8. Gender Politics

Christina Rossetti's enigmatic poem encapsulates something of the relationship between the artist and his subject. For her brother, in particular, women she suggests, existed as projections of imagination, fantasy and ideals. Outside the studio, however, Rossetti was very attractive to women who he treated with considerable affection.

By the mid 1850s Rossetti's turbulent relationship with Elizabeth Siddal reached a crisis. She began to take drugs, was frequently ill, and finally the couple parted for many months. In the meantime Rossetti had met Fanny Cornforth at the Royal Surrey Gardens. Model, part time prostitute, voluptuous, lively she had many of the qualities of uninhibited drive that Lizzie lacked. She became Rossetti's model then mistress, and she seems to have given him new sexual pleasures. Nor did she mind giving the same pleasures to Rossetti's close friend W P Boyce. The two set her up in her own flat, and the enjoyment that both of them had with her was celebrated in a picture commissioned by Boyce, Bocca Baciata. 




It was, as Rossetti recognised it had a, 'Venetian aspect'. Gone are the ascetic values of the medieval world, and just as Renaissance painters, particularly those in Venice, had celebrated the pleasures they had with courtesans, so Rossetti celebrated the pleasure he had with Fanny.

Rossetti was not alone in shifting painting away from narrative towards the sensuousness of pure pigment, but a picture like Leighton's Pavonia though brilliantly skilful has none of the warmth and allure of Bocca Baciata.

Rossetti's discovery that he enjoyed sharing a woman with another man led to a new orientation in his work, and a burst of creativity. Here he draws Fanny and Boyce in his own studio as Fanny leans affectionately over Boyce. On the wall behind is a portrait of the divorced actress Ruth Herbert, a famous beauty with a harem of lovers.

In Bocca Baciata Fanny is pressed towards the viewer in a moment of meditative intimacy. She allows her courtesan's dress to fall open and make her white flesh available to the viewer. The marigolds, symbols of the sun and creativity blossom in a wall of verdure behind her, and the eponymous mouth that gave so much pleasure is placed centrally in the canvas. The rich oil medium (Rossetti until now had worked mainly in watercolour), links him with his Venetian originals and speaks of a new painterly mode.

Lizzie Siddal returned to Rossetti's life, crushed by illness and drug taking, and more out of duty than desire Rossetti married her. Their married life was brief, but long enough for her to become pregnant, though the female child was still-born. Depressed and isolated, she overdosed on laudanum. Rossetti was overwhelmed with guilt, and placed the manuscript of his poems in her coffin. Some years later in a gesture of remorse he painted Beata Beatrix which, in contrast to his developing Renaissance style, returns to the neo-gothic mode in a picture of Lizzie as Beatrice at the moment of death. Behind stand Dante let by Love.

Around 1865 Jane Morris returned from her early married years in Kent to the centre of London and returned, too, to Rossetti's life. His new attraction to her was marked by a series of remarkable photographs taken by the photographer Alfred Parson in Rossetti's garden in Chelsea.

Her dress, loose and dark, though it covers her body also serves to reveal it. In direct contrast to contemporary fashion she wears neither crinoline nor corset.

This fact was noticed by Henry James when he first visited the Morrises in London in 1869. In a famous letter to his sister he suggests that Mrs Morris probably is has no underwear on and he is startled by her dress, her manner and her physiognomy. He saw her as the quintessence of Pre-Raphaelitism, a fact that was reinforced by a portrait of her The Blue Silk Dress that Rossetti had just given her as a present and that hung in their sitting room.

The painting (as the accompanying sonnet suggests) is a gesture of defiance and possession. In another triangular relationship, Rossetti had managed to seduce Jane into temporarily abandoning her children and her husband. The relationship passionate, all consuming and dangerous stimulated Rossetti into some of his most vivid and energetic poems and pictures. James noticed the obsession when he visited Rossetti in his studio.

Urged by all those around him to publish his poems, Rossetti had to recover the manuscript book buried with Lizzie Siddal. In famous, macabre scene in Highgate Cemetery her coffin was brought to the surface. After the book had been fumigated Rossetti transcribed the poems, and with the aid of his brother William Michael and the poet A C Swinburne, edited them along with poems written since Lizzie's death. They were published in 1870.
 

In 1872 William Buchanan under the pseudonym of Thomas Maitland attacked Rossetti in a famous article 'The Fleshly School of Poetry'. He accused Rossetti of writing a kind of pornography that would infect others across the land. Rossetti was devastated by such public humiliation thinking that it would expose his treatment of Lizzie, his affair with Jane and his betrayal of his friend Morris. He took an overdose of laudanum in the hope of following Lizzie to the grave, and was at first given up for dead.

7. The Origins of Aesthetic Art

David Wilkie was a hugely popular narrative artist telling stories in his pictures about English village life. He was one of Charles Dickens' favourite painters.

To some extent his work was modelled on the seventeenth century work of Dutch genre painters, much admired in the early nineteenth century. It also influenced the work of artists who turned their attention from rural life to the lives of the growing middle classes.

One of those artists was W. P. Frith who became both rich and famous in his representation of the lives of this class in huge and imposing canvases. Stories dominated his epics depicting the activities of the middle classes.

As art became more accessible and still more popular there was a widespread demand for pictures that entertained and instructed; for pictures that told stories and told them with stongly moral tendencies.

