The following year was mainly devoted to the Blessed Damozel, an attempt to realize on canvas Rossetti's early poem which first appeared in "The Germ." The picture is a very fine one. Rossetti filled in the background behind the stooping figure of the damozel with a heavenly landscape, in which were countless pairs of embracing lovers. In 1877 he added a predella representing the earthly lover gazing up through space, and in 1879 he painted a replica, omitting the background of lovers and substituting two angel heads rather suggestive of those which occur in La Ghirlandata.
The year 1877 contains but three items, two of which are, however, the important oil-pictures Astarte Syriaca and The Sea-Spell. The third was a Magdalen bearing the vase of spikenard.
Astarte Syriaca is a massive figure, with face and hair strongly reminiscent of Mrs. Morris. It was bought at its first owner's death for the Corporation Art Gallery of Manchester.
The two finished items of 1878—for as the years advance the output grows less and less—are A Vision of Fiammetta and a water-colour study of a head called Bruna Brunelleschi. Fiammetta is a fine and striking conception, representing on a life-size scale the lady beloved by Boccaccio, to whom he addressed the sonnet which begins: "Round her red garland and her golden hair, I saw a fire about Fiammetta's head." The sitter for Fiammetta was Mrs. W. J. Stillman.
La Donna della Finestra was painted in 1879. This "Lady of the Window," also known as "The Lady of Pity," is she who in Dante's "Vita Nuova" is described as looking down upon the poet one day when he was overcome with grief. The head is taken from Mrs. Morris, much modified by the conventions which Rossetti at this time introduced into all his faces. Not the least charming feature of the picture is the clustering mass of beautifully painted fig-leaves growing up to the balcony in which the lady sits.
During 1880 and 1881 Rossetti was occupied with three large pictures, The Day Dream, The Salutation of Beatrice, and La Pia; with Found, which had been re-commissioned by Mr. William Graham; and with several replicas, of which the most important was the smaller Dante's Dream.
The Day Dream is a portrait of Mrs. Morris seated in the lower branches of a sycamore tree. La Pia, the last original picture painted by Rossetti, depicts the story of Pia de' Tolomei, told in the fifth canto of the "Purgatorio." In Rossetti's canvas she is seen, sitting forward in a window, gazing out over the poisonous Maremma from the fortress where her husband had placed her to die. Found, which was one of the first pictures Rossetti attempted, was never completed. After Rossetti's death, as already mentioned, Sir Edward Burne-Jones added a little work to it, and in this condition it was taken over by the purchaser. It is now in America.
With this we come to an end of Rossetti's work as a painter. It remains briefly to close the record of his life.
In September, 1881, Rossetti, accompanied by Mr. Hall Caine, undertook an expedition to the lake district of Cumberland; but after a month his health, which at first had appeared to benefit, became alarmingly bad, and he returned hurriedly to London. After a partial recovery from this illness his work was once more interrupted in December by an attack of nervous paralysis, traceable to the effects of the drug he had been taking. In February, 1882, he was taken to Birchington-on-Sea, where a cottage had been placed at his disposal, and here he died on the 10th of April. He was buried, quietly and simply, in the little churchyard at Birchington, where a stone monument has been erected by his family in the form of a Celtic cross designed by Madox Brown. A memorial window embodying his own early design of The Passover, adapted by Mr. Shields, was also set up in the adjoining church.
So passed away, in the fifty-fourth year of his life, one of the most original artists of our time; I will not say one of the greatest painters, for that would invite controversy as to points in which he was, and knew himself to be, deficient. But as an artist, as one who saw, and could interpret and depict beautiful things in a beautiful way, there can be no two questions about Rossetti's greatness. Never before has one man blended so perfectly the sister gifts of poetry and painting that it was impossible to pronounce in which he was superior.