, and finally to reproduce them on her violin. In the picture the Lady Veronica is robed in a rich gown of Rossetti's favourite green, with yellow daffodils in a glass beside her. The bird, a canary, is perched on a cage above her. She sits at a cabinet, on which is a sheet with the musical notes she has been writing down; and listening with dreamy blue eyes to the bird's song she lets her thumb wander over the strings of the violin suspended on the wall before her.
Before leaving the year 1872 there is a minor but interesting episode to record. In this year Rossetti took up an old background of trees and foliage which he had painted in 1850, in his Pre-Raphaelite days, when studying with Holman Hunt at Knole Park, near Sevenoaks. Nothing had ever been done to it since; but now Rossetti painted in two women playing instruments and a group of dancing figures, for which very charming crayon studies were made, and called it The Bower Meadow. This interesting combination of early and late styles now belongs to Sir J. D. Milburn, of Newcastle.
La Ghirlandata, the next great oil picture by Rossetti, is dated 1873, and is one of those which has already crossed the Atlantic to the bourne whence works of art but seldom return. The picture represents a lady playing upon a garlanded harp, in the midst of a forest clearing, where angel faces peer down upon her, and mystical blue birds cleave the air. The whole is a subtle blending of subdued colour, where blue and green strive for the mastery. Beautiful as it is in these respects, La Ghirlandata lacks the invention and the interest of Rossetti's more vigorous early work.
The Damsel of the Sanc Grael, painted in 1874 for Mr. Rae, is a very different picture from the little water-colour of 1856-7. There was a simplicity and primitiveness about the latter which accorded well with the mediaeval sanctity surrounding the subject. When Rossetti came to paint the picture again in his later manner, he represented the austere damsel of the holy mysteries as a handsome girl with flowing chestnut hair, bright lips, and languishing eyes, sumptuously robed in a red gown with a heavily-flowered mantle. In painting this picture Rossetti probably did not seek much beyond mere beauty of form and decoration, in the attainment of which he has succeeded perfectly; and the same may be said in part of a better-known production of the same year, the much-praised Roman Widow, which represents a lady seated by the marble tomb of her husband. A large unfinished canvas, painted simply in grisaille, called The Boat of Love, was begun at this time but abandoned in 1881. After Rossetti's death it was bought for the Birmingham Corporation Art Gallery, where it is now exhibited. It may be mentioned that the Birmingham Gallery possesses an unequalled collection of Rossetti's drawings, recently acquired (1906) through the munificence of two or three local donors.
One other subject dated 1874 is intimately bound up with Kelmscott. This is an oil picture called by a variety of names—Marigolds, Fleurs de Marie, The Gardener's Daughter, etc., but representing in actual fact a young girl standing in a room, and reaching up to place a mass of yellow marigolds and lilies in a flower vase upon a high cabinet of inlaid wood. The model is said to have been the gardener's daughter at Kelmscott, not that the detail signifies, except as connecting the picture with the place.