Poetry in Pre-Raphaelite paintings: transcending boundaries 9781433140785, 9781433140754, 9781433140761, 9781433140778, 1433140780

Table of contents :
Plates - Notes on Contributors - Acknowledgments - Sophia Andres/Brian Donnelly: Pre-Raphaelite Poetic Paintings: Transcending Spatial and Temporal Boundaries - Serena Trowbridge: Gender and Space in Pre-Raphaelite Paintings of "The Eve of St Agnes" - Divya Athmanathan: "Good pictures ... are always another poem": Mapping Spatialities in Alfred, Lord Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott" and Elizabeth Siddal's The Lady of Shalott - Dante Alighieri's Dreams in Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Paintings - Laurence Roussillon-Constanty: "A Dramatis Personae of the Soul": Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Proserpine - Martina John: " Portrait of the Artist as an Italian Poet: Rossetti's Dante - Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Poems in Paintings: Photography, Realism and Painting - Enrique Olivares: Interpretation and Representation in Dante Gabriel Rossetti's "Sonnets for Pictures" - Daniel Brown: "They that would look on her": Jane Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and "The Portrait" - Modernity's Kaleidoscopic Views - Amelia Yeates: Poetic Narrative in William Morris's and Edward Burne- Jones's Pygmalion Project - Sarah Banschbach Valles: Aestheticism and Violent Delight in the Sister Arts of A. C. Swinburne and Simeon Solomon - Anne Koval: From Poet to Painter: The Aestheticism of Swinburne and Whistler - Sophia Andres: Conclusion: Pre-Raphaelite Paintings of Classical Texts - Bibliography - Index.

Citation preview

Poetry in Pre-Raphaelite Paintings TRANSCENDING BOUNDARIES EDITED BY

S O P HIA A ND R E S AND B R IA N D O NNE L L Y

Poetry in Pre-Raphaelite Paintings is an international collection of essays written by seasoned and emerging scholars. This book explores, discusses, and provides new perspectives on Pre-Raphaelite paintings inspired by poems and poems inspired by Pre-Raphaelite paintings, ranging from the inauguration of the movement in 1848 until the end of the nineteenth century. Through a textual and visual journey, this work reflects an innovative approach to Pre-Raphaelite art and Victorian poetry. The rationale in collating this collection of essays is to suggest new approaches for studies in Victorian visual and verbal art. This collection urges new ways of looking at Pre-Raphaelite art and poetry and its dynamic impact on the changing face of Victorian artistic practices through the second half of the nineteenth century, re-evaluating the extent to which this relatively short-lived movement influenced diverse writers and artists and their work. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of Pre-Raphaelites, Victorian poetry and painting, and the intersection between them. “This thought-provoking collection of essays explores the intersection of PreRaphaelite painting and poetry and reimagines a poetics of the visual. By destabilizing the categories of verbal and visual representation and bringing together familiar and unfamiliar poems and paintings, the authors model new and exciting ways of thinking about gender, musicality, photography, the temporal-spatial divide, the use of the voice, morality, sexuality, social implications, and aestheticism as they are conveyed through word and image by the Pre-Raphaelites.” Constance M. Fulmer, Blanche E. Seaver Chair of English Literature, Pepperdine University, Malibu, California Sophia Andres is Professor of English and Kathlyn Cosper Dunagan Professor at the University of Texas of the Permian Basin. She is the author of The Pre-Raphaelite Art of the Victorian Novel: Narrative Challenges to Visual Gendered Boundaries (winner of the 2006 SCMLA Book Award). Brian Donnelly is Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Reading Dante Gabriel Rossetti: The Painter as Poet (2015).

www.peterlang.com

Advance Praise for

Poetry in Pre-Raphaelite Paintings

“These essays provide rich, multi-layered portals into the hearts and minds of PreRaphaelite artists, while disrupting conventional interpretations of space, identity and gender. They advance nuanced discourse across disciplines, outlining the integration between poetry of the period, Pre-Raphaelite poetry in particular, and the visual art produced through that integration. Poetry in Pre-Raphaelite Paintings is not only important for ongoing academic research on the subjects, but it is unique for the ways it can prompt practicing arts professionals (including museums), to engage viewers in a total phenomenological and sensory experience in front of the physical work of art. The essays challenge us to consider gender and identity politics in the interior and exterior spaces of mind and canvas, while contemplating the lush brushstrokes and written lines of these memorable Victorian masterpieces.” Rita R. Wright, Director, Springville Museum “This international collection not only reconsiders how painting and poetry enrich each other, but also extends the nature of ekphrasis itself beyond its traditional boundaries, as a method of expressing gendered spatial relations, as an extension of the artist’s own self, as a mode capable equally of releasing a subject into view as it is of representing an object. Of particular note are the essays enabling us to see how the sister-arts reveal what is interior, reminding us that a poem is as much introspection as it is a visual event. It is a collection in which an artist’s experiments are reframed as stylistic innovations, biographical interpretation is replaced with arguments about intertextual framework, and the voiceless receive both faces and voices. Reading these essays produces, as one author suggests, a ‘violent delight,’ asking us to consider what questions we have not been asking and which we need to ask now.” Bryn Gribben, Seattle University

Poetry in Pre-Raphaelite Paintings

This book is part of the Peter Lang Humanities list. Every volume is peer reviewed and meets the highest quality standards for content and production.

PETER LANG

New York  Bern  Frankfurt  Berlin Brussels  Vienna  Oxford  Warsaw

Poetry in Pre-Raphaelite Paintings Transcending Boundaries Sophia Andres and Brian Donnelly

Edited by

PETER LANG

New York  Bern  Frankfurt  Berlin Brussels  Vienna  Oxford  Warsaw

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Andres, Sophia, editor. | Donnelly, Brian, editor. Title: Poetry in pre-Raphaelite paintings: transcending boundaries / edited by Sophia Andres and Brian Donnelly. Description: New York: Peter Lang, 2018. Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017026102 | ISBN 978-1-4331-4078-5 (hardback: alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4331-4075-4 (ebook pdf) | ISBN 978-1-4331-4076-1 (epub) ISBN 978-1-4331-4077-8 (mobi) Subjects: LCSH: English poetry—19th century—History and criticism. Art and literature—Great Britain—History—19th century. Pre-Raphaelitism—Great Britain. | Literature in art. Visual perception in art. | Visual perception in literature. Classification: LCC PR585.A78 P64 2017 | DDC 821/.809357—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017026102 DOI 10.3726/10803

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de/.

Cover image: La Belle Dame Sans Merci by Frank Dicksee (1853–1928). Courtesy of Bristol Museum and Art Gallery/Bridgeman Images.

© 2018 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York 29 Broadway, 18th floor, New York, NY 10006 www.peterlang.com All rights reserved. Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm, xerography, microfiche, microcard, and offset strictly prohibited.

Table of ­Contents

List of Plates

vii

Notes on Contributors

ix

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Pre-Raphaelite Poetic Paintings: Transcending Spatial and Temporal Boundaries Sophia Andres and Brian Donnelly

xiii

1

Windows and Bowers: Sexuality and Creativity 1. Gender and Space in Pre-Raphaelite Paintings of “The Eve of St Agnes” Serena TrowBridge 2. “Good pictures … are always another poem”: Mapping Spatialities in Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” and Elizabeth Siddal’s The Lady of Shalott Divya Athmanathan

17

29

Dante Alighieri’s Dreams in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Paintings 3. “A Dramatis Personae of the Soul”: Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Proserpine Laurence Roussillon-Constanty

45

4. Portrait of the Artist as an Italian Poet: Rossetti’s Dante Martina John

59

viContents Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Poems in Paintings: Photography, Realism and Painting 5. Interpretation and Representation in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “Sonnets for Pictures” Enrique Olivares

77

6. “They that would look on her”: Jane Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and “The Portrait” Daniel Brown

91

Modernity’s Kaleidoscopic Views 7. Poetic Narrative in William Morris’s and Edward BurneJones’s Pygmalion Project Amelia Yeates

107

8. Aestheticism and Violent Delight in the Sister Arts of A. C. Swinburne and Simeon Solomon Sarah Banschbach Valles

121

9. From Poet to Painter: The Aestheticism of Swinburne and Whistler Anne Koval

137

Conclusion: Pre-Raphaelite Paintings of Classical Texts Sophia Andres

153

Bibliography

163

Index

175



Plates

Plate 1.1: Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal, The Eve of St Agnes, c. 1850, The National Trust. Plate 2.1: Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal, The Lady of Shalott, 1853, Private Collection. Plate 3.1: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Proserpine, 1874, Tate Gallery, London. Plate 4.1: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Salutation of Beatrice, 1849–50, Fogg Museum, Harvard. Plate 5.1: Leonardo da Vinci, The Virgin of the Rocks, c. 1491-9/1506-8, National Gallery, London. Plate 6.1: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Pandora, 1869, Faringdon Collection. Plate 7.1: Edward Burne-Jones, Pygmalion and the Image II. The Hand Refrains, 1868–69, Birmingham Museums. Plate 8.1: Simeon Solomon, Habet!, 1865, Private Collection. Plate 9.1: James McNeill Whistler, The Little White Girl, 1864, Private Collection. Plate 9.2: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Lady Lilith, 1868, Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington.

