Page 30 - Studio International - January 1973

suited to his intense, introverted imagination. matter for his inspiration. The PRB had helped rejected union, and all express the doomed
Sulman, one of his pupils at Maurice's Working in this direction, but his meeting with Elizabeth significance and the inevitability of the occasion.
Men's College, remembered him 'with the Siddal was the more lasting influence. He had The various implications of these dramatic
shabby box of fragments he used to rattle always been looking for his Beatrice, and he told meetings are conveyed pictorially through a
amongst, rubbing with an almost dry brush on Maddox Brown that when he saw her he felt as variety of poses, gestures and designs, but there
hard chips, but always getting the colour he if his destiny had been defined. So had his is a consistency of manner in them all which
wanted'. And Rossetti himself was proud of the aesthetic direction. The long, frustrating, reflects the coherence of Rossetti's imagination
luminosity of his colour effects. But he had ambiguous relationship between Elizabeth at this time.
learned to draw at Sass's and at the Academy Siddal and Rossetti is a fascinating reflection of The first encounter he painted was of a
schools, and his pen sketches of 1844/5 (four his own nature; it lacked clarity or decision and different sort — the Annunciation, Ecce Ancilla
years before the establishment of the the passion of the early years gradually and Domini, the 'white eye-sore' as Rossetti used to
Brotherhood), of a man and a woman in drearily dissipated into lethargic resignation. call it later in exasperation. It was painted before
trousers dancing together, show a fluent He had already fallen in love again, with Jane his meeting with Elizabeth Siddal, but gives us
confident vigour of draughtsmanship that is Burden who was to marry Morris, before he some idea of the kind of tension that inspired
astonishing to compare with the deliberately finally decided to marry Elizabeth. But it him. The design is rectilinear, a vertical
awkward style of the Pre-Raphaelite phase. They produced painting of a quite extraordinarily arrangement of figures and furniture, where the
contrast as strongly with the meticulous intense and original kind in which his personal, crouching girl, intent and brooding, avoids
pen-work of the drawings of the 185os of literary and painterly qualities were for once looking at the perpendicular angel and fixes her
Elizabeth Siddal, delicate, minute and static. successfully fused. glance on the diagonal lily he carries. The bed
Rossetti's drawings explode the legend of his In his paintings even more than in his poems curtains fall straight behind her and in front
incompetence and suggest rather a talent too Rossetti is the artist of encounters. His best stands a tall oddly oriental embroidery frame.
varied and adaptable for his narrower and more subjects — Dante meeting Beatrice in Florence The lines of the picture are strongly marked
obsessive imaginative vision. or Paradise, Paolo and Francesca, Launcelot and against the prevailing white tones; the effect is
The watercolours of 1853-65 represent the Guinevere and later Tristram and Yseult are all of suspense and reserve; this is evidently an
height of Rossetti's achievement when he had presented in the moment of collision, abrupt unsolicited and supernatural encounter. For all
at last found an appropriate style and subject meeting or enforced parting, an embrace or a its naive purity of style, the work possesses a
quality of intense and immediate realism — a
realism of feeling. The Virgin's expression is the
focal point of the picture; her surroundings, her
pose and her dress in their simplicity
concentrate attention on her face and its look of
dawning response.
Rossetti uses this technique of strong linear
design for very different effects in the erotic
watercolours of lovers meeting or parting which
occupied him in the fifties and after, from the
embrace of Carlisle Wall to the frustrated
encounters of Arthur's Tomb, Sir Launcelot in
the Queen's Chamber, Sir Tristram and La Belle
Yseult, and the ecstatic unions of The Wedding of
St George and the Princess Sabra or the drawing
of St Cecilia and the angel for Moxon's edition of
Tennyson which astonished the poet himself—
it was not what Tennyson had meant at all. In
Sir Launcelot in the Queen's Chamber (1857), a
drawing in pen and black and brown ink, the two
figures stand back to back, Launcelot's sword
marking the sharp diagonal Rossetti used to
exaggerate passionate gesture and counterpoint
an angular design. His head and the upper part
(Above) of his body thrust forward towards the window
Giorgione Painting, c. 1853 on the left, while Guinevere behind him leans
Pen and ink, 4I x 7 in. backwards. The action suggests a curious
Photo courtesy
Birmingham City Art mingling of physical desire and inevitable
Gallery separateness. The head of Guinevere here is
that of Janey Morris who was also the model for
(Right)
D. G. Rossetti sitting the later Sir Tristram and La BelleYseult (1867)
to Elizabeth Siddal 18 53 where the stiff vertical pose of the woman
Pen and ink, 4 1/4 x 6 9/16 in. separated from her lover by a table and the love
Photo courtesy
Birmingham City Art potion across which he leans to kiss her hand,
Gallery again suggests inevitable fatality. Here the sense
of urgency is less acute than in the Launcelot
Guinevere drawing; the realism of physical
passion is now concentrated in the presentation
of Yseult, not in the figure of her lover, and in
the flaming of the loving cups and the angel of
love who observes the pair.
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