Page 29 - Studio International - January 1973

ROSSETTI: justifications for the legend

Rachel Trickett

`D. G. ROSSETTI: PAINTER AND POET' IS AT THE ROYAL ACADEMY 13 JANUARY—11 MARCH
Holman Hunt used to complain in the days of At once sociable and solitary, sceptically may seem to connote or define, it is common
Rossetti's notoriety that he was never a true realistic and obsessively drawn to the inner world currency as scientific reformers have constantly
Pre-Raphaelite. Hardly anyone would dispute of imagination, Rossetti epitomizes one of the complained, and clouded by use, implication and
that now, but in his own time he was popularly aesthetic dilemmas of his age. He wrote in The all the confusions so precious to the metaphoric
thought of as the genius of the group and there Orchard Pit, 'All my life I have dreamed one imagination. Delineation by line — which Blake
is, after all, some truth in the old opinion. He dream', but he was never quite clear what that thought the pure truth of art, or by colour which
was the kind of man who acts as a focus for other dream was. He failed through a lack of definition, the Pre-Raphaelites revived as a way of reaching
people's energies, and if Hunt was the conscience and, except in a few extraordinary works, authentic vision — has the immediacy which
and Millais the right-hand of the Brotherhood, through a lack of comprehension of the real Reynolds admitted as the painter's strength
Rossetti was its imagination. His face often nature of what he was looking for. and weakness in contrast with the poet. What he
appears in their early work — the square, The dual inspiration in painting and poetry has to do he does instantaneously and at one
saturnine, sensuous face, draining a glass in the was not unique in his age. Blake, his guiding stroke. Rossetti wanted both : the immediacy of
line of profiles in Millais's Lorenzo and Isabella, genius, had already mastered it, and in his teens painting and the implication of language.
or, more refined, as the self-consciously noble Rossetti borrowed ten shillings from his brother His pictures vary inevitably in achieving this
Valentine rescuing Sylvia from Proteus in Hunt's to buy a Blake manuscript from a British Museum end. In his late works he resorts too often to
canvas. At this stage of his life Rossetti was attendant, in which the design and the printed emblem, a sort of neat short-hand device, but
looking for a method and a society — an anti- word made up one aesthetic whole. Palmer, hearts, roses, doves and the rest of the simple
society perhaps — to give him assurance. He Blake's disciple, had already said that the symbolic paraphernalia are less effective in his
found neither in the Brotherhood. But he gave constant study of poetry was essential to the single-study figures than the muddy ambiguity
them vitality, ideas which he could not be painter, and even Turner had composed bad of his oil technique and the obsessive intensity of
bothered to work out himself, and an verse as a commentary on his visionary expression in the chosen face. Something other
enthusiastic devotion to the idea of art which landscapes. The popular painters of the time — than painterly qualities gives these works their
evaporated quickly after his withdrawal. In the Wilkie, Mulready and Maclise— were literary and hallucinatory appeal. They are bad paintings,
second phase of the movement he was even more illustrative and the Pre-Raphaelites themselves, but bad in a new way, and it was a way that
the dominant figure. But what he taught his however revolutionary their technique, followed haunted and affected his contemporaries.
disciples Morris and Burne Jones after the this bias in their scenes from history, Rossetti was not without technical ability.
Oxford Union adventure of 1857/8 was not the Shakespeare and Keats. Traditionally the Friends were constantly bemoaning his
pure doctrine of the PRB. Truth to nature, English genius had expressed itself in language, impatience with the rules of perspective or the
historical realism and moral conscience are and language is an ambiguous and complex preliminaries of oil-painting. So the myth grew
conspicuous by their absence from the work of medium. Line and even colour convey more up of the lucky amateur who hit on the device of
the new aesthetes. Little wonder that Hunt was directly the idea of definition. Though language a dry stippling watercolour method well
peeved! The common idea of Pre-Raphaelitism
current in the last forty years of the nineteenth
century was, apart from symbolic trappings, far
indeed from the world of The Hireling Shepherd
and The Awakened Conscience. Tim Hilton in his
article 'Pre-Raphaelite problems' (Studio
International, May 1972), writes: 'The
importance of the Pre-Raphaelites is . . . that
they got from late academic baroque painting to
Art Nouveau and Symbolism in the
astonishingly short span of thirty or forty
years.' That they did so was largely due to the
peculiar genius and influence of Rossetti.
Any estimate of Rossetti's importance as a
painter must take his temperament into account.
He was equally drawn to poetry and painting but
lacked confidence in his mastery of either. His
father, a refugee revolutionary and commentator
on Dante who encouraged his family in
literature and unconventionality, approved of
Rossetti's ambition to be a painter. Uncertainty
was, then, not so much the result of
circumstances as of a conflict in his own nature.

Sir Launcelot in the Queen's Chamber 1857
Pen and ink, 10 1/4 x 13 1/4 in.
Photo courtesy Birmingham City Art Gallery
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