23 31 47 60 80 95 109 125 139 141



Notes on Contributors

Sophia Andres is Professor of English and Kathlyn Cosper Dunagan Professor at the University of Texas of the Permian Basin. She is the author of numerous articles on Victorian literature and the Pre-Raphaelites, in addition to The Pre-Raphaelite Art of the Victorian Novel: Narrative Challenges to Visual Gendered Boundaries (2006 SCMLA Book Award). Andres is also the recipient of several teaching awards including the Piper and the UT Regents Award for Teaching Excellence. Recently she was inducted into the UT System Academy of Distinguished Teachers. Divya Athmanathan received her MSt in English from the University of Oxford, and her Ph.D. from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai, India. She researches and writes on Victorian fiction, the Pre-Raphaelites, and Victorian colonial writings and illustrations. Daniel Brown is currently an independent scholar. He received his Ph.D. in English, with a specialization in British Victorian literature, from the University of Florida in 2012. His recent and first book, Representing Realists in Victorian Literature and Criticism (Palgrave MacMillan, 2016), argues that our understanding of realism came about by way of nineteenth-century writers’ attempts to understand what they saw happening in the visual arts. Other publications include chapters and articles in Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature (Spring, 2012), The Blackwell Companion to Sensation Fiction, edited by Pamela K. Gilbert (Blackwell, 2011), and Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies (2007). Brian Donnelly is a Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has published articles on Victorian literature and art in Victorian Poetry, The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies,

xNotes

on

Contributors

Victorians, and Victorian Literature and Culture. He is the author of Reading Dante Gabriel Rossetti: The Painter as Poet (Ashgate, 2015). Martina John studied History of Art and English and German literature at Christian-Albrechts University, Kiel and graduated with a Master’s thesis on Edward Burne-Jones’s Holy Grail Tapestries. She published her Ph.D. thesis “Rossetti’s Dante: Image-Text-Relations and the Reception of Literary Subjects in the Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti” via Verlag Ludwig in 2015. She also participated in the conception of the exhibitions “K(l)eine Experimente. Kunst und Design der 50er Jahre in Deutschland” (Stiftung Schleswig Holsteinische Landesmuseen Schloß Gottorf), and “Holman Hunt and the Pre-Raphaelite Vision” (Manchester City Art Gallery). John lives and works as a digital editor in Hamburg, Germany. Anne Koval is Professor of Art History in the Fine Arts Department at Mount Allison University. Her Ph.D. is from the University of London where she specialized in nineteenth century art, and she has published extensively on the artist James McNeill Whistler. She is also a writer and curator of contemporary art. Her most recent essays include “Calling the Cuckoo,” a profile of artist Linda Rae Dornan appearing in Volume 2 of More Caught in the Act: Anthology of Performance Art by Canadian Women (2016). As a poet she was commissioned to write ekphrastic poetry for Sarindar Dhaliwal’s catalogue The Radcliffe Line and Other Geographies. Her poems have been published in the Queen’s Quarterly, and Ekphrasis Journal. Enrique Olivares is a scholar, songwriter and professor of English literature in the General Studies Department of the Universidad de Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras campus. He graduated from the UPR, Rio Piedras with a B.A. (2010) and M.A. (2013). His thesis “Ut Picture Poesis: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Double Work of Art” was awarded the Thomas Sullivan award for outstanding research. His academic interests are poetics, the literature of art and the long British nineteenth century, particularly Victorian poetry and the works of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood within the frame of empire and its connections to the Caribbean in the postcolonial frame. He has presented extensively both at home and abroad (including Oxford and Liverpool) on topics ranging from literature, media culture and musicology. Laurence Roussillon-Constanty is Professor in English Literature, Art and Epistemology at the Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour (France) and a Member of the Research Group CICADA (Centre Intercritique des Arts et des Discours sur les Arts). Her main research field is Victorian literature and painting and word and image studies and she has published several articles on Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Ruskin. She is the author of Méduse au miroir. Esthétique romantique de Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Grenoble:

Notes on Contributors

xi

ELLUG, 2007) and co-editor (with David Clifford) of The Rossettis Then and Now (London: Anthem Press, 2003). She also co-authored a translation into French of a selection of texts from John Ruskin’s Modern Painters (Pau: PUP, 2006). In recent years she has initiated several projects on art and science relations and co-edited two books: Science, Fables and Chimeras (Cambridge Scholars, 2012) and Imprint, Impregnation, Impression (PUP, 2014). Serena Trowbridge is Lecturer in English Literature at Birmingham City University. Her research focuses on the Pre-Raphaelites, in both literature and art, and she is currently preparing an edition of the poems of Elizabeth Siddall. Her monograph, Christina Rossetti’s Gothic, was published by Bloomsbury in 2014, and an edited collection, Pre-Raphaelite Masculinities (Ashgate, with Amelia Yeates) also appeared in 2014. Recent publications include “‘Truth to Nature’: the pleasures and dangers of the environment in Christina Rossetti’s poetry,” in Victorians and the Environment, eds. Mazzeno and Morrison (Ashgate, 2017); and a chapter on graveyard poetry for Gothic and Death, ed. Carol M. Davison (Manchester UP, 2017). Sarah Banschbach Valles is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at Texas Tech University. Her work on early modern British poetry uncovers the religious and political nature of Renaissance marriage and ritual, particularly in the works of the poets John Milton, Amelia Lanyer, and Robert Herrick. Her interests include book history and print culture, religion and literature, writing center pedagogy, Westerns, and Victorian visual art. Valles is the recipient of several departmental and graduate school scholarships and awards. Her work has been published in St. Austin Review and in the edited collection Contemporary Westerns. Amelia Yeates is Senior Lecturer in Art History at Liverpool Hope University. She has published on Pygmalionism, women’s reading practices and artistic masculinities in the nineteenth century. She was co-editor of Pre-Raphaelite Masculinities (Ashgate, 2014) and editor of a special issue of Visual Culture in Britain (July 2015) on The Male Artist in Nineteenth-Century Britain.

Acknowledgments

Poetry in Pre-Raphaelite Paintings: Transcending Boundaries would not have been possible without the generous support of the Dunagan family that a few years ago granted the Kathlyn Cosper Dunagan Endowed Professorship in the Humanities to the University of Texas of the Permian Basin. Professor Sophia Andres, who currently holds this Professorship, is deeply grateful to Kathlyn and John Dunagan for once again making scholarly dreams a reality to be shared with scholars and students who love literature and art. In addition to the anonymous readers at Peter Lang, the editors wish to warmly thank the following scholars for their willingness to read the manuscript of Poetry in Pre-Raphaelite Paintings: Transcending Boundaries and provide their valuable feedback: Professor Constance Fulmer, Pepperdine University; Professor Bryn Gribben, Seattle University; Dr. Rita R. Wright, Director Springville Museum of Art. We would also like to thank our editor Meagan Simpson for her insight and support. Most importantly we would like to thank the contributors to this volume for their intellectual vigor, energy, patience, and good humor.



