[Frontispiece: BEATA BEATRIX.]
Bell's Miniature Series of Painters
ROSSETTI
BY
H. C. MARILLIER
LONDON
GEORGE BELL & SONS
1906
CHISWICK PRESS: CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO.
TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. INTRODUCTORY
II. THE "PRE-RAPHAELITE BROTHERHOOD"
III. WORK FROM 1849 TO 1853--INFLUENCE OF BROWNING AND DANTE
IV. FRIENDSHIP WITH RUSKIN--MARRIAGE, AND DEATH OF MRS. ROSSETTI
V. WORK FROM 1854 TO 1857
VI. WORK FROM 1858 TO 1862
VII. SETTLING AT CHELSEA--WORK FROM 1863 TO 1874
VIII. CLOSE OF THE RECORD. 1874-1882
OUR ILLUSTRATIONS
CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF CHIEF PICTURES
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
BEATA BEATRIX ... Frontispiece
ECCE ANCILLA DOMINI
THE BLUE CLOSET
MARY MAGDALENE AT THE HOUSE OF SIMON THE PHARISEE
THE BELOVED
MARIANA
ASTARTE SYRIACA
DANTE'S DREAM
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY
Dante Gabriel, or, to give him his full christening name, Gabriel
Charles Dante Rossetti, was born on May 12th, 1828, at No. 38,
Charlotte Street, Portland Place, and was the second of four
children, born in successive years. Gabriele Rossetti, his father,
was a native of the city of Vasto, in the province of Abruzzi. He
was a man of superior ability and force of character, and was at one
time custodian of bronzes at the Naples Museum; but having made
himself obnoxious to the Bourbon King Ferdinand during the
suppression of the constitution in 1821, he was in consequence
proscribed and obliged to fly for safety. Assisted by a British
man-of-war in escaping to Malta, Gabriele Rossetti remained there for
some time, practising as an instructor in his native language, until
further annoyance drove him in 1824 to England. Here he settled, and
obtained an appointment as Professor of Italian at King's College.
Meantime, in 1826, he had married a daughter of Gaetano Polidori, for
some while secretary to the notable Count Alfieri, and father of that
strange being, Dr. John Polidori, who travelled with Byron as his
physician, and committed suicide in 1821. Gaetano Polidori's wife,
Rossetti's grandmother, was an Englishwoman, whose maiden name was
Pierce. To his parentage the young Gabriel was indebted for much,
but especially to his mother. One can judge of the latter's quiet
sensible character, and deep religious instincts, from the portraits
left us by her son. But, besides these qualities, she possessed good
literary and artistic judgement, shrewd knowledge of human nature,
and a fund of common sense which was strong enough to prevent the
somewhat mystical spirit pervading the thoughts of her young family
from deteriorating into morbid and unhealthy channels. Between D. G.
Rossetti and his mother the warmest and most affectionate relations
prevailed, relations that were only severed by the former's untimely
death on April 9th, 1882. Mrs. Rossetti survived her son exactly
four years to the very day. Her husband had died in April, 1854,
honoured at the last as a patriot in his native land. Their elder
daughter, Maria, departed this life in 1876, and in December, 1894,
Christina Rossetti also died, leaving as sole survivor of this
brilliant family the younger son, William Michael, well known as a
literary critic and as the biographer of his more famous brother.
Albeit English in its main external features, the environment of the
Rossetti family in London remained essentially Italian during their
father's lifetime. Gabriele Rossetti was a commentator on Dante, and
himself a writer of verse, mainly in a politico-patriotic vein. To
the ears of the young Gabriel, familiarized by habit with the
sonorous metres of the "Inferno" and "Paradiso," the name of Dante
for many years conjured up no very stimulating thoughts. It was not
until he had begun as a young man to read upon his own lines, that
the pictorial richness and splendour of the Florentine dawned on him
and seized him with its spell. "The 'Convito,'" he says, "was a name
of dread to us, as being the very essence of arid
unreadableness,"--an interesting fact to remember when dealing, as we
shall presently have to do, with the influence which Dante was
destined afterwards to exert upon two members at least of the family.
Reared in this studious atmosphere, however, it is not to be wondered
at that the young Rossettis early took to literature. Before they
were six years old they had made acquaintance with Shakespeare and
Scott, in addition to the usual works of childhood, and were steeped
in romance of a more lofty kind than is common at such an age.
