Emery Walker
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI
From the portrait by himself in the National Portrait Gallery.
To face page 59.
CHAPTER V
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI
I can hardly say what it was that gave to my early efforts in journalism a decided bent towards the study of Art; for although my first experiments, as I have already said, were made as a dramatic critic, I very soon found myself employing the best of my energies in another direction.
My elder sister had already begun a serious study of painting, and that no doubt partly influenced my taste as a boy. Not that my keen interest in the drama ever lapsed, even during the period when I was qualifying myself as an Art Critic; but it lay dormant for a time, in so far at least as my journalistic occupation was concerned; and apart from my daily work upon the Globe, and those lighter essays on general and social topics contributed to the Examiner and the Saturday Review, my main energies for several years to come were destined to be employed in the criticism of pictorial art.
It is not quite easy now to realise the extraordinary interest with which the annual exhibitions at the Royal Academy were then greeted by those whose minds had been awakened to the new movement in painting.
I can remember year after year, from the age of sixteen, presenting myself on each opening Monday at eight o’clock in the morning at the doors of Burlington House, and snatching an hour there before making my way to the City. The pre-Raphaelite movement had begotten a freshly awakened spirit, not only in the workers themselves, but in those who worshipped them. The advent of Ruskin had kindled a new flame which made a study of Art something more than mere dilettantism. It was with something almost of religious fervour that we awaited the advent of a new Millais or Holman Hunt, for it was then only on rare occasions that we had the chance of seeing an example of the work of Rossetti.