Introduction: Pre-Raphaelite Poetic Paintings: Transcending Spatial and Temporal Boundaries Sophia Andres

and

Brian Donnelly

From the inception of the movement identified as The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848, through the emergence of British aestheticism and the close of the Victorian century, poetry has been quintessential to what we identify as Pre-Raphaelite art.1 The short-lived Pre-Raphaelite publication, The Germ (1850), was first subtitled Thoughts Towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art. After the first two issues, a new title emphasized its intertextual nature: Art and Poetry, Being Thoughts Towards Nature, Conducted Principally by Artists. If we consider the critical response to the change of the original title, Lindsay Smith suggests, we may perceive the new title as an attempt to destabilize the categories of art and poetry: It [the title] is a blatant advertisement for a radical intertextuality that presents the journal as questioning its categorization as discourse. And in this sense it may be regarded as, in effect, a self-parodic intervention into the rigidity of genre division, and into the sister arts analogies of reviewers.2

In essays on history, aesthetics, literature, art, as well as in poems that translated pictorial into verbal texts, the journal thoroughly explored the relationship between art and literature. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s compositions for The Germ, particularly his “Sonnets for Pictures,” embody these early attempts to reimagine a poetics of the visual. The essays collected here address the distinctly lyrical nature of Pre-Raphaelite art in ways that echo the manifesto of the movement, as Smith identifies it, specifically in terms of a “radical intertextuality” that encourages a destabilization of the comfortable categories

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of visual and verbal representation. This international collaboration brings together familiar and unfamiliar poetry and paintings associated with the Pre-Raphaelite coterie to envisage a Pre-Raphaelitism that pushes suggestively at the boundaries of sister-arts discourse and to provoke new thinking about this eclectic and engaging movement. The Pre-Raphaelites believed the fusion of poetry with painting was one of their highest achievements. William Holman Hunt deliberately drew attention to the association of Pre-Raphaelite art with poetry in order to distinguish it from its “dull detractors who were destitute of poetic discrimination.”3 Hunt’s definition of poetic painting does not merely include a tendency to select subjects from poetry; he also connects poetic painting to the PreRaphaelites’ ability to capture the beauty of nature in evanescent moments of ephemeral light. In distinguishing the Pre-Raphaelites from their contemporaries, Hunt declared, we saw that in Nature contours are found, and lost, and what in one point is trenchant, in another melts its form into dazzling light or untraceable gloom; that there is infinite delight to the mind in playing upon the change between one extreme characteristic and another. … Adherents to our reform in the true spirit … have proved that poetry in painting is not destroyed by the close pursuit of Nature’s beauty.4

Here Hunt echoes those sentiments expressed in the altered title of the Pre-Raphaelite manifesto The Germ quoted above: Art and Poetry, Being Thoughts Towards Nature, Conducted Principally by Artists. Hunt thus establishes the relation of Pre-Raphaelite painting to poetry while asserting the fundamental principles of Pre-Raphaelite art: realism, naturalism, truth, poetical expression and reform, fleeting change rather than permanence. Early Pre-Raphaelite champion John Ruskin also emphasized the poetic quality of Pre-Raphaelite art. In the third volume of Modern Painters, Ruskin claimed poetical feeling, that is to say, mere noble emotion, is not poetry. It is happily inherent in all human nature deserving the name, and is found often to be the purest in the least sophisticated. But the power of assembling by the help of the imagination, such images as will excite these feelings, is the power of the poet, or literally of the “Maker.”5

Later in the same work Ruskin distinguishes the Pre-Raphaelites from old masters such as Horace Vernet, Jacques-Louis David, or Domenico Tintoretto due to their ability to represent “noble grounds for noble emotions.” He recognizes them as “poetical painters,” not just for seeking inspiration in poetry and for depicting and generating intense emotions, often associated with poetry,

Introduction

3

but for “becoming poets in themselves in the entire sense, and inventing the story as they painted it.”6 Rather than abiding by the established restrictive boundaries of poetry and painting, Pre-Raphaelite artists destabilized them by coalescing spatial and temporal arts, thus infusing one art with the power and intensity of the other, and bringing the singular qualities of each firmly to the viewers’ minds. Through the temporal dimension of poetry, the subjects of Pre-Raphaelite art acquired a voice and quite often a subjectivity that the spatial essence of painting had denied them. Poetry removed the static quality of paintings, infusing them with movement, vitality, dynamism and multitudinous perspectives. In creating paintings inspired by well-known poems at the outset of the movement, the first Pre-Raphaelite artists deliberately cultivated an association with the literary in order to render their somewhat controversial paintings more palatable to the public. John Everett Millais’s first Pre-Raphaelite painting Isabella (1848–49), for instance, was exhibited accompanied by stanzas 1 and 21 of John Keats’s “Isabella, or the Pot of Basil”; Holman Hunt’s The Flight of Madeline and Porphyro during the Drunkenness Attending the Revelry (1848) was exhibited with the penultimate stanza of Keats’s “The Eve of St. Agnes” in the catalog; the frame of Rossetti’s first Pre-Raphaelite painting, The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1848–49), was inscribed with his own sonnet, “Mary’s Girlhood.” The intertextual nature of their subjects continued to characterize PreRaphaelite paintings from the beginning of the movement and further through its multiple manifestations. Illustrations of Alfred Tennyson’s famous poem “The Lady of Shalott,” for instance, made their first appearance in the Moxon edition of Tennyson’s poetry (1857), and continued to inspire painters like John William Waterhouse at the turn of the twentieth century. It was the “common enthusiasm” for Keats’s poetry, Hunt recalls, which brought the three founders together, and later served as the inspiration for several paintings.7 Contemporary critics such as Ruskin and David Masson described and even identified the Pre-Raphaelites as poetical painters. Twentieth-century critics, such as Stephen Spender, continued to see the Pre-Raphaelites as literary painters. More recently art historian David Peters Corbett declared but if the founding Pre-Raphaelites thought of their project to represent the modern as a visual one, it is also the case that language and literary art featured centrally in Pre-Raphaelite practice and as an equal partner in the reformulation of the arts that the Pre-Raphaelites attempted.8

Corbett considers that the verbal and the visual have been complementary and fundamental forces in Pre-Raphaelite art: “The visual is not, merely by

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virtue of its own achievements and without the aid of language, able to conduct the spectator into the inner truths of Pre-Raphaelite ambition.”9 In The Pre-Raphaelite Illustrators, Gregory Suriano claims that “nearly every Pre-Raphaelite painting and work of graphic art is related to literature.”10 But it is important to note that the Pre-Raphaelite illustrations of literature were rarely precise transcriptions of the poetic or literary text; rather they depicted the individual artists’ interpretations, hence the diverse representations in paintings of “The Lady of Shalott,” Ophelia, or “The Eve of St. Agnes.” In their illustrations, Suriano remarks, the Pre-Raphaelites “created whole new universes.”11 For this reason, Pre-Raphaelite illustrations often caused heated disputes between the poet and the artist. Shortly after the publication of Moxon’s 1857 edition of Tennyson’s Poems, for instance, Holman Hunt recalls meeting Tennyson, who beset him with disconcerting questions about his illustrations for “The Lady of Shalott”: “I must now ask, why did you make the Lady of Shalott, in the illustration, with her hair wildly tossed about as if by a tornado?” Quite puzzled, Hunt responded that his illustration accurately captured “the idea of the threatened fatality by reversing the ordinary peace of the room and of the lady herself; that while she recognized that the moment of the catastrophe had come, the spectator might also understand it.” Still dissatisfied, the great poet persisted: “But I didn’t say that her hair was blown about like that. Then there is another question I want to ask you. Why did you make the web wind round and round her like the threads of a cocoon?” “Now,” I exclaimed, “surely that may be justified, for you to say Out flew the web and floated wide; The mirror crack’d from side to side; a mark of the dire calamity that had come upon her.” “But I did not say it floated round and round her.” My defense was, “may I not urge that I had only a half a page on which to convey the impression of weird fate, whereas you use about fifteen pages to give expression to the complete idea?”12

Still the poet admonished the artist: “an illustrator ought never to add anything to what he finds in the text.” To further underscore his point, he continued to assail Hunt with his objections against his illustrations for “King Cophetua and The Beggar Maid.” Tennyson’s response to Rossetti’s “St. Cecilia,” his illustration to “The Palace of Art,” was equally belligerent. According to William Michael Rossetti “he had to give up the problem of what it had to do with his verses.”13 Each visual representation, or transformation of the verbal into the visual, also disclosed the ideological propensities of the individual artist. Such writers