Of Rossetti's early literary efforts it is sufficient to mention two:
"The Slave," a bombastic drama in blank verse, which occupied his
faculties at the age of five, and "Sir Hugh the Heron," a legendary
poem founded on a tale by Allan Cunningham. These two productions do
not sum up the juvenile work of Rossetti of which a record has been
kept, but they are quite as much as it is fair to mention, and serve
sufficiently to show the romantic drift of his earliest ideas. In
art he was scarcely less precocious; a pretty story being told of a
milkman, who came upon him in the passage sketching his
rocking-horse, and expressed considerable surprise at having seen "a
baby making a picture." Drawings of this date exist, and also later
ones done when he was in the habit of preparing illustrations for
books he read and for his own romances. In point of quality,
however, these juvenile sketches are not to be compared with those of
many masters of the brush who began early, for example with those of
Millais, and are chiefly interesting in connection with a statement
of his brother that "he could not remember any date at which it was
not an understood thing in the family that Gabriel was to be a
painter."
In 1837, after a short preliminary training at a private school,
Dante Gabriel was admitted to King's College, where his father was
Italian professor. His artistic training did not begin until 1841 or
1842, when he left school, and entered himself at a drawing academy
known in those days as "Sass's," and kept by Mr. F. S. Gary, son of
the translator of Dante. He remained some four years at Gary's
Academy, during which period he seems to have acquired the bare
rudiments of his art and to have made a small reputation for
eccentricity. In July, 1846, having sent in the requisite
probation-drawings, he was admitted to the Antique School of the
Royal Academy. His first appearance is graphically delineated by a
fellow-student, whose observant eye has preserved for us a probably
accurate conception of the fiery young enthusiast:
"Thick, beautiful, and closely-curled masses of rich brown
much-neglected hair fell about an ample brow, and almost to the
wearer's shoulders; strong eyebrows marked with their dark shadows a
pair of rather sunken eyes, in which a sort of fire, instinct with
what may be called proud cynicism, burned with furtive energy. His
rather high cheekbones were the more observable because his cheeks
were roseless and hollow enough to indicate the waste of life and
midnight oil to which the youth was addicted. Close shaving left
bare his very full, not to say sensuous lips, and square-cut
masculine chin. Rather below the middle height, and with a slightly
rolling gait, Rossetti came forward among his fellows with a jerky
step, tossed the falling hair back from his face, and, having both
hands in his pockets, faced the student world with an _insouciant_
air which savoured of thorough self-reliance. A bare throat, a
falling, ill-kept collar, boots not over familiar with brushes, black
and well-worn habiliments, including not the ordinary jacket of the
period, but a loose dress-coat which had once been new--these were
the outward and visible signs of a mood which cared even less for
appearances than the art-student of those days was accustomed to
care, which undoubtedly was little enough."
As a student in the dry atmosphere of the Academy Antique School
Rossetti proved a failure, and never passed to the higher grades of
the Life and Painting classes. Conventional methods of study were
distasteful to him, and the traditions of the Academy were especially
arid and cramping to the imagination. It will be necessary later on
to give some description of the state into which the art of painting
had fallen in England before the fresh minds of the young romantic
school, breaking away under Rossetti's leadership, caused such a
turmoil and revolution; but in the meantime, at the period we are
dealing with, it is probably correct to say that Rossetti grew tired
of, rather than disapproved of, the teaching in the school, that he
was full of ideas craving utterance on canvas, and that he wanted to
paint before he could properly draw. This impatience caused him to
take a momentous and curious step, which certainly entailed harm to
him as a technical executant, though it may indirectly have furthered
his career as an artist. He decided to throw up the Academy
training, and wrote to a painter of whom not many people at that date
had heard, but whose work he himself admired, asking to be admitted
into his studio as a pupil. This was Ford Madox Brown, and for his
own particular needs and line of thought Rossetti could have lighted
upon no man more absolutely suitable. Madox Brown was only seven
years Rossetti's senior, but he had studied abroad at Ghent, Antwerp,
Paris, and Rome, and had exhibited during the early forties some fine
cartoon designs for the decoration of the new House of Lords. The
pictures by Brown which Rossetti had seen, and which he mentioned in
writing, were the _Giaour's Confession_, exhibited at the Academy in
1841, _Parisina_ (1845), _Our Lady of Saturday Night_, and _Mary
Queen of Scots_, of which he remarked, "if ever I do anything in art,
it will certainly be attributable to a constant study of that work."
