Rossetti

by H. C. Marillier

For the doings of the Brotherhood the curious reader will do well to consult the "Memoirs" and the "Rossetti Papers" published by Mr. W. M. Rossetti. Mr. Rossetti, not being an artist, was himself elected secretary, and with business-like care preserved in a diary all the daily and weekly occurrences that came under his notice. It is sufficient to say here that the weekly attendances of the Brethren, at first a constant source of pleasure and mutual help, had become very irregular by December, 1850, that an attempt was made to revive them in January, 1851, but without effect, and that Millais's election to the Academy in 1853 gave a final quietus to the organization, which for some time previously had ceased to exist save in name. The ranks of the Brotherhood had not even remained intact. In addition to Collinson, it had lost Woolner, who went to Australia when the emigration craze was at its height. To replace the former a young painter, Walter Howell Deverell, had been nominated, but his election was regarded by some as invalid. Deverell, whose picture of Viola and the Duke in Twelfth Night remains an almost solitary testimony to his genius, unhappily died young. He possessed many graces of appearance and manner, and was in all respects a fascinating personality. Behind the Brotherhood, and hitherto unmentioned, we seem to catch a glimpse of another very gracious, but retiring figure, that of Rossetti's sister Christina, who in addition to her deeply religious and poetic gifts, possessed a quiet fund of humour to be expended on the events that occurred within her little circle.

We left Rossetti, in order to describe the formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, at the point where he had just settled down in a joint studio with Holman Hunt to paint his first picture. In an enthusiasm for community of action, and a spirit of devotion to Keats, it had been proposed that each of the Brethren should illustrate, by an etching, a scene from that poet's "Isabella." Hunt, however, was already engaged upon his picture of Rienzi; Millais had work of a less than Pre-Raphaelite character to finish off, and Rossetti himself was seized with desire to paint a subject which much commended itself to his mystical and symbol-loving mind, The Girlhood of Mary Virgin. The only one of the three eventually, who touched Keats that year (1848) was Millais, who achieved a triumph with the striking picture, Lorenzo and Isabella.

Rossetti's subject, as can well be imagined, gave him endless trouble, and was a source of violent fits of alternate depression and energy. Madox Brown's diary, a document full of dry humour and quaint touches, to say nothing of its pathos, contains many anecdotes of Rossetti's exasperating changefulness and want of consideration which show that kindness did not blind the painter to his pupil's foibles. To Brown's description of Rossetti, "lying, howling, on his belly in my studio," and, at another time, reduced by struggles with impossible drapery to an almost maudlin condition of profanity, we may add Hunt's description of how he had solemnly to take his companion out for a walk and explain that if the interruptions of temper and multiplication of difficulties did not cease, neither of them would have a picture finished to show alongside of Millais's—a remonstrance which he says was effectual and taken in perfect good part.

So by the following spring (1849) all three pictures were ready for exhibition, and were hung, Millais's and Hunt's in the Academy, and Rossetti's either from choice or necessity in the so-called Free Exhibition held in a gallery at Hyde Park Corner. Here it was bought for £80 by the Marchioness of Bath, in whose family an aunt of Rossetti's was acting as governess. The picture is on many accounts a favourite one with lovers of Rossetti's work. Considering the painter's age and want of proper training, it is a masterly performance. The scene shown is a room in the Virgin's home, with an open balcony at which her father, St. Joachim, is tending a symbolically fruitful vine. On the right of the picture, are the figures of the Virgin and her mother seated at an embroidery frame. The young girl, a most untypical Madonna, in simple gray dress with pale green at the wrists, pauses with a needle in her hand, and gazes with a rapt ascetic look at the room before her, where, as if visible to her eyes, a child-angel is tending a tall white lily. Beneath the pot in which the lily grows are six large books bearing the names of the six cardinal virtues. These, and a dove perching on the trellis, are amongst the peaceful symbols of the picture, whilst the tragedy also is foreshadowed in a figure of the cross formed by the young vine-tendrils and in some strips of palm and "seven-thorned briar" laid across the floor. Rossetti painted the calm face of his mother for St. Anna, and his sister Christina for the Virgin, giving her, however, in contravention of the rule mentioned above, golden instead of dark brown hair.

Although 1848 is intrinsically the year of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, much of the work of the next two years comes within the scope of its influence. As an example may be cited the important pen-and-ink drawing called Il Saluto di Beatrice, representing in two compartments the meeting of Dante and Beatrice, first in a street of Florence and secondly in Paradise. The whole composition was repeated in oil in 1859, and the meeting in Paradise formed the subject of more than one separate drawing. The cream of Rossetti's Pre-Raphaelite work, however, during the two years subsequent to 1848, is the Ecce Ancilla Domini, a sequel in sentiment to his picture of the previous year. This is well known to frequenters of the National Gallery at Millbank, and is described elsewhere. It was exhibited in 1850 under the same auspices as its predecessor (though the gallery this year was moved to Portland Place), and was priced at £50. Its appearance was the signal for a storm of abuse and raillery, which descended with impartial violence also upon the pictures of the other "Pre-Raphaelites" exhibited at the Academy, and pursued them relentlessly until time and success finally established their position.

ECCE ANCILLA DOMINI.

It would serve no purpose to go again and at length into the nature of this attack. Charles Dickens and many other great men lent their names to it, and the Brethren were compelled to face evil days in consequence. But in the darkest hour a saviour appeared. Ruskin, who before the outcry hardly knew of the existence of the school, had his attention drawn to it by Coventry Patmore, and with characteristic fearlessness and energy plunged into the fray. In a series of letters to the "Times" he defended the artists at all points, from the charge of being ignorant copyists and realists, the accusation that they could not draw, the alleged conspiracy against Raphael, and finally from the subtlest insinuation of all, because it sounded so professional, the charge that they knew not the laws of perspective. This ardent championship had one curious effect. In his warmth of defence Ruskin had not only combatted the statement of faults, but had revelled in laying down an elaborate statement of principles. Thus it came about that the original ideas out of which the Brotherhood had grown, ideas of a broad and possibly nebulous character, became transmuted into hard and fast rules of conduct and of practice, which the Brotherhood more or less had to accept, partly perhaps out of gratitude to their benefactor, partly because they agreed with them in theory, and partly because they may not have seen how far they led.

On the other hand, if we are not to credit the "Pre-Raphaelites" with all the fine sentiments attributed to them in Ruskin's inspired defence, it is absurd to imagine, as some have done, that they failed to take themselves or their work seriously because Rossetti in his family letters used to speak flippantly of his unlucky little picture, which, like a curse, had come home to roost. Men often enough speak lightly to friends of things which have lain at the heart; and if Rossetti joked to his brother about "the blessed eyesore" and "the blessed white daub," it is none the less true that he had striven to put all his thoughts and all his knowledge into it, with such success that it reveals to us to-day an intensity of feeling and reverence which few modern painters have emulated, and to which Rossetti in his later work did not always attain.