Introduction

5

as Christine Poulson and Lynn Pearce have observed the ideological disparities between Malory’s and Tennyson’s poetical version of Guinevere, for example, and some of its visual representations as, for instance, Rossetti’s Sir Lancelot’s Vision of Sanc Graal (1857), or James Archer’s The Meeting of Lancelot and Guinevere (1864). Vibrant, sensuous paintings such as Millais’s Mariana (1850–51), Arthur Hughes’s April Love (1855–56), and Rossetti’s The Blessed Damozel (1875–78), to name but a few, originated in poetry and illustrated the painters’ interpretation of a moment, a scene or a theme. Such literary paintings may be seen as attempts to make palpable and tangible impalpable and intangible verbal expressions, or to express challenges to ideologically dominant representations of gender. As Elizabeth Prettejohn observes, pictures like Millais’s Mariana or Rossetti’s Ecce Ancilla Domini! (1849–50), both associated with poetry, explore “sexual issues of contemporary concern … The figures do not represent categories in a moral system, conventional or otherwise, nor are their narrative situations reducible to logical propositions about sexual morality”14 Each reconfiguration then from one text to the other or from the verbal to the visual discloses ideological gaps or contradictions which the viewer may question or attempt to fill. In this collection, authors explore the complexities involving the coalescence of Pre-Raphaelite poetry and painting to provide new and exciting perspectives often overlooked by the few writers concerned with the intersection of the two arts in the Victorian period. Beginning with the early years of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, the collection ends with the commonly called second movement of Pre-Raphaelitism and the aestheticism of James McNeill Whistler and Algernon Swinburne. The first section of the book concentrates on the somewhat marginalized figure of Elizabeth Siddal. Often reduced to a biographical token as Rossetti’s early muse and rather unfortunate lover and later wife, Siddal’s artistic output has been similarly marginalized, and these papers work to relocate her at the outset of the Pre-Raphaelite engagement with the written word. In Chapter 1, “Gender and Space in Pre-Raphaelite Paintings of ‘The Eve of St Agnes,’” Serena Trowbridge explores several Pre-Raphaelite paintings inspired by John Keats’s 1819 poem: William Holman Hunt’s The Flight of Madeline and Porphyro during the Drunkenness Attending the Revelry (1848), Arthur Hughes’s, The Eve of St Agnes (1856), and John Everett Millais’s, The Eve of St Agnes (c. 1863). Comparing the work of these artists to Elizabeth Siddal’s The Eve of St Agnes (1852–60), inspired by Tennyson’s poem “St Agnes’ Eve” (1837), Trowbridge examines the ideological complexities fueling the works of male and female artists. Romantic literature, medieval history, early Italian art, as well as the Pre-Raphaelites’ multifarious interests in literary

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and artistic relations, Trowbridge suggests, coalesce in the Pre-Raphaelite paintings of “The Eve of St. Agnes,” where they acquire new complexities and raise new questions. In particular, she explores the significant insights into gender relations which Pre-Raphaelite painters represent through the lenses of art and Romantic poetry. Notable for its treatment of physical, moral and gender boundaries, Keats’s poem often oscillates between moments of voyeurism and “ethereal stillness,” issues which male Pre-Raphaelite artists also pursued in their paintings. Here Trowbridge examines these early PreRaphaelite paintings on the same subject to interrogate the gender divide she identifies between the images by male artists, and Siddal’s singular painting. According to Trowbridge, Siddal’s painting can transform our understanding of the poems of St Agnes through its deployment of space in such a way as to disrupt the conventional narrative in which the female protagonist is solely subject to the masculine gaze and therefore interpretation. Similarly Chapter 2 is concerned with the way that space is constructively deployed in Siddal’s artwork to disrupt conventional Pre-Raphaelite interpretations of its source poetry. In “‘Good pictures … are always another poem’: Mapping Spatialities in Alfred Lord Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’ (1842) and Elizabeth Siddal’s The Lady of Shalott (1853),” Divya Athmanathan examines Pre-Raphaelite representations of the Lady of Shalott, focusing in particular on the contrast between Holman Hunt’s spectacular and very famous painting on the subject, and Elizabeth Siddal’s somewhat ascetic drawing of the lady. Athmanathan identifies in Siddal’s image a complex re-presentation of the crisis of the poem, focusing again on the deliberate spatial arrangement of Siddal’s work. In rethinking this representation, Athmanathan casts doubt on readings of the subtle sexual fall that pre-dominate in the reception of Tennyson’s poem and in male Pre-Raphaelite artists’ representations of the lady, depicting her at the moment when she abandons her domestic activity in favor of taking in the delights of the outside world. Whereas male PreRaphaelite artists such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, and John William Waterhouse accentuate the lady’s sexuality, Siddal underscores her autonomous creativity. Thus this chapter collapses conventional thinking regarding the passive role the lady plays in Pre-Raphaelite representations of this popular poem to suggest the possibility of multiple social and cultural trajectories for the eponymous lady. The next two sections of this collection are devoted to Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s double works of art. Indeed Rossetti’s work is replete with moments where poetry and painting become inextricably bound, one complementing and expanding the meaning of the other. Rossetti repeatedly underscored their interdependence, as, for instance in his declaration that “picture and

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poem bear the same relation to each other as beauty does in man and woman: the point of meeting where the two are most identical is the supreme perfection.”15 Several art historians have pointed out that Rossetti’s pictures for poetry by other authors such as Tennyson, Dante and Malory, rather than merely illustrating the verbal text, complement its meaning and expand its boundaries, most often representing his own interpretations of the texts he illustrated.16 In a letter to his friend William Allingham from 1855, Rossetti described his approach to his illustrations for the Moxon Tennyson, providing evidence of his perspective on the translation of the verbal into the visual: The other day Moxon called on me, wanting me to do some of the blocks for the new Tennyson. … I have not even begun designing for them yet, but I fancy I shall try the Vision of Sin, and Palace of Art, etc.- those where one can allegorize on one’s own hook on the subject of the poem, without killing, for oneself and everyone, a distinct idea of the poet’s. This, I fancy, is always the upshot of illustrated editions.17

Rossetti’s allegorizing of Tennyson’s poetry in his illustrations differed from the poet’s conception to such an extent that Tennyson gave up comprehending the connection between his poetry and Rossetti’s illustrations “St. Cecilia” and “King Arthur and the Weeping Queens.” Indeed Rossetti’s conception of the “double work of art” offers numerous opportunities to explore the transformation of the visual into the verbal or vice versa. As such, his work is central to developing our understanding of the distinct relations between the arts in Pre-Raphaelite representation. As Brian Donnelly has argued, Rossetti’s work is primarily concerned with “reconfiguring the traditional temporal-spatial divide between visual and verbal modes of representation.”18 His verbal portraits accompanying his paintings, as the writers in this collection demonstrate, extended the picture’s space beyond its plane by describing past or future events or by shedding light on the psychological states of the subjects in his paintings. Thus by extending spatial and temporal boundaries, Rossetti guided the viewer’s interpretation, simultaneously engaging the spectator/reader in a multifarious rather than a monolithic experience. Thus in Chapter 3, “‘A Dramatis Personae of the Soul’: Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Proserpine,” Laurence Roussillon-Constanty discusses this poempicture not only as Rossetti’s most coded homage to Jane Morris, but as one of his most successful attempts at going beyond the text and image divide by blending a multiplicity of voices, enhanced by the bilingual nature of the sonnet itself. By placing the text of his sonnet within the picture frame, RoussillonConstanty argues, Rossetti forces the spectator into an ambivalent and

