Chapter III: Work From 1849 to 1853

INFLUENCE OF BROWNING AND DANTE

Before the first number of the "Germ" had appeared, and while it was in progress, Rossetti, accompanied by Holman Hunt, paid a short and hurried visit to Paris and Belgium. A rhyming diary and a series of jocular sonnets, interspersed with a few serious ones, recall the vigour of his first impressions. A large proportion of the time was spent at the Louvre and other galleries, rushing through Old Masters at a furious rate.

After their return home Rossetti found his affairs in a bad way. The failure of the _Ecce Ancilla_ to find a purchaser at once (it was not sold until June 1853), and the storm of unfavourable comment it provoked, caused him frankly to abandon as unprofitable the mine of semi-religious, semi-mystical feeling which he had begun to work, and it was some time before he could settle down to find another. Feeling his way pictorially towards the field of romance in which his thoughts wandered, he began to undertake subjects from this class of literature, from Browning, Dante, Keats, and later from the "Morte Darthur" of Malory. His first experiment was a large canvas illustrating the page's song in "Pippa Passes," which soon became impossible and had to be dropped. The composition of it remains, however, in a little painting called _Hist, said Kate the Queen_, dated 1851. Two other designs from Browning which were carried out at this time are a pen-and-ink drawing from "Sordello" entitled _Taurello's first sight of Fortune_ and _The Laboratory_. The latter was, in all probability, Rossetti's first attempt at water-colour (it is painted over a pen-and-ink drawing, as several of his early ones were), and bears but slight resemblance either in thought or execution to the work by which he is popularly known.

In addition to these three subjects, Rossetti drew or painted in the years 1849-50 other themes of a romantic and mediaeval nature. Amongst them was his first illustration to Shakespeare, a scene from "Much Ado about Nothing," representing the happy lovers, _Benedick and Beatrice_, receiving the felicitations of those who had plotted their match.

From the "Vita Nuova" Rossetti took the incident of _Dante drawing an Angel on the Anniversary of Beatrice's Death_, executed first in pen-and-ink, and originally given to Millais. A water-colour of the same subject is of later date, 1853. The latter was bought by Mr. Thomas Combe, of the Oxford University Press, and was bequeathed by his widow to the Taylorian Museum, where it remains.

The "Vita Nuova" also furnished the subject of a small water-colour of 1849, representing _Beatrice at the Wedding Feast denying her salutation to Dante_. The poet, with a friend grasping his arm as if to restrain him, stands watching a procession of figures clad in blue and green, and adorned with roses in their hair. The central figure of the bridal procession is a portrait of Miss Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal, who first came into Rossetti's life at about this date. She was the daughter of a Sheffield cutler, and was employed in a milliner's shop off Leicester Square, where Walter Deverell discovered her one day when shopping with his mother. She was persuaded to sit to Deverell for his _Viola_, and later to Rossetti. Her portrait also occurs in a picture by Holman Hunt and in Millais's _Ophelia_.

Both on account of her romantic history and her individual attractions, the personality of Miss Siddal has always exercised a delicate charm over those who love Rossetti. She was the model for most of Rossetti's earliest and finest water-colours containing women, and probably for all his Beatrices except the last.

To resume the tale of early work, in 1851 Rossetti continued to be engaged on small subjects of a mediaeval or dramatic character. We have, for instance, the charming little group called _Borgia_, in which the famous Lucretia is seen seated with a lute in her hands, to the music of which two children are dancing. Over her shoulders lean on the one side the bloated Pope Alexander VI, on the other her brother Caesar, beating time with a knife against a wine-glass on the table, and blowing the rose-petals from her hair. Lucretia's white gown is of ample folds, with elaborate sleeves, looped up all over with coloured ribbons and bows, a device which so took Rossetti's fancy that he repeated it in _Bonifazio's Mistress_ (1860).

In the same year (1851) was produced the first design for a subject of weird and ghostly conception, called _How they met Themselves_. This depicts a pair of lovers wandering at twilight in a wood, and suddenly confronted with their own doubles. The legend of the Doppelganger was one of a class of mysterious horrors which greatly appealed to Rossetti's imagination, and which fascinated him from boyhood. Few but he however would have dared to draw it, and fewer still could have succeeded with it. The first design just referred to, was drawn in pen-and-ink, and was destroyed or lost at an early date; but Rossetti redrew it in 1860 whilst at Paris on his honeymoon, and four years later painted two water-colour versions.

