COVE

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 bells and a lute. Two other ladies stand singing from sheet music. A red lily rises in the lower foreground. Elizabeth Siddal was the model for the queen on the right.

DGR's brief comment supplies a useful, equally enigmatic gloss on the picture's abstract quality: "its subject is some people playing music" (see DGR's letter to his aunt Polidori of 20 September 1869, Fredeman 60.38). When F. G. Stephens says the picture is "intended to symbolize the association of colour with music" (41), he underscores the formalism of the work, as well as its ideal character.

The picture represents a series of balanced relations: the queen on the right plays the clavichord with her right hand, the queen on the left with her left, and their other hands are symmetrically playing the bells and lute. At the back, we see the left arm of the woman on the right, the right of the woman on the left. A like set of balanced relations governs the arrangements of the colors, including the colors on the musical instruments (which are themselves organized in a set of double balances). The holly at the top balances the red-orange lily at the bottom, and the latter's color rhymes with the soil in which it grows. The blue tiles, visible at the back wall and the floor, argue that the entire "closet" is indeed enclosed in their blue; and the pair of blue emblems on the bells and lute define another symmetry. In a sense, the crossed legs supporting the clavichord are a visual emblem of all these symmetries; in another sense, the predominance of quaternary relationships connects to the square tiles which enclose the entire space.

No studies for the picture are known to survive. It was executed for William Morris in 1856-1857. Monogram and date are inscribed at lower right.

DGR's works often use emblems of sun and moon as signs of time passing, as here on the musical instruments. The instruments themselves are neo-platonic emblems. They stand for the Pythagorean understanding of perfect harmony (at once a musical and a mathematical idea); see The Monochord, where DGR engages this subject most directly.

Alastair Grieve suggests that "The symmetrical grouping and echoed poses recall the composition of medieval scenes of the flagellation of Christ or of angels making music (e.g., Orcagna's panel of 'Musical Angels' in Christ Church, Oxford" (280).

The painting was the inspiration for Morris's splendid and equally strange poem of the same title, published in 1857 in his The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems volume. Morris had finished his poem in mid-December 1856 (see DGR's letter to Allingham of 18 December 1856 where he describes Morris's work as a "stunning poem" ( Fredeman 56.59).

This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published (or registered with the U.S. Copyright Office) before January 1, 1923. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Works Cited

Fredeman, William E. The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. D. S. Brewer, 2002-2010.

Grieve, Alastair. The Pre-Raphaelites: A Catalogue for the Tate Exhibition. Tate Gallery/Penguin Books, 1984.

Stephens, F. G. Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Seeley and Co., 1894.

How to Cite this Web Page (MLA format)

McGann, Jerome. "Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Blue Closet (1857)." Omnibus Edition of "In an Artist's Studio. Eds. Pamela Buck, Dino Franco Felluga, Nicole Fluhr, Dominique Gracia, Jerome McGann, Melissa Merte, and Herbert F. Tucker. The COVE: The Central Online Victorian Educator, covecollective.org. [Here, add your last date of access to The COVE].