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somewhat disconcerting position. Within this textual-visual discourse, she contends, Rossetti’s sonnet, through its very visual language, reifies the sense of unease with which the combination of word and image confront the viewer. While the first part of this chapter focuses on the painted poem, the second identifies and examines the Dantean subtext (New Life and Divine Comedy) woven into Rossetti’s double work so as to single out the artist’s own poetic voice. Roussillon-Constanty suggests that through the figure of Jane Morris Rossetti re-imagines Dante’s vision of the “Lady of Pity” in addition to his “Francesca da Rimini,” both figures Rossetti also painted. Rossetti’s deep fascination with and meditations on Dante continue into Chapter 4. Martina John in “Portrait of the Artist as an Italian Poet: Rossetti’s Dante,” examines Rossetti’s strategies of transforming and translating Dante’s Vita Nuova and Divina Commedia into painterly form. This chapter concentrates on the early Pre-Raphaelite drawing The Salutation of Beatrice (1849–50), the large oil painting Dante’s Dream (1871), and the late “double work” La Donna della Finestra (1879). Here Martina John demonstrates the means by which Rossetti’s paintings are not merely translations of the source text, rather they incorporate and indeed rely on Rossetti’s own unique conceptualization of art and literature to create meaning. This perceptive reading of Rossetti’s interest in Dante proposes that Rossetti constructs a version of Dante that sees him as an outsider, a figure removed from society, much like the removed lady at the window of Rossetti’s painting, and tellingly, much like the Victorian poet-painter himself. Thus a multiplicity of voices and images again become central to reading through Rossetti’s work to that of his namesake, and the source of much of his inspiration. These issues of multiplicity are contracted in the next section to focus on the way Rossetti’s visual poetics instruct the spectator in ways of seeing his images. In Chapter 5, “Interpretation and Representation in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘Sonnets for Pictures,’” Enrique Olivares discusses the ways in which Rossetti’s sonnets for pictures are inherently circular. According to Olivares, Rossetti reconfigures the visual material of his paintings through the verse form, only to lead the reader back to the image in the act of representation. Rather than being mimetic, these sonnets embody the “ekphrastic encounter” of conversion and reconversion described by W. J. T Mitchell.19 Olivares contends that the “Sonnets for Pictures” follow the same pattern of Rossetti’s sonnet written after Leonardo’s The Virgin of the Rocks, “Our Lady of the Rocks,” in that they circulate between image and text. Thus Rossetti’s poem on Memling’s Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine sublimates the experience of art into that of poetry. By turning visual signs into aural signifiers, Rossetti also transforms the rhetoric of art into that of the lyric. While

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these poems might interpret the Pre-Raphaelite optic of “truth to nature” by defining objects in the utmost lyrical clarity, Olivares suggests, they are by no means mimetic. They remain faithful to the content of the picture insofar as they help to “voice” new expressions of the painting, expressions which could represent alterity as much as fidelity. Issues of fidelity and “truth to nature” go to the very heart of our next chapter by Daniel Brown, “‘They that would look on her’: Jane Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and ‘The Portrait.’” Brown contends that Rossetti’s paintings have long been assessed largely through nineteenth-century standards of photographic representational practice, leading to a bias located in Rossetti’s ability and desire to create life-likenesses within his portraiture. This chapter demonstrates through an assiduous unpacking of the relationship between photographs of Jane Morris and Rossetti’s paintings of her, the idiosyncratic nature of Rossetti’s stylized form of portrait painting. Brown also reads these images through Rossetti’s own meditations on portrait painting in his poetry, chiefly the 1869 dramatic monologue “The Portrait.” Here we see the coming together of Rossetti’s methodologies in both word and image in search of Pre-Raphaelite “truth to nature,” a kind of realism that Elizabeth Prettejohn identifies as a union of the perceptual and conceptual: “Chris Brooks has described this union … using the term ‘symbolic realism’: ‘Pre-Raphaelite images of what the world looks like are simultaneously accounts of what the world means.’”20 Brown’s analysis extends this conceptualization of Pre-Raphaelite painting into his assessment of Rossetti’s portrait poems to challenge the assumptions surrounding photography as the standard for nineteenth-century realism in relation to Rossetti’s art. Poetry continued to be the source of inspiration for the second generation of the Pre-Raphaelites, advocates of aestheticism, led by Edward Burne-Jones. In such paintings as Le Chant d’Amour (1868–77), Laus Veneris, (1873–78), and The Beguiling of Merlin (1874), all inspired by poems, Burne-Jones destabilized gender constructs by blurring the demarcation line between femininity and masculinity. Producing paintings thematically inspired by poetry set in an imagined past, Burne-Jones was able to approach the transgressive subjects of androgyny and homosexuality. Negative contemporary reviews, seemingly aimed at the aesthetic principles of these paintings, reveal anxieties over the ambivalent representations of gender and sexuality in Burne-Jones’s work. According to the Illustrated London News, for instance, Burne-Jones’s paintings represent “a school which in its worst development is the morbid outcome of weakly over-wrought physique—which every man who respects his manhood and every woman who values her honour must regard with disgust.”21 The androgynous

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figures in Burne-Jones’s paintings, though representing mythological or legendary poetical figures of the past, simultaneously conceal and reveal contemporary anxieties surrounding gender constructs by “resisting the polarized gender divisions of the culture.”22 The last section in this collection engages these issues in relation to the second or aesthetic movement of the Pre-Raphaelites. In “Poetic Narrative in William Morris’s and Edward Burne-Jones’s Pygmalion project,” Amelia Yeates considers the way Morris and Burne-Jones engage with the Pygmalion myth as a collaborative project. Bringing text and image together, Yeates argues, allows for a clearer understanding of their respective and collective response to the Ovidian textual archetype, which is often overlooked in critical discussions of these works. This chapter thus contextualizes the verbal and visual collaboration that is the Morris and Burne-Jones Pygmalion within the Ovidian version of the Pygmalion story and other textual traditions, in addition to contemporaneous visual and literary representations of Pygmalion. Yeates calls into question the dominant critical reading of Burne-Jones’s Pygmalion project as biographical, in particular through his relationship with the model Maria Zambaco, to consider rather the vast range of visual and textual reference points that inform the series. Reading the paintings that comprise the Pygmalion and the Image series through and against the textual variants that are its source, Yeates suggests a vision of ambivalence regarding the role of the artist and the complex relations between the artist and his work. Attending to visual cues and the narrative that inform these images allows for a far more rich and variegated response than critics have considered. A figure more controversial and confrontational than Edward BurneJones, the painter Simeon Solomon also tested late Victorian convention in terms of the representation of gender. As Colin Cruise recently declared, “Solomon is a particularly interesting figure to consider in the contexts of ‘poetic’ painting and its critical reception.” Cruise discusses Solomon’s watercolor Poetry, as an allegory—not a personification of the Muse of poetry but an embodiment of the internal reception of poetry, of the effects of the poetic … The painting is, therefore, doubly about the imagination and the unseen … Given Solomon’s closeness to Swinburne at this date, we might conjecture that the text is related to Swinburne’s poetic works.23

Solomon’s paintings Bacchus (1867), Sappho and Erinna in the Garden at Mytilene (1864), The Moon and Sleep or Night Looking upon Sleep her Beloved Child (1895), likewise seem to embody some kind of poetic effect in their

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fusion of masculinity and femininity. Swinburne himself attended to their “supersexual beauty in which the lineaments of woman and of man seem blended as the lines of sky and landscape melt in the burning mist of heat and light.”24 In Chapter 8, “Aestheticism and Violent Delight in the Sister Arts of A. C. Swinburne and Simeon Solomon,” Sarah Banschbach Valles addresses some of the controversial issues surrounding Solomon’s oeuvre, specifically interpreting Swinburne’s and Solomon’s strategy of seemingly condemning while simultaneously endorsing homoeroticism in their respective poems and paintings. Focusing on the poem “Faustine” by Swinburne and its seeming companion painting Habet! by Solomon, this chapter considers the way both men evasively aestheticize classical subject matter to avoid censure over their ambivalent representations of decadence and sensuality. Solomon’s interest in classical subjects follows Swinburne’s vein of Hellenic Aestheticism, and here Valles traces the development of this interest in Swinburne’s poetics before turning to the relationship between his poem and Solomon’s painting. The vaguely historical point of departure for their work enabled the men to locate controversial concepts such as same-sex desire or morally dubious women within a context agreeable to the Victorian palate. This chapter considers these controversial works within a contemporary context that is fraught with ambiguity regarding the development of Aestheticism and what might constitute good taste in late Victorian culture. The final chapter in this collection also focuses on Swinburne’s poetics in relation to visual subject matter. Anne Koval considers Swinburne’s poetry in an entirely different context, that is, as a response to James McNeill Whistler’s famous painting, The Little White Girl. “From Poet to Painter: The Aestheticism of Swinburne and Whistler” also draws connections between Whistler’s painting and Rossetti’s Lilith, and the photographic work of Lady Hawarden, a contemporary artist recently recognized for her significant contribution to nineteenth-century photography. Using the mirror as both a lens and a metaphor to examine the word-image relationship, Koval contends that multiple spatial arrangements inform our reading of both image and text here. The photographic medium, sometimes called a “Magic Mirror” during this period, complicates the conceptualization of Whistler’s aesthetic as nonrepresentational, confusing the distinction between nature and art. Koval sees both image and text here as anticipating, and indeed as paradigmatic of the developing narrative of modernity, arguing that a new subjectivity distorts the traditional dichotomy of spectator and subject. This subjectivity is inherent in the modes of viewing and of reading, and the mirror acts to destabilize the positions from which each activity is carried out.

