 | |
| ROSSETTI. | Seemann, Leipzig. DANTE’S DREAM. |
| (By permission of the Corporation of Liverpool, the owners of the picture.) | |
 | |
| ROSSETTI. | Cassell & Co. ROSA TRIPLEX. |
| (By permission of Mr. F. Hollyer, the owner of the copyright.) | |
His range of subject was not wide. In his earliest period he had a fancy for painting small biblical pictures, of which “Ecce Ancilla Domini” is the best known, and the delightfully archaic “Girlhood of Mary Virgin” one of the most beautiful. But this austerely biblical tendency was not of long continuance. It soon gave way to a brilliant, imaginative Romanticism, to which he was prompted by Dante. “Giotto painting the Portrait of Dante,” “The Salutation of Beatrice on Earth and in Eden” (from the Vita Nuova), “La Pia” (from the Purgatorio), the “Beata Beatrix,” and “Dante’s Dream,” in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, are the leading works which arose under the influence of the great Italian. The head of his wife, with her heavily veiled eyes, and Giotto’s well-known picture of Dante, sufficed him for the creation of the most tender, mystical poems, which, at the same time, show him in all the splendour of his wealth of colour. He revels in the most brilliant hues; his pictures have the appearance of being bathed in a glow; and there is something deeply sensuous in his vivid and lustrous green, red, and violet tones. In the picture “Dante on the Anniversary of Beatrice’s Death” the poet kneels at the open window which looks out upon Florence; he has been drawing, and a tablet is in his hand. The room is quite simple, a frieze with angels’ heads being its only ornament. Visitors of rank have come to see him—an elderly magnate and his daughter—and have stood long behind him without his noticing their presence; for he has been thinking of Beatrice, and it is only when his attention is attracted to them by a friend that he turns round at last. The “Beata Beatrix,” in the National Gallery in London—a picture begun in 1863 and ended in the August of 1866—treats of the death of Beatrice “under the semblance of a trance, in which Beatrice, seated in a balcony overlooking the city, is suddenly rapt from earth to heaven.” In accordance with the description in the Vita Nuova, Beatrice sits in the balcony of her father’s palace in strange ecstasy. Across the parapet of the balcony there is a view of the Arno and of that other palace where Dante passed his youth close to his adored mistress, until the unforgotten 9th of June 1290, when death robbed him of her. A peaceful evening light is shed upon the bank of the Arno, and plays upon the parapet with warm silvery beams. Beatrice is dressed in a garment belonging to no definite epoch, of green and rosy red, the colours of Love and Hope. Her head rises against a little patch of yellow sky between the two palaces, and seems to be surrounded by it as by a halo. She is in a trance, has the foreknowledge of her approaching death, and already lives through the spirit in another world, whilst her body is still upon the earth. Her hands are touched by a heavenly light. A dove of deep rose-coloured plumage alights upon her knees, bringing her a white poppy; whilst opposite, before the palace of Dante, the figure of Love stands, holding a flaming heart, and announcing to the poet that Beatrice has passed to a life beyond the earth.
 | |
| Cassell & Co. | |
| ROSSETTI. | SIR GALAHAD. |
 | |
| ROSSETTI. | Pageant. MARY MAGDALENE AT THE HOUSE OF SIMON THE PHARISEE. |
| (By permission of Mr. W. M. Rossetti.) | |