The Pre-Raphaelites, though they reacted against this prescriptive tendency were not immune to the demand for narrative. Collins's 'Convent Thoughts', for example, is full of implicit narrative impulses, but shifts them in the direction of symbols and emblems.

Similarly, Hunt's 'Hierling Shepherd' works at several levels. It celebrates rural life and its healthiness, it tells a story about the negligent farm-hand bought in to look after the sheep; but beneath it all is an allegory about the state of the Church in Britain, tempted into false pre-occupations by the temptations of Catholicism.

In the mid-1850, Millais moved closer to pictures without narrative impulses.  His 'Apple Blossoms' offers an image of a group of young girls having a picnic of porridge in an orchard. What conceptual meaning that can be extracted from this must lie in the realm of a meditation on youth, transience and death, though nothing is spelled out.

Millais's masterpiece in this mode is 'Autumn Leaves' - again a picture which, with is sunset, autumn and bonfire in the company of a group of young women, is replete with associations of the passing of life. 'All flesh is as grass' comes to mind, as do many other biblical texts, but the finally the picture resists these the specificity of narrative construction.

Rossetti wrestled with the issues of narrative and material realism, though he never successfully resolved it in the way in which Millais did. 'Found' shows him trying to bring together material reality in a context of issues about sexuality that are essentially non specific.

Rossetti's solution lay in his return to myth and mythological structures. His large and powerful drawing of Mary Magdalene visiting the house of Simon is a far more resolved expression of the issues raised in 'Found'. Mary's vision of Christ that no others can see sanctifies her sexuality in an image that realism could not hope to capture. Narrative still plays a part, but in a very subordinate role.

The sentiments of the drawing are dramatised and expanded in Rossetti's accompanying sonnet.

5. Word and Image

In a discussion of the use of the dramatic monologue in William Morris, 'The Defence of Guenevere', Robert Browning, 'Fra Lippo Lippi', Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 'Jenny' together with his poem 'Mary Magdalene at the door of Simon the Pharisee: for a picture' these images were used to illustrate the work of Filippo Lippi (1406-1469), Giotto (1267-1337) and Rossetti's drawing of Mary Magdalene.

4. From Dante to King Arthur

Though Ruskin had offered his support to a number of the PRB, because Rossetti did not show his work at major venues it was some time before he came to the critic's notice. When Effie left Ruskin for Millais, Ruskin turned to Rossetti as his new protegé.



He was hugely impressed by Rossetti's treatment of the Middle Ages in his Dante pictures

and admired the way in which he used symbolism in his biblical subjects. He found a number of patrons for Rossetti and lent material support to both him and to Elizabeth Siddal.

Around 1854, however, Ruskin began to find the subjects Rossetti was choosing too forthright, and too explicit in a number of ways. Paolo and Francesca was a Dante subject, but not one that Ruskin thought would meet with approval with female patrons.

Rossetti also began to look once again at the Morte d'Arthur and found the stories more and more to his taste. Dante's poetry, especially the Vita Nuova was tender and spiritual; the stories of King Arthur were more vigorous, energetic and filled with political and sexual intrigue.

In the mid-1850s Rossetti was asked by the publisher Moxon to contribute to an illustrated Tennyson. Rossetti chose four some of which were Arthurian in subject.

Though the PRB was largely disbanded as a group, other members were invited to contribute including Holman Hunt who provided his famous image of the Lady of Shalott.

William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones were young undergraduates who had gone to Exeter College Oxford to study for the ministry. Jones was brought up by a poor father in Birmingham, Morris came from an affluent family in London. Knowing nothing at first of the PRB, they shared a love of art and a love of the chivalric Middle Ages. The decided to set up a brotherhood around the legend of the chaste figure of Sir Galahad.

Burne-Jones, coming across a copy of The Germ, learned of Rossetti and was determined to meet him. Both Morris and Jones abandoned the Church for a life in art. Morris, at first chose architecture; Jones wanted to be a painter, and when he travelled to London to meet his hero, Rossetti welcomed him as a new disciple. Burne-Jones's early drawings were chivalric, delicate and mystical.

In 1857 Rossetti was invited to decorate the newly built Oxford Union debating chamber. He agreed, decided that the subjects of the murals must be Arthurian, and asked a number of friends to join him. These included Morris and Jones.

None of the artists other than Hungerford Pollen had any experience of the highly specialist art of mural painting.

Rossetti, whose relationship with Lizzie Siddal was very strained, chose an incident from the legend of Sir Lancelot where he failed to enter the Chapel of the Holy Grail because of his adultery with Guinevere. The figure of the angel of the Grail was modelled on Lizzie Siddal and Guinevere on the daughter of an ostler who Rossetti saw one evening at the theatre.

She was Jane Burden.

Morris also painted her as Guinevere.

And she appeared in another design for Lancelot in the Queen's Chamber created for the debating chamber, but never used.

Guinevere was a  controversial figure in British culture where Arthurianism had come very much into vogue. Tennyson in his developing poem The Idylls of the King, published his Guinevere episode in 1858, in which she was strongly condemned for her affair with Lancelot and its political repercussions. 

In the same year Morris wrote The Defence of Guenvere that took a very different view of the Queen.

 In 1858 Morris proposed to Jane Burden to whom Rossetti was also deeply attracted, beginning a triangular situation that was to affect their lives for years to come.