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This final chapter elucidates one of the central conceits of Pre-Raphaelite painting and poetry, articulated by John Ruskin in his famous defense of Pre-Raphaelite art in 1851: they will draw either what they see, or what they suppose might have been the actual facts of the scene they desire to represent, irrespective of any conventional rules of picture making.25

Pre-Raphaelite art is seemingly always self-aware of its status as representational, playing with the promise of a truth which is always unverified. As the revised title of the Germ with which we opened this introduction boldly claims: “Art and Poetry, Being Thoughts Towards Nature,” the Pre-Raphaelite manifesto strives to interrogate representational form itself, and does so chiefly through the relations between words and images. The verbal-visual relations presented throughout this book seek to reconfigure our understanding of the way the Pre-Raphaelite manifesto was itself interpreted through the work of the great variety of men and women who became engaged with this form of expression. The “interspace,” Anne Koval examines with regard to poetry, painting and photography, might well be applied to this collection as a whole. The essays assembled here attempt to draw our attention to the in-between aspects of Pre-Raphaelite representation, through the juxtaposing of word and image certainly, but also through the concepts of truth, nature, and artifice, through surface and depth, and through form and content. In the sanctuary of the poetry of the past, Pre-Raphaelite painters invite us, as they did Victorian spectators, to question the validity of established gender boundaries, to see the arbitrary aspects of cultural relativity in determining gender roles. But most importantly perhaps, as we contemplate the connection between Pre-Raphaelite poetry and painting, we should be aware that “the Pre-Raphaelite visionaries considered the culture of art more vital than the nature of life, the golden realm of the cosmos we envision more vital than the brazen reality of the chaos we experience.”26 Poetry in Pre-Raphaelite Paintings: Transcending Boundaries explores some of the most complex perspectives that paintings acquire if we view them within the context of the poetry which inspired them, or the poems they themselves inspired. Representations of gender ambiguity or of unconventional gender roles, often set in the poetry of the past, reflect these artists’ and writers’ awareness of contemporary legislative movements (divorce laws, women’s higher education, women’s right to vote) to ameliorate women’s social and legal status and to redress hitherto legalized gender inequities. In contrast to recent critical works, such as Elizabeth Helsinger’s Poetry in the Pre-Raphaelite Arts: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris (2008)

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and Lindsay Smith’s Pre-Raphaelitism: Poetry and Painting (2013), which limit their scope within the works of Rossetti and Morris, Poetry in PreRaphaelite Paintings broadens the reach of a significant subject, one which has received limited attention, to focus on the poetry and painting nexus of several Pre-Raphaelite artists and poets from the origins of the movement to the second-generation Pre-Raphaelites and Aesthetes.

Notes 1. The section that follows reframes and elaborates some arguments from Sophia Andres, The Pre-Raphaelite Art of the Victorian Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005). 2. Lindsay Smith, Victorian Photography, Painting, and Poetry: The Enigma of Visibility in Ruskin, Morris, and the Pre-Raphaelites (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 123. 3. William Holman Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (London: Macmillan, 1905), 2: 400. 4. Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 2: 400. 5. John Ruskin, “Modern Painters,” in The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. 39 vols. (London: George Allen, 1903–1912), 5: 29. 6. Ruskin, Modern Painters, 5: 127. 7. William Homan Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (London: Macmillan, 1905), 1: 104. 8. David Peters Corbett, “‘A Soul of the Age:’ Rossetti’s Words and Images, 1848–73,” in Writing the Pre-Raphaelites: Text, Context, Subtext, ed. Michaela Giebelhausen and Tim Barringer (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 85. 9. Corbett, “‘A Soul of the Age:’ Rossetti’s Words and Images, 1848–73,” 86. 10. Gregory Suriano, The Pre-Raphaelite Illustrators (Delaware: Oak Knell Press, 2000), 32. 11. Suriano, The Pre-Raphaelite Illustrators, 101. 12. William Holman Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 2: 124–125. 13. William Michael Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Family Letters and a Memoir by William Michael Rossetti. 2 vols. (London, 1895, Reprint. New York: AMS Press, 1970), 1: 190. 14. Elizabeth Prettejohn, The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 214–215. 15. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Collected Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. William Michael Rossetti. 2 vols. (London: Ellis, 1886), 1: 510. 16. Maryan Wynn Ainsworth, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Double Work of Art (Hartford: Yale University Art Gallery, 1976), 4. See also Christine Poulson, The Quest for the Grail: Arthurian Legend in British Art 1840–1920 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press and St Martin’s Press, 1999), 91–100. 17. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. William E. Fredeman, completed by Robert C. Lewis, Jane Cowan, and Anthony H. Harrison. 9 vols. (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2002–10), 1: 239.

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18. Brian Donnelly, Reading Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The Painter as Poet (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), 3. 19. W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 164. 20. Elizabeth Prettejohn, The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites, 171. 21. “The Grosvenor Gallery Exhibition.” Illustrated London News 74 (May 5, 1879), 415. 22. John B. Bullen, The Pre-Raphaelite Body: Fear and Desire in Painting, Poetry, and Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 216. 23. Colin Cruise, “Poetic, Eccentric Pre-Raphaelite: The Critical Reception of Simeon Solomon’s Work at the Dudley Gallery,” in Writing the Pre-Raphaelites, 179. 24. Debra M. Mancoff, “Truth to Nature with a Difference: Solomon’s Pre-Raphaelite Identity,” in Love Revealed: Simeon Solomon and the Pre-Raphaelites, ed. Colin Cruise. (New York: Merrell, 2005), 36. 25. John Ruskin, “The Pre-Raphaelites.” Letter to the Editor. London Times 20, 800 (May 13, 1851), 8–9. 26. David Latham, “‘A World of Its Own Creation’: Pre-Raphaelite Poetry and the Paradigm of Art,” The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, 25, new series (Spring 2016): 24.

Windows and Bowers: Sexuality and Creativity

1. Gender and Space in Pre-Raphaelite Paintings of “The Eve of St Agnes” Serena Trowbridge

John Keats’s poem “The Eve of St Agnes” (1819) is one which has proved perennially popular with painters. The Pre-Raphaelites produced several versions of it, including William Holman Hunt, The Flight of Madeline and Porphyro during the Drunkenness Attending the Revelry (The Eve of St Agnes) (1848, Guildhall Art Gallery, London), Arthur Hughes, The Eve of St Agnes (1856, Tate Britain), John Everett Millais, The Eve of St Agnes (c. 1863, The Royal Collection), and Elizabeth Siddal, The Eve of St Agnes (1852–60, The National Trust, Wightwick Manor). Given the Pre-Raphaelite interest in contemporary poetry, it is also interesting to consider Alfred Tennyson’s poem “St Agnes’ Eve” (1837) as a source for these paintings. The Pre-Raphaelites produced their art amid a web of literary and artistic connections, fascinated by mythology, medieval history, early Italian art, and Romantic and contemporary writing. These interests seem to coalesce in the “St Agnes’ Eve” paintings, which offer an insight into how the Pre-Raphaelite painters explore gender through the lens of art and Romantic poetry. Agnes was a young girl of the Christian faith living in Rome who, in 304 AD, refused to sacrifice her faith and her virginity to a pagan man, and was tortured and killed.1 Different versions of the story refer to miracles, such as her hair growing to cover her naked body, and men who saw her being struck blind. The Catholic Church subsequently recognized her as the patron saint of virgins and the betrothed, and she was held to be an example of ideal womanhood, displaying virtues of purity, devotion and steadfastness. Thomas Wright holds up the Christian women of the Roman Empire as possessing “a constancy of mind which was truly noble” and it is qualities such as this which appealed to nineteenth-century hagiographers.2 Julia Margaret

