The “Bower Meadow” represents two women playing instruments and two dancing figures, for which he made charming crayon studies. All these figures were painted on an old background study of trees and foliage he had painted in 1850, in his Pre-Raphaelite days when he was working with Holman Hunt.
The next great oil canvas is dated 1873, and is called “The Ghirlandata.” To this year belongs “Ligeia Siren,” a drawing of a sea-maiden playing on a musical instrument, a preliminary study for “Sea Spell.”
“The Damsel of the Sanc Grael” was painted in 1874; it is a second version of that subject strangely showing the psychological change in Rossetti. The primitive simplicity so characteristic of the mediæval legend and also of his early work has disappeared. The austere damsel has become a “pretty” girl, with fair flowing hair, who holds a goblet. The unfinished “Boat of Love” was also begun in 1874. Rossetti came back to London in that year as has already been stated.
The dissolution of the firm Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. took place at that time and was reconstituted under the sole management of Morris. The dissolution did not take place without a certain amount of friction, caused by the disagreement between Morris and Brown. Rossetti seems to have taken Brown’s part, and although Rossetti and Morris did not quarrel, they saw very little of one another from that date. But it is well to remember that Rossetti lived a very secluded life, seeing very few people and labouring under the delusion that a widespread conspiracy existed against him. This was apparently one of the hallucinations resulting from the habitual use of chloral.
The end of 1875 and beginning of 1876 were passed first in a house at Bognor and after at a friend’s in Hampshire. The artist was then working on his pictures, “The Blessed Damozel,” “The Spirit of the Rainbow,” and “Forced Music.”
In 1877 serious illness kept him two months in bed, and when better he was taken to a little cottage near Herne Bay. There he was able to resume his work and drew a crayon group of his mother and sister as well as two separate drawings of his sister and one of his mother. To that year belongs the “Astarte Syriaca” (now in the Corporation Art Gallery of Manchester). The Syrian Venus stands against a red sunset sky in which the moon is rising, gazing full face, with large dreamy eyes. On the right and left two angel figures, holding torches, look upwards.
In that year the Grosvenor Gallery was founded and Madox Brown, Rossetti, and Burne-Jones were asked to exhibit. Madox Brown and Rossetti refused, but Burne-Jones accepted. The exhibition of his work there brought him the enormous popularity he enjoyed. Down to that time the public curiosity which had been roused by the controversies following the forming of the P.R.B. had not been satisfied.