Exhibit:

Feminine Archetype: Maiden

Preview of images

A drawing of a blonde women in a long white dress, facing forward to camera; hands are clasped in front, plain yellow background.
Painting of a grail maiden holding the Eucharistic devices in her left hand. Her right hand is raised. Over her head hovers the white dove of the Holy Spirit. Both have halo of light.
Young girl in a tapestried chamber, with a jar containing marybuds or marsh marigolds, she is arranging them on a shelf. Near her is a cat playing with a ball of worsted.
A lady and a knight praying before an altar. He offers his sword and she fixes her sleeve on his basnet. Overhead, in the distance, is seen ‘a black tower’, and beside is a black knight, mounted, waiting with his lance in rest for the combat.

The following exhibit includes reformatted content from The Rossetti Archive, now made available for reassembly through the the COVE database. The content is open access but you need to subscribe to reassemble material into new collections at COVE. We have created exhibits based thematic elements to illustrate how Rossetti Archive content can be reassembled in interesting ways. This particular exhibit, one of three on Femine Archetypes, concentrates on The Maiden.

Images in this Exhibit

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Study of a Young Girl (1850)
A drawing of a blonde women in a long white dress, facing forward to camera; hands are clasped in front, plain yellow background.

A variant of this description was originally published at The Rossetti Archive.

Scholarly Commentary

Introduction

The drawing is a key document in the early development of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's ideas about how to represent the neo-platonic “dream maiden” that pervades the entire corpus of his work both literary and pictorial. The pertinence of this figure to that subject is underscored by the identification that has been made between the woman in this drawing and the “figura...
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Damsel of the Sanct Grael (1857)
Painting of a grail maiden holding the Eucharistic devices in her left hand. Her right hand is raised. Over her head hovers the white dove of the Holy Spirit. Both have halo of light.

A variant of this description was originally published at The Rossetti Archive.

Scholarly Commentary

Introduction

During the 1850s and early 1860s, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his circle were deeply interested in Aurthurian subject matter. In the late 1850’s Dante Gabriel Rossetti painted scenes from Thomas Malory's Morte D'Arthur in fresco in the Oxford Union Debating Society hall, and completed three Arthurian illustrations for the Moxon edition of Tennyson. In...
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Marigolds (Alternate titles: Bower Maiden / Fleurs de Marie / Gardener's Daughter) (1873)
Young girl in a tapestried chamber, with a jar containing marybuds or marsh marigolds, she is arranging them on a shelf. Near her is a cat playing with a ball of worsted.

A variant of this description was originally published at The Rossetti Archive.

Scholarly Commentary

Introduction

William Sharp admired this picture, on which he made an elaborate commentary. Particularly noteworthy is the following remark: “I have heard it spoken of as one of his few modern paintings, but while not of necessity belonging to any definite period it undoubtedly assimilates much more to earlier periods than the nineteenth-century” (233). The comment...
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Chapel before the Lists (1857-1864)
A lady and a knight praying before an altar. He offers his sword and she fixes her sleeve on his basnet. Overhead, in the distance, is seen ‘a black tower’, and beside is a black knight, mounted, waiting with his lance in rest for the combat.

A variant of this description was originally published at The Rossetti Archive.

Scholarly Commentary

Introduction

Henry Currie Marillier describes this as “a scene suggested by Thomas Malory. In a lighted chapel a lady is helping to arm a kneeling knight in red, her long white head-dress, as she stoops to kiss him, falling like a mantle down her blue dress. She is holding his long two-handed sword. Upon the pointed shield of the knight is a figure of a maiden in distress (...