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Cameron’s albumen print St Agnes (c. 1864, Victoria and Albert Museum) depicts just such an idealized, devoted virgin. In Western folklore, St Agnes’ Eve on January 20th was a night when unmarried women might dream of their future husbands after following certain rituals.3 It is ironic that the murder of a young girl for refusing to conform in a misogynistic pagan culture is transformed into such a gentle and dream-like commemoration of hope and love. The romantic potential of the superstitious ritual is obvious, but it is important to consider why Keats and Tennyson chose this particular occasion in the calendar to set their poems. Keats was significant to the PRB; as Hunt wrote, a “common enthusiasm for Keats brought us into intimate relations,”4 and the painters loved to argue about which Keats poem was superior. William Michael Rossetti wrote that “The power of ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ … lies in the delicate transfusion of sight and emotion into sound; in making pictures out of words.”5 “The Eve of St Agnes” describes events which occur on the night of St Agnes’ Eve. Madeline, a young woman, ignoring the preparations for a feast going on around her, is awaiting the arrival of the evening: They told her how, upon St Agnes’ Eve, Young virgins might have visions of delight, And soft adorings from their loves receive If ceremonies due they did aright; (46–50)

Unaware that Porphyro has been falling in love with her, Madeline carries out these rituals (in this version, fasting and going to bed naked). She is watched by Porphyro, who has persuaded a maidservant to hide him in Madeline’s room. After she falls asleep, Porphyro leaves his hiding-place and attempts to awaken her, though one of the questions the poem raises is whether she is awake or asleep at this stage. An early draft of the poem intensifies the sexual imagery in this stanza, toned down at the publisher’s request. On awakening, Madeline is both shocked and afraid, but is quickly captivated by Porphyro’s words, and elopes with him. Keats’s poem clearly places the young woman in a vulnerable position: her innocence is accentuated throughout the poem, though it seems of little significance to Porphyro, and for the early part of the poem Madeline is objectified, sleeping “an azure-lidded sleep, / In blanched linen, smooth, and lavender’d” (262–63). That she is watched, and touched, without her consent or consciousness is an uncomfortable aspect in the poem, and one which the poet seems complicit in, urging “Now prepare / Young Porphyro, for gazing on that bed” (196–97). This aesthetic objectification of the young woman in her trance-like state may perhaps explain why the poem held such strong appeal for the (male) Pre-Raphaelite painters. Elizabeth Prettejohn discusses

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the “erotic force of the figure,” which initiates “an intimacy that some viewers … experience as improper or indecorous” in Rossetti’s later paintings.6 The “erotic force” of the unconscious Madeline is explicit in Keats’s poem, and is emphasized by Pre-Raphaelite depictions of her. Isobel Armstrong suggests that “the sexual liberation of Porphyro and Madeline stood for the sensuous immediacy that emancipation could achieve.”7 Millais’s St Agnes Eve offers the clearest example of this. The painting depicts the moment when Madeline is disrobing in her room: her vespers done, Of all its wreathed pearls her hair she frees; Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one; Loosens her fragrant bodice; by degrees Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees: Half-hidden, like a mermaid in sea-weed, (226–31)

The jewel-like colors and dramatic potential of the scene seem suitable for a Pre-Raphaelite appropriation. Madeline stands in her petticoats, her dress around her knees and pooling on the floor, her hair loose. The painting offers both a moment of intimacy and immediacy, as we are invited to see Madeline from the same voyeuristic perspective as Porphyro; we cannot moralize while we are in the place of the voyeur himself. The shadows in the room and the dreamy expression on Madeline’s face, however, relocate the image within the realm of innocence. What we are shown is not a woman flaunting her body (whether knowingly or otherwise), but a romantic moment of innocence. That this innocence is corrupted by the presence of Porphyro is almost irrelevant in the moment which Millais provides. The space in the room is small (Millais painted at night at Knole to achieve the appropriate effect) and somewhat claustrophobic. The details of the room are present but shadowed, while Madeline herself appears in a pool of light shadowed by the bars of the window, as if imprisoned. This can be read in two opposing ways, I suggest. One is that the female figure stands alone with her thoughts, gazing into the distance as she contemplates a blissful future. Her innocence seals her off from the world and within the liminal space of her room she is safe. The draperies and furnishings provide a cozy barrier between Madeline and the cold outside world, and she is safe to dream. The other, which relies more on the context of the poem, is less comfortable but more probable. Madeleine’s sense of security and peace is false; she is doubly viewed and doubly objectified, by Porphyro and by viewers of the painting. Rather than the painting offering an introspective view of a young woman’s reflections, the woman’s musings whilst undressing are

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set up as a spectacle. Instead of a chaste space of security, “blissfully haven’d both from joy and pain” (240), what we are offered here is a potential site of violation, in which we are made complicit. Though Madeline is ostensibly preoccupied with her dreams of St Agnes’ Eve, she is displayed here as an object for the male gaze rather than as a depiction of female independent introspection. The imprisonment implied by the shadows of the window metaphorically represents the gendered code which traps Madeline into a schema of social relations from which she cannot escape, and in which she is destined to be the compliant victim of Porphyro’s desires. Yet an alternate reading is possible, in which Madeline becomes the active agent of the scene, by manifesting Porphyro as the product of her own fantasy. As Madeline dreams of her bridegroom, she might be willing him into existence, desirous of a lover, an approach which explains her willingness to leave with him. This reversal undermines the traditional view that Madeline is physically objectified, instead placing Porphyro into the submissive position of objectified male in the narrative. Arthur Hughes’s image provides more narrative and a different approach; Jon Whiteley suggests that it demonstrates “a sensitivity to the verse that was alien to Hunt (who was the least poetic of the group) and to Rossetti who imposed his personal vision on everything he painted.”8 The first painting of the triptych shows Porphyro (the only painting which depicts him alone) as a romantic hero: Beside the portal doors, Buttress’d from moonlight, stands he, and implores All saints to give him sight of Madeline, But for one moment in the tedious hours, That he might gaze and worship all unseen; Perchance speak, kneel, touch, kiss—in sooth such things have been. (76–81)

This moment depicted by Hughes is ripe with portent: Porphyro has humble aspirations, it seems, which are to be more than realized. The moment of anticipation, as the young hero sees the lighted windows of Madeline’s family home, aligns him with Romeo, an importunate lover who will have his way at all costs (a parallel heightened by the introduction of old Angela, a character comparable with Juliet’s Nurse). This perspective affords Porphyro sympathy from the viewer, especially considering Keats’s narrative which emphasizes the “blood-thirsty” nature (99) of Madeline’s family, who “howl / Against his lineage” (87–88). The second image of the triptych is a scene in Madeline’s bedchamber, a heavily decorated medieval room with stained glass reminiscent of a church and a prie-dieu as a reminder of her piety and