This, and other rather florid compliments of the same sort, may well
have impressed Madox Brown, who was not accustomed to be
complimented, with a shrewd idea that he was being made fun of; and
the story has been told how, in a suspicious frame of mind, he armed
himself with a stick and went forth to seek his unknown
correspondent. On arriving at the house he was partly reassured by a
door-plate; and the evident sincerity and enthusiasm of the boy
himself, when they met, overcame his generous warm-heartedness, and
made him agree to take Rossetti into his studio, and to teach him
painting, not for a fee, which he declined, but for the sheer
pleasure of encountering and training up a sympathetic spirit.
Before following his fortunes further in this direction we must go
back and note what Rossetti's activities in literature had amounted
to during this period. These are no less than astonishing. To take
the greatest first, they include the bulk of the verse translations
from the early Italian poets, first published in 1861, and afterwards
republished under the altered title of "Dante and his Circle."
Although worked on and revised from time to time, these translations
remain in all essentials much as Rossetti compiled them between the
years 1845 and 1849, and they rank among the finest work of the kind
in the English language, being no less remarkable for their high
poetic qualities than for the subtle dexterity of phrase by which the
sound and sense of the originals have been transplanted into a
naturally colder tongue. Rossetti's translation of the "Vita Nuova"
alone might stand as a monument of industry in such a case, for it
breathes a new spirit of language, a voluptuous and exotic style such
as has never been excelled for conveying the emotional mysticism and
introspective sentiment of a southern lover; but to this he added
that great mass of verse translations and sonnets, involving many
days spent over musty volumes at the British Museum. Even this was
not all, for between the same years he began a translation in verse
of the Nibelungenlied, and finished a translation of von Aue's "Arme
Heinrich," which has been thought worthy of a place amongst his
collected works. Besides these, in 1847, before he was nineteen
years old, he had written his best-known poem, "The Blessed Damozel,"
together with several others, including, "My Sister's Sleep," "The
Portrait," and considerable portions of "Ave," "A Last Confession,"
and the "Bride's Prelude." The performance of these literary efforts
is so finished, the sentiment so profound and mature, that one can
hardly understand the ambition which kept painting in the foremost
place and made poetry the _parergon_. The ease with which
versification came to Rossetti may have blinded him at first to the
merits of his work in this art, as happened later in the case of
William Morris; but however that may be, he was not encouraged to
abandon painting as a means of livelihood, and having made the
arrangement already described with Madox Brown, he settled down with
a characteristic mixture of enthusiasm and despair to the pursuit of
art.
Much as he owed to him in the way of instruction and sympathetic
encouragement, Rossetti did not remain long in Brown's studio, at all
events as a regular attendant, but left him after a few months to
share a studio with Mr. Holman Hunt. The beginning of this intimacy
was curious and typical. On the opening day of the Academy
Exhibition (May, 1848) "Rossetti," says Mr. Hunt, "came up
boisterously and in loud tongue made me feel very confused by
declaring that mine was the best picture of the year. The fact that
it was from Keats (the picture was _The Eve of St. Agnes_) made him
extra-enthusiastic, for I think no painter had ever before painted
from this wonderful poet, who then, it may scarcely be credited, was
little known." Rossetti begged to be allowed to visit Hunt, for at
the Academy schools they had barely been acquainted, and, as an
upshot of the acquaintance, agreed to work for a time with him,
sharing for this purpose a studio which the latter had just taken in
Cleveland Street, Fitzroy Square. Here (as well as later in a studio
which he took for himself at 83, Newman Street) Brown, whose
friendship continued to the end of Rossetti's life, visited him from
time to time, and gave him the benefit of his advice; and here, amid
what Mr. Hunt has described as the most dismal and dingy
surroundings, Rossetti began to paint his first real picture. The
year 1848 marks his transition artistically from boyhood to
adolescence, an adolescence in which depth of feeling and height of
aspiration transcended the power of accomplishment, and no artificial
mannerisms obscured the seriousness of purpose that characterized,
not him alone, but the whole of the small band of workers with which
he presently became associated. The formation of this band, and the
painting of Rossetti's first picture, bring us to the story of the
famous Pre-Raphaelite movement, and will more properly serve to begin
a new, than to end a preliminary chapter.