To the year following, 1852, belongs a remarkable water-colour, representing Giotto painting a famous portrait of Dante which was discovered on removing the plaster from the wall of the Bargello in 1839. Giotto is in dull red, with brocaded sleeves turned back. To his left is seated Dante, cutting a pomegranate in his hand, and gazing down with a rapt expression to where Beatrice is passing in a church procession. Behind Giotto stands his master, Cimabue, watching the work which is to eclipse his; and behind Dante leans his rival, Cavalcanti, holding in his hand a book of Guinicelli, symbolizing thereby the three generations of poets.

Nothing else of importance is catalogued under the year 1852, but in 1853 we come to one or two well-known designs and pictures. First may be mentioned the pen-and-ink drawing entitled _Hesterna Rosa_, founded upon the plaintive song of Elena in Sir Henry Taylor's "Philip van Artevelde":

"Quoth tongue of neither maid nor wife
To heart of neither wife nor maid,
'Lead we not here a jolly life
Betwixt the shine and shade?'

Quoth heart of neither maid nor wife
To tongue of neither wife nor maid,
'Thou wag'st, but I am sore with strife,
And feel like flowers that fade.'"

The scene represents two gamblers throwing dice, and their mistresses, one of whom in a fit of shame is covering her face. She is the "yesterday's rose." The other clasps her arms round the neck of her lover, and is singing a merry song. An innocent little child near by is touching a lute, and Rossetti has completed the other aspect of the scene by putting in an ape scratching itself, a Düreresque touch which he added also in the little _Borgia_ group. A water-colour version of the same subject was painted in 1865, and a larger version, bearing the title _Elena's Song_, was painted in 1871.

The starting of _Found_ is one of the most memorable events in connection with the year 1853. The subject is a countryman or drover recognizing in a fallen woman of the streets his own lost sweetheart. _Found_ was commissioned by a Mr. MacCracken, who was also the purchaser of _Ecce Ancilla_, in 1853, and several studies were made for it. The picture however was never finished. "It was," writes Mr. W. M. Rossetti, "a source of lifelong vexation to my brother and to the gentlemen, some three or four in succession, who commissioned him to finish it." After his death, Sir Edward Burne-Jones consented to give a sort of finish to the picture by washing in blue sky. In its half-completed state it passed into the possession of Mr. William Graham, and after his death it went to America.

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A short note on Rossetti's movements during the period just covered may be given here. We left him in 1848, after a few months' work at Madox Brown's, sharing a studio with Holman Hunt in Cleveland Street, Soho, and painting at the _Girlhood of the Virgin_. At the beginning of 1851, he took in common with Deverell the first floor rooms at No. 17, Red Lion Square--the rooms which Morris and Burne-Jones occupied subsequently from 1856 to 1859, and which served as a cradle for the famous firm. In November, 1852, he took a set of rooms at 14, Chatham Place, Blackfriars, on a site now cleared away, overlooking the river and presenting other advantages. Here he remained for nearly ten years, including the brief two years of his married life, and here he accomplished what many judges consider the most interesting portion of his work. He had by now acquired a certain measure of independence as a painter, which went on increasing as generous or wealthy patrons attached themselves. That his progress was slow, and that for many years he was reduced to selling water-colours of priceless beauty for comparatively trifling sums, was the result partly of a determination which he formed never to exhibit his work. This resolve, which later on became a sort of mania, is said to have been due in the first instance to the discouraging reception of _Ecce Ancilla Domini_ in 1850. For a long time, of course, it prevented his being known at all or appreciated by possible purchasers, and his work circulated amongst a narrow circle of artistic friends. In the days of his greatness it may have had an opposite effect by arousing curiosity, and producing a feeling of pique. Buyers were attracted towards a man who was notorious for despising the public eye, and whose work was spoken of with bated breath as something supremely precious. With some few exceptions, however, it is essential to remember that Rossetti's work was absolutely unseen by the public, who became acquainted with him as a poet long before they knew him even dimly as a painter. The effects of this ignorance are still discernible. Even after two great exhibitions of his works in London, and after the publication of a wide selection from his designs, there are people who believe that Rossetti never painted but from one model, and that all his pictures are distinguished by impossible lips and a goitrous development of neck.