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| ROSSETTI. | Brothers, photo. ASTARTE SYRIACA. |
| (By permission of the Corporation of Manchester, the owners of the picture.) | |
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| Mansell & Co. | |
| ROSSETTI. | THE DAY DREAM. |
He was barely eighteen when he became a pupil at the Royal Academy, studying a couple of years later under Madox Brown, who was not many years older than himself. Even then Rossetti had an almost mesmeric influence upon his friends. He was a pale, tall, thin young man, who always walked with a slight stoop; reserved, dry in his manner, and careless in dress, there was nothing captivating about him at a transitory meeting. But his pale face was lit up by his unusually reflective, deeply clouded, contemplative eyes; and about his defiant mouth there played that contempt of the profane crowd which is natural to a superior mind, while the laurel of fame was already twined about his youthful forehead. In 1849, when he was exhibiting his earliest picture, he had published in The Germ, to say nothing of his numerous poems, a mystical, visionary, sketch in prose named Hand and Soul, which was much praised by men of the highest intellect in London. Soon afterwards he published a volume entitled Dante and his Circle, in which he translated a number of old Italian poems, and rendered Dante’s Vita Nuova into strictly archaic English prose. Reserved as he was towards strangers, he was irresistibly attractive to his friends, and his brilliant, genial conversation won him the goodwill of every one. A man of gifted and delicate nature, sensitive to an extreme degree, a sedentary student who had yet an enthusiasm for knightly deeds, a jaded spirit capable of morbidly heightened, exotic sensibility and soft, melting reverie, one whose overstrained nerves only vibrated if he slept in the daytime and worked at night, it seemed as though Rossetti was born to be the father of the décadence, of that state of spirit which every one now perceives to be flooding Europe.
| ROSSETTI. STUDY FOR ASTARTE SYRIACA. |
His later career was as quiet as its opening had been brilliant. After that graciously sentimental little picture, “Ecce Ancilla Domini,” Rossetti exhibited in public only once again; this was in 1856. From that date the public saw no more of his painting. He worked only for his friends and the friends of his friends. He was famous only in private, and looked up to like a god within a narrow circle of admirers. One of his acquaintances, the painter Deverell, had introduced him in 1850 to the woman who became for him what Saskia Uylenburgh had been for Rembrandt and Helene Fourment for Rubens—his type of feminine beauty. She was a young dressmaker’s assistant, Miss Eleanor Siddal. Her thick, heavy hair was fair, with that faint reddish tint in it which Titian painted; it grew in two tapering bands deep down into the neck, being there somewhat fairer than it was above, and it curled thickly. Her eyes had something indefinite in their expression; nothing, however, that was dreamy, mobile, and changeable, for they seemed rather to be insuperable, fathomless, and unnaturally vivid. All the play of her countenance lay in the lower part of her face, in the nostrils, mouth, and chin. The mouth, indeed, with its deep corners, sharply chiselled outlines, and lips triumphantly curved, was particularly expressive. And her tall, slender figure had a refined distinction of line. In 1860 they married. Some of his most beautiful works were painted during this epoch—the “Beata Beatrix,” the “Sibylla Palmifera,” “Monna Vanna,” “Venus Verticordia,” “Lady Lilith,” and “The Beloved”—pictures which he painted without a thought of exhibition or success. After a union of barely two years this passionately loved woman died, shortly after the birth of a still-born child. He laid a whole volume of manuscript poems—many of them inspired by her—in the coffin, and they were buried with her. From that time he lived solitary and secluded from the world, surrounded by mediæval antiques, in his old-fashioned house at Chelsea, entirely given up to his dreams, a stranger in a world without light. He suffered much from ill-health, and was sensitive and hypochondriacal, and, indeed, undermined his health by an immoderate use of chloral. His friends entreated him to bring out his poems, and all England was expectant when Rossetti at length yielded to pressure, opened the grave of his wife, and took out the manuscript. The poems appeared in the April of 1870. The first edition was bought up in ten days, and there followed six others. Wherever he appeared he was honoured like a god. But the attacks directed against the first pictures of the pre-Raphaelites were repeated, although now transferred to another region. A pseudonymous article by Robert Buchanan in the Contemporary Review, and published afterwards as a pamphlet, entitled The Fleshly School of Poetry, accused Rossetti of immorality and imitation of Baudelaire and the Marquis de Sade. Rossetti stepped once more into the arena, and replied by a letter in the Athenæum headed The Stealthy School of Criticism. From that time he shut himself up completely, never went out, and led “the hole-and-cornerest existence.”
In 1881 he published a second volume of poems, chiefly composed of ballads and sonnets. A year afterwards, on 10th April 1882, he died, honoured, even in the academical circles in which he never mingled, as one of the greatest men in England. The exhibition of his works which was opened a couple of months after his death created an immense sensation. Those of his pictures which had not been already sold straight from the easel were paid for with their weight in gold, and are now scattered in great English country mansions and certain private galleries in Florence. The only very rich collection in London is that of an intimate friend of the artist, the late Mr. Leyland, who had gathered together, in his splendid house in the West End, probably the most beautiful work of which the East can boast in carpets and vases, or the early Renaissance in intaglios, small bronzes, and ornaments. Here, surrounded by the quaint and delicate pictures of Carlo Crivelli and Botticelli, Rossetti was in the society of his contemporaries.