Dante Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite movementWood, Esther (of Hampstead)
Philosophy
Dante Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite movement
Wood, Esther (of Hampstead)
Pre-Raphaelitism -- Great Britain; Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 1828-1882
The Pre-Raphaelites as Book-Illustrators—Moxon’s “Tennyson”—The “Oxford
and Cambridge Magazine”—The Oxford Frescoes—Oxford Patrons of
Millais and Hunt—Departure of Hunt for Palestine—The Pictures of
Madox Brown—Further Developments of Rossetti’s Painting—Marriage and
Bereavement—“Beata Beatrix”—Replicas—Life at Chelsea—Later Models—
Designs for Stained Glass—Visit to Penkill—“Dante’s Dream”—
Publication and Reception of the “Poems”—Paintings of Rossetti’s
Last Decade—Death at Birchington.
The first and most fruitful decade of Pre-Raphaelitism in painting and
poetry saw also the excursion of several of its leaders into the realm
of book-illustration. In 1855 Rossetti, Millais, and Arthur Hughes
combined to make a series of drawings for the second edition of a little
volume of verse entitled “Day and Night Songs,” by William Allingham, a
young poet well known to the Brotherhood since 1849. The efforts were
not of an ambitious character. The weird little group of fairies dancing
in the moonlight, by Arthur Hughes, reflected vividly the influence of
Blake. Rossetti’s “Maids of Elfinmere” were of his most angelic-mediæval
type, ascetically beautiful, and yet, if the phrase may be permitted,
with a certain sensuous severity of look, a delicate and half-mystic
passion, as of pure spirits newly wakened to the tenderness of the
flesh.
A more important experiment in the same direction was made in 1857, when
Rossetti, Millais, and Holman Hunt appeared among the illustrators of
Moxon’s edition of “Tennyson.” Intimately charmed as they had all been
with the “Idylls of the King,” and with such entirely “Pre-Raphaelite”
poetry as “The Lady of Shalott,” the draughtsmen could hardly have found
a more congenial sphere for design. The volume affords one of the most
interesting records of the transitional work of the three painters.
Woolner’s fine medallion of the young laureate formed the frontispiece.
Then followed Millais’s “Mariana”—a composition wholly distinct from,
and far inferior to, his “Mariana in the Moated Grange,” which had been
shown in the Academy of 1851. The face of this Mariana is hidden in her
hands as she turns with bowed head from the window, and from the sunset
that mocks her grief with its imperturbable glory heedless and afar.
Much less conventional in spirit is the passionate, strained figure of
Rossetti’s “Mariana in the South,” crouching on her unrestful bed, and
kissing the feet of the crucifix above her as she draws from her bosom
the “old letters breathing of her worth.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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