Page 32 - Studio International - January 1973

were shafts of light rather than full light from all lethargic, passive side of his nature now began
sides'. This may well account for his repeated to predominate. In the monotonous
use of the diagonal high-toned line in his repetitive portraits of his last years lovers no
designs; it is certainly true that an enclosed longer embrace or try to kiss — the roundabout
quality is as characteristic of Rossetti's of swooning pairs he devised as a background to
paintings as of his poems. Pater, discussing the his painting of The Blessed Damozel is so
poems, pointed out the peculiarity of their different in temper and mood from that clear-cut
landscapes, seen from windows and through early poem that it seems a tired parody of his
mirrors rather than en plein air. Rossetti is fond old dream. The women in these paintings are no
of the device of the window in his pictures, not longer objects of urgent desire either to possess
only to admit light but for symbolic or to understand; they are one, an idol to be
significance. There is nothing so complicatedly contemplated and worshipped masochistically,
realistic in his work as Hunt's reflection of a a sort of vampire who dominates the canvases
window in the mirror in the background of and whose features, Janey Morris's or Alexa
The Awakened Conscience, but the outline of the Wilding's, are distorted to caricature like a face
ship's prow in Sir Tristram and La Belle seen in hallucination. One model refused to be
Yseult, the cross-barred window with the subdued to this treatment — Fanny Cornforth,
landscape beyond which surrounds the two Rossetti's 'dear old elephant'. His portraits of
dignified figures with subdued light in place of her, even in the guise of Fazio's mistress
St Cecilia 1856-7 haloes in Mary in the House of St John, and the (whoever she was), or under mysterious titles
Pen and ink, 3 7/8 x 3 1/4 in.
Photo courtesy Birmingham City Art Gallery wide window-vista before which the lovers like The Blue Bower, never quite repress the
embrace in Chapel Before the Lists, all make an innate vulgar vitality of their original. He
implicit comment on the closed-in character of sketched her lounging or combing her hair — a
the direction of the urgent desire of the artist — the relationships depicted. Sometimes Rossetti favourite pose — and in the splendid watercolour
Rossetti's favourite slanting erotic pose. eliminates any outward view. In The Wedding of Woman Combing her Hair (1864) in spite of the
A similar urgency is used in a more St George and the Princess Sabra the lovers are slackness of articulation in the drawing of
sublimated and complex fashion in the original observed in their embrace by angels, but from hands and details, there is a feeling for the
watercolour of Dante's Dream (1856) where some indoor vantage in a close interior which texture of flesh and hair and stuff, a warmth and
Love, leading Dante, leans forward in the moved James Smetham to write ecstatically of intimacy that makes you think of Renoir.
familiar posture to kiss the dead Beatrice. But `a sense of secret enclosure in "palace chambers When he let his realism prevail (and that was
he is now observed by the awkward, isolated far apart" but quaint chambers in quaint seldom after 1865) Rossetti could still achieve
figure of Dante, head thrust sullenly forward, palaces where angels creep in through sliding surprising results. Monna Vanna (1866) with
one foot clumsily set before the other as he doors and stand behind rows of flowers Alexa Wilding fingering a real necklace and
watches the ecstatic union from which he is drumming on golden bells with wings crimson flaunting a peacock-feather fan in a splendid
excluded. In later years Rossetti lost much of the and green.' The stiffing intensity of this contemporary fancy dress is worth all the later
subtlety of this expression of the mixed nature of conception, together with the luminosity of the sirens.
love as he had experienced it in fact and colour, reflects that sense of the inner sanctum Rossetti ended his life making inferior myths
imagination. We need only compare this of the imagination, Keats's 'chamber of maiden for himself out of the substance of the past and
drawing with the smooth enormous thought' which from the romantics to Yeats the shadow of the present. 'Lolling about and
oil-painting Dante's Dream (1871) in the Walker deepens and intensifies the romantic theory of behaving like a seal on a sandbank' as Smetham
Art Gallery, Liverpool to see this. Here the rigid dream and conflicts with the alternate desire to once described him. But the condition was
meticulous drapery a la Burne Jones deadens express vision in action. ultimately tragic. He had begun by re-creating
the whole execution; Janey Morris's Among the studies for The Wedding of the literary myths which first stirred his
familiar features have usurped the more St George is a drawing of a very contemporary imagination and interpreting his own
modest corpse of the original drawing and pair, the girl kneeling beside a man in jacket experience through them. Like most of his
they are topped by what looks like a blonde wig. and trousers who is comfortably settled in a contemporaries he failed to resolve the dilemma
There is a dull lack of distinction between each Victorian tub chair. The ideal and the reality of the conflicting demands of the inner world of
figure, though Rossetti made careful individual could exist side by side in Rossetti's imagination vision and of external reality. But he had
sketches for them. Both the dream and the at this time. It was not always to be so. He was realized both more intensely than others, and
realism of the original have disappeared. The never very fond of nature in the simple for a short period he succeeded in reconciling
lighting has become theatrical; the light from romantic sense, though he loved and responded them. In the remaining time he exerted an
the right-hand doorway is of the same intensity to climate and atmosphere — from Kelmscott influence which lingered on as a legend even
as that which surrounds the dead Beatrice, he wrote to Bell Scott to describe how the yew when his pictures were consigned to cellars
where in the watercolour a more subdued effect hedges 'purred and simmered' in the heat. But as and back rooms. The legend was unfair to his
is also a more realistic one. Light enters there often as not Rossetti painted from cloth lilies genius as it was to his original Pre-Raphaelite
from both sides of the drawing and is diffused and paper roses. When, in his last phase, he brethren. A full exhibition of his work, drawings
subtly over the two planes of the inner recess irritably demanded fresh flowers for the and paintings, should re-establish him in his
where Beatrice lies and the foreground where limply-patterned backgrounds of his portraits own right, not merely as a symbol of
Dante, the darkest-toned figure in the painting, he might as well have resorted to artificial. The nineteenth-century aestheticism in revolt
stands. But above all the urgency of gesture and suicide of Elizabeth after their marriage, his against its conditions. He had as exquisite a
movement has gone. Everything is held in placid obsession with Janey Morris together with sensibility as Pater's, but we weary of it less
suspense, where originally an action was taking increasing addiction to chloral and whisky easily because of the animated realism, the
place. began to stifle the productive tension in ability to conceive of action even in suspense,
Ford Maddox Hueffer remarks of Rossetti's Rossetti's nature between the real and the which make his best works alive and vivid still.
light effects 'it should be remembered that his dream, the sensuous and the ideal which had It is Rossetti's vitality that justifies him, and
painter's life was essentially an indoor one; generated the energy that enabled him to paint that makes the paintings of his decadence,
the lights that he principally must have noticed or compose effectively. The obsessive, however influential, ultimately dispensable. q