“La Donna Finestra,” painted in 1879, and to be counted amongst his ripest creations, has connection with that passage in the Vita Nuova where Dante sinks to the ground overcome with sorrow for Beatrice’s death, and is regarded with sympathy by a lady looking down from a window, the Lady of Pity, the human embodiment of compassion. “Dante’s Dream” is probably the work which shows the painter at his zenith. The expression of the heads is profound and lofty, the composition severely mediæval and admirably complete; and although the painting is laboured, the total impression is nevertheless so cogent that it is impossible to forget it. “The scene,” in Rossetti’s own description, “is a chamber of dreams, strewn with poppies, where Beatrice is seen lying on a couch, as if just fallen back in death; the winged figure of Love carries his arrow pointed at the dreamer’s heart, and with it a branch of apple-blossom; as he reaches the bier, Love bends for a moment over Beatrice with the kiss which her lover has never given her; while the two green-clad dream-ladies hold the pall full of May-blossom suspended for an instant before it covers her face for ever.” The expression of ecstasy in Dante’s face, and the still, angelical sweetness of Beatrice, are rendered with astonishing intensity. She lies upon the bier, pale as a flower, wrapped in a white shroud, with her lips parted as though she were gently breathing, and seems not dead but fallen asleep. Her fair hair floats round her in golden waves. In its vague folds the covering of the couch displays the marble outlines of the body: and a look of bliss rests upon the pure and clear-cut features of her lovely face.

BURNE-JONES.CHANT D’AMOUR.
(By permission of Mr. F. Hollyer, the owner of the copyright.)

BURNE-JONES.THE DAYS OF CREATION.
(By permission of Mr. F. Hollyer, the owner of the copyright.)

This “painting of the soul” occupied Rossetti almost exclusively in the third and most fruitful period of his life, when he painted hardly any pictures upon the larger scale, but separate feminine figures furnished with various poetic attributes, the deeper meaning of which is interpreted in his poems. “The Sphinx,” in which he busied himself with the great riddle of life, is the only one containing several figures. Three persons—a youth, a man of ripe years, and a grey-beard—visit the secret dwelling of the Sphinx to inquire their destiny of this omniscient being. It is only the man who really puts the question; the grey-beard stumbles painfully towards her cavern, while the young man, wearied with his journey, falls dying to the earth before the very object of his quest. The Sphinx remains in impenetrable silence, with her green, inscrutable, mysterious eyes coldly and pitilessly fixed upon infinity. “The Blessed Damozel,” “Proserpina,” “Fiammetta,” “The Daydream,” “La Bella Mano,” “La Ghirlandata,” “Veronica Veronese,” “Dis Manibus,” “Astarte Syriaca” are all separate figures dedicated to the memory of his wife. As Dante immortalised his Beatrice, Rossetti honoured his wife, who died so early, in his poems and his pictures. He painted her as “The Blessed Damozel,” with her gentle, saint-like face, her quiet mouth, her flowing golden hair and peaceful lids. He represents her as an angel of God standing at the gate of Heaven, looking down upon the earth. She is thinking of her lover, and of the time when she will see him again in heaven, and of the sacred songs that will be sung to him. Lilies rest upon her arm, and lovers once more united hover around.

There is no action or rhetoric of gesture in Rossetti. His tall Gothic figures are motionless and silent, having almost the floating appearance of visionary figures which stand long before the gaze of the dreamer without taking bodily form. They glide along like phantoms and shadows, like the undulations of a blossom-laden tree or a field of corn waving in the wind. They neither talk nor weep nor laugh, and are only eloquent through their quiet hands, the most sensuous and the most spiritual hands ever painted, or with their eyes, the most dreamy and fascinating eyes which have been rendered in art since Leonardo da Vinci. In the pictures which Rossetti devoted to her, Eleanor Siddal is a marvellously lofty woman, glorified in the mysticism of a rare beauty. Rossetti drapes his idol in Venetian fashion, with rich garments which recall Giorgione in the character of their colour, and, like Botticelli, he strews flowers of deep fragrance around her, especially roses, which he painted with wonderful perfection and hyacinths, for which he had a great love, and the intoxicating perfume of which affected him greatly.

BURNE-JONES.CIRCE.
(By permission of Mr. F. Hollyer, the owner of the copyright.)

This taste for beautiful and deeply lustrous colours and rich accessories is, indeed, the one purely pictorial quality which this painter-poet has, if one understands by pictorial qualities the capacity for intoxicating one’s self with the beauty of the visible world. His drawing is often faulty; and his bodies, enveloped in rich and heavy garments, are, perhaps, not invariably in accordance with anatomy. What explains Rossetti’s fabulous success is purely the condition of spirit which went to the making of his works—that nervous vibration, that ecstasy of opium, that combination of suffering and sensuousness, and that romanticism drunk with beauty, which pervade his paintings. When they appeared they seemed like a revelation of a beautiful land, only one could not say where it existed—a revelation, indeed, for it revealed for the first time a world of story which was in no sense fabulous: there came a romanticism which was something real; a style arose which seemed as though it were woven of tones and colours, a style rioting in an everlasting exhilaration of spirit, breaking out sometimes in a glow of flame and sometimes in delicate, tremulous longing. Even where he paints a Madonna she is merely a woman in his eyes, and he endows her with the glowing fire of passionate fervour, with a trace of the joy of the earth, which no painter has ever given her before; and through this union of refined modern sensuousness and Catholic mysticism he has created a new thrill of beauty. His painting was a drop of a most precious essence, in its hues enchanting and intoxicating, the strongest spiritual potion ever brewed in English art. The intensity of his overstrained sensibility, and the wonderful Southern mosaic of form into which he poured this sensibility with elaborate refinement, make him seem own brother to Baudelaire.

BURNE-JONES.PYGMALION (THE SOUL ATTAINS).
(By permission of Mr. F. Hollyer, the owner of the copyright.)