Morris’s first volume faced mixed, even discouraging, reviews. It didn’t help that he had dedicated his volume to his mentor Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who was disliked by certain reviewers. These retaliated by condemning the Defence as showing Pre-Raphaelite influence--notably in arcane subject matter and a concentration on detail.
More important was the reviewers’ reaction to the medievalism of the Defence poems. Whether they liked or disliked them, most agreed that Morris’s poems were original and even powerful, but they could not fully understand them (often they hadn’t read the...
Though not technically a double work, the painting is connected to many of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's most central writings and pictures. The all but explicit connection to...
Frame: Gilded flats set between tiered mouldings, with roundels centered on each flat; the roundels are stylized concentric circles. This was a design DGR used from about 1868.
This is the original, pen-and-ink illuminated text drawing that Dante Gabriel Rossetti made for his mother's birthday. The drawing was laid into the front of a copy of David Main's Treasury of English Sonnets (1881), which had laid into the back a birthday poem by Christina Rossetti. Brother and sister then presented the...
Verse Fancies Poems by Edward Levetus, illustrations by Celia Levetus (Chapman & Hall, 1897)
The poetry collection Verse Fancies can only be described as a family affair. Edward L. Levetus composed the poetry in the collection, and his sister Celia Levetus did the accompanying illustrations. In the illustration accompanying the poem "Love in Ambush," the scene is a quintessentially English one, with Phyllis tending to the rose bushes. The background is filled with dense and leafy foliage. The peacock that occupies the foreground adds an exotic...
Dante Gabriel Rossetti's original portrait of Christina Rossetti was completed around 1850. As William Michael Rossetti explains, "The portrait of my sister given in the present volume is taken from a pencil drawing done by Dante Gabriel, which remained quite unnoticed (and by myself forgotten) until I turned it up among her miscellanies after her death. It is much like her, and is possibly the sweetest version of her face that he or anyone ever produced. I should not be surprised if it were a slight study preliminary to the picture...
This painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti is watercolour, pencil, and gum arabic heightened with touches of bodycolour and with scratching out. The model for the figure of the Virgin was Elizabeth Siddal. Inscribed on the verso in G. P. Boyce's hand: "Painted by Dante Gabriel Rossetti for G P Boyce—1855." The Virgin is bathing...
This work by Dante Gabriel Rossetti is often (and not incorrectly) read as a memorial to his wife, Elizabeth Siddal. It is more than that, however. He had begun it on canvas years before his wife's death in early 1862, as he told Ellen Heaton in a letter of 22 December 1863 (see Surtees 1.93). Drawings of all kinds from as...
There is only one version of this picture by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a small watercolor in the Tate Gallery. It describes, against a striking background of blue tiles, two queens playing on a clavichord with one hand each while their other hands play a set of...
This drawing of Christina Rossetti by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (colored chalk on blue-gray paper) was completed September 1866. The sitter's name, the artist's monogram, and the date are inscribed at upper right: "del. September 1866." This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published (or...
Executed in late 1857 and exhibited at the Liverpool Academy in 1858, this "A Christmas Carol" by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (watercolour) was bought in mid-1859 by James Leathart for 80 guineas. DGR told Leathart it was one of the best watercolours he had ever done and advised him that "to be seen favorably [it] ought to be hung...
This watercolour on paper by Dante Gabriel Rossetti was commissioned by John Ruskin in 1855. The watercolour illustrates an episode from Dante's Purgatorio, Canto XXVII. This is one of two watercolours dealing with subjects from Dante commissioned by Ruskin in April 1855. The other is...
Ecce Ancilla Domini! (oil on canvas) by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a companion piece to The Girlhood of Mary Virgin, occupies a key place among the large number of works DGR conceived and executed early in...
This watercolour and graphite drawing of Elizabeth Siddal (on paper, laid on fine linen on a stretcher) is now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. The monogram and date are inscribed at lower right. The monogram design belongs to 1863 or later. The date is ambiguous, and may indicate that the drawing was begun in 1850, and...
This remarkable picture by Dante Gabriel Rossetti is a watercolor painted over a carte de visite photograph of Elizabeth Siddal. According to G. C. Williamson, DGR made the portrait in May 1861 while attending at the bedside of his wife shortly after she gave birth to her dead child on 2 May (at their home, 14 Chatham Place...
This drawing by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (sepia, pen and brush) is not catalogued in Virginia Surtees and its present location is not known. It has been reproduced, however, in Harry Quilter's Preferences in Art, Life, and Literature (facing page 54). Compare the similarly posed portraits, one...
The First Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice is a watercolour by Dante Gabriel Rossetti from 1853. The model for the head of the young woman was Elizabeth Siddal. Eriko Yamaguchi has identified a pictorial source for this work in Camille Bonnard's Costumes Historiques (1829). The costume of religious figure on the...
Dante Gabriel Rossetti's painting, The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (oil on canvas), was begun in August 1848 and completed for exhibition in March 1849. Christina Rossetti was the model for the Virgin; Gabriele Rossetti was the model for St. Anne. Old William (a family dependent) sat for St. Joachim. Both William...
