Dante Gabriel Rossetti's own description of the work, given in a 14 November 1848 letter to Charles Lyell, is primary: “It belongs to the religious class which has always appeared to me the most adapted and the most worthy to interest the members of a Christian community. The subject is the education of the Blessed Virgin, one which has been treated at various times by Murillo and other painters,—but, as I cannot...
According to Surtees, this is the last portrait Dante Gabriel Rossetti made of his mother. It was completed during his recuperative stay at Hunter's Forestall, Kent (Surtees188).
See the commentary for the early drawing and the later finished oil as well as Rossetti's letter to his brother of 28 September 1877 where he says he has “commenced a...
This is one of the many Marian pictures and poems that Dante Gabriel Rossetti created in the late 1840s and early to mid-1850s. The sketch for the virtually finished pencil drawing has on its back a study for The Meeting of Dante and Beatrice in Paradise. The contiguity underscores the close relation Rossetti saw in his pursuit of his Marian and his Beatricean...
Based on the story of the Lady of Siena as told in Dante Alighieri's Purgatorio (V. 130-136), the painting bears within itself an oblique allusion to the relations between Jane Morris, her husband William, and their close friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Jane sat for this portrait of La Pia, who was imprisoned and murdered by her husband in 1295 in a...
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 (...
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...
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...
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...
This image of Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal (1829-1862) is perhaps the most dominant figura of the first phase of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Until her tragic death of an overdose of laudanum, she was Dante Gabriel Rossetti's principal model. She inspired him to create an extraordinary series of portrait drawings, and he used her image as the focus for...
This drawing is perhaps the most celebrated in the series of drawings Dante Gabriel Rossetti made to illustrate texts from Lord Alfred Tennyson's poetry. The target in this case is "The Palace of Art” (lines 97-100). The difficulty arises because of the erotic intensity of the picture, which (given the source text) appears to represent a (male) angel embracing the...
This famous drawing gives an important statement of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's thoughts about the relation of pictorial forms of representation to the expression of ideas. Indeed, the picture amounts to a formal embodiment of its own thinking. Like...
Emparadised Damozel gazing downward. “Behind the Damozel, beneath spreading branches, groups of lovers embrace against a pink sky; below her a pink flame outlines three angel heads. In the predella the earthly lover rests beside a river in a wooded landscape” (Surtees, Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti 142). Stephens' description is more elaborate: “Beata Beatrix,” 86-88.
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...
Morris’s departure for Oxford was a great event in his life. He made close friends who shared his interest in historical and contemporary art, poetry, and contemporary affairs--Edward Burne-Jones, a future painter, Cromwell Price, a future headmaster, Vernon Lushington, a future judge, and Richard Watson Dixon, a future poet and clergyman. This “Oxford Brotherhood” admired the poems Morris had begun to write, and when they decided as a group on the ambitious venture of founding a magazine, The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, Morris became its first editor and chief contributor, writing...
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...