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chastity. Hughes depicts Madeline’s awakening to see Porphyro, believing that the rituals have indeed brought her a view of her future husband. In Keats’s poem this begins at stanza XXXIV, where Madeline first opens her eyes, but it is unclear whether she is truly awake, “she look’d so dreamingly” (305), and Jack Stillinger interprets the phrase “Into her dream he melted” (320) as a potential implication of rape.9 Yet when Madeline speaks, she expresses love, though this quickly changes to fear that she will be abandoned, a fallen woman with no hope of marriage, “a dove forlorn” (333). In Hughes’s painting of this moment, Madeline’s face is blank, and though Porphyro’s posture is importuning, it is difficult to pinpoint the exact moment in the poem, though the poem is inscribed with Keats’s lines describing the St Agnes’ Eve ritual. The final painting of the triptych is more explicit; this is the lovers’ departure. Keats writes, “They glide, like phantoms, into the wide hall” (361), and in front of them lays the drunken Porter. This scene offers a different perspective: rather than Madeline’s seduction as a sordid event, we suddenly see it as a triumph of love, of amorous innocence over drunken, angry, bestial men who would deny the lovers their happiness. Hughes’s Madeline has her head covered and eyes cast down, the picture of innocence as the pair step over the Porter; Porphyro, too, looks down sorrowfully. Yet as the poem ends, it is clear that the threshold the pair crossed when leaving the castle was a step towards freedom, leaving behind captivity, death and violence forever. The effect of the triptych is to compress both the narrative sequence and to shrink the space in which it takes place. The apertures in the frame, shaped like ecclesiastical arches, lend prurience to the middle, largest scene, in Madeline’s bed, as though this moment of waking and joining is the focus of the poem and thus the painting. The sequence as it is depicted gives Porphyro agency and again paints Madeline as an object: her lover arrives, reaches her bedside, and leaves with her, as though she were a goal to be achieved, or a package to be collected. Yet there is real tenderness in the positions of the two figures in the final painting, although Madeline is literally subservient to Porphyro here, appearing to be leaning on him for support and standing close for protection. William Holman Hunt’s painting, which inspired Rossetti to seek him out just before the formation of the PRB, offers the same moment from the poem as the last of the Hughes triptych. Again Madeline shrinks back towards Porphyro as her protector, clutching him with an exposed arm, as they see the bodies of the drunken revelers (and dogs) on the floor, placing him in the role of the rescuer rather than seducer. The architecture and furnishings medievalize the setting, placing a safe distance in time between the viewer and the viewed, and again the interior is reminiscent of ecclesiastical

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architecture, heightening the contrast between the “purity” of the lovers and the sinful excesses of the partygoers. This Madeline is a far cry from that of Millais’s later work; demureness and a desire to escape are her primary features, based on her facial expression and clothing. Yet as Paul Barlow points out, there is an undercurrent of sexuality in the details of Porphyro’s clothing which indicate the sexual threat of the narrative.10 With his hand on his sword-hilt, he seems to be effortfully restraining his sexuality. This gestures towards what Barlow identifies as the “voyeuristic desire which consistently skirts the borders of pornography” in Keats’s poem.11 The painting is structured so that the lovers’ escape must be made via the path towards the viewer, where freedom lies; the threshold they must cross is just out of sight, and the claustrophobic space depicted, filled with recumbent or reveling figures, is saturated with the fear of apprehension by Madeline’s family. This painting, more even than the others, suggests that Madeline was a victim of her family’s patriarchal rule, unable to escape or make her own choices, and that her dream for St Agnes’ Eve was of a husband who would make escape possible, a dream which has now come true. This reading of course also depends on the view of marriage as an escape, not from a patriarchal society but from a tyrannical one: the difference is the love and desire present on both sides. Nothing could be further from these three versions than Elizabeth Siddal’s gouache, variously referred to as The Eve of St Agnes or St Agnes’ Eve [Plate 1.1]. Siddal’s paintings are almost all under-studied and deserving of more interpretation, and this painting offers an interesting contrast with the ostensibly similar images by male Pre-Raphaelites. Though the title connects it to the other paintings and to Keats’s poem, Siddal’s source was Tennyson’s poem; a number of her works are related to Tennyson’s poetry. This was originally titled “St Agnes,” and Tennyson’s decision to change the title to “St Agnes’ Eve” relates it to Keats’s poem, potentially transforming readings of it, since it is a text fraught with ambiguity. Siddal was inspired by Tennyson for several of her poems and paintings, and her choice of his “St Agnes’ Eve” indicates both continuity with and a departure from Pre-Raphaelitism, providing a contrast with the works of the male Pre-Raphaelite painters. Tennyson’s poem offers a narrative of peace and stillness, untouched by ritual superstition and romantic love. In the Eversley draft in the British Museum, Tennyson wrote, “Here the legend is told by a nun.” His acknowledged source is William Hone’s The Every-Day Book (1825), which describes the legend of St Agnes for the entry on January 21. Hone’s entry focuses on Agnes’ purity, a theme carried over into Tennyson’s poem. Tennyson’s poem is framed as a cry of the nun to her Bridegroom, drawing on the imagery of

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Plate 1.1: Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal, The Eve of St Agnes, c. 1850, gouache on paper. ©National Trust/Sophia Farley and Claire Reeves.

the book of Revelation as well as echoing the mythic plea of Agnes of Rome, that her only husband was Christ. The poem opens with images of winter and extreme cold, and, like Keats’s Beadsman, the chill suggests a pathetic fallacy in which the speaker’s faith is at one with its surroundings: “My breath to heaven like vapour goes: / May my soul follow soon!” (3–4). The purity and devotion of both Agnes and the nun-speaker are thus associated with a chaste

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coldness, which distances this poem in style from the richly visual texture of Keats’s poem. However, Shaw points out that: In ‘St Agnes’ Eve’ (1833) there is a danger that the ritual symbolism of the phrase ‘Sabbaths of Eternity’ will become too obtrusive, and that Tennyson will succumb to the visionary paralysis of his ode ‘The Poet’. Instead, the auroral blending of Keats’s jeweled colors into non-chromatic shades of white and black produces new and subtle colors for Tennyson to explore.12

Shaw’s comment contrasts the potentially undermining symbolic phrases which Tennyson uses (several taken from the Bible, although this one is of the poet’s invention), with the way in which Tennyson manipulates and subverts the reader’s expectations, assuming their familiarity with Keats’s poem. The poem’s use of images and phrases from the Bible ensures that it reads as familiar and recognizable as a poem of devotion, yet the imagery still startles: what little the nun can see through the cell of her window—the moon, a symbol of female purity and light, the shadows, the “frosty skies” (10), the starlight and the snowdrop—is extrapolated into an even more glittering vision of the Heaven that awaits her. The icy silvers of the wintry scene become golden and sparkling as the nun contemplates her union with Christ. This poetic expression of longing and devotion combines the projected reflections of St Agnes herself as she awaited execution, the nun’s devotion to Christ, and the romantic spiritual yearnings of a young woman. It is perhaps no wonder that it appealed so to Elizabeth Siddal. Siddal was the wife of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, better known as his muse than as an artist (or indeed poet) in her own right. She worked alongside her husband, inspired by the enthusiasm of the art critic John Ruskin for her painting, and her work is often clearly inspired by his style. Yet both her painting and her poetry demonstrate a carefully wrought naïve medievalism which was inspired by her reading of poets including Walter Scott, Keats and Tennyson, and which often moves in different directions to that of Rossetti. Deborah Cherry suggests that “In the mid-1850s Siddal’s archaizing art placed her at the forefront of Pre-Raphaelitism’s new medievalizing.”13 This implies a significant recognition of her place in the Pre-Raphaelite firmament, which makes it possible to consider paintings such as The Eve of St Agnes as part of a complex web of Pre-Raphaelite painting and poetry. Though Siddal’s contemporaries noted that she was not especially religious, her work often suggests a yearning for a spiritual love and peace which the world could not offer, and this is reflected in The Eve of St Agnes. Her poems, such as “Worn Out” and “Lord, May I Come?” demonstrate a comparable monochromatic visual and verbal palette, yearning for the next world. The latter poem, one of her better-known, asks:

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Holy death is waiting for me— Lord, may I come to-day? My outward life feels sad and still Like lilies in a frozen rill; I am gazing upwards to the sun, Lord, Lord, remembering my lost one. O Lord, remember me! (13–18)

Her poems tend towards extreme melancholy, and a favorite image is that of the young woman near death, a trope which has perhaps been exaggerated beyond proportion given her own early death. The contrasting but limited visual imagery of “Lord, May I Come?” seems related to the monochromatic St Agnes painting. Opening with the lines “Life and night are falling from me, / Death and day are opening on me,” it takes the unusual approach of coupling life with dark and death with light. The internal rhymes of “life” and “night,” and alliteration of “death” and “day,” help to integrate these contrasting ideas so that they might almost pass without comment. The words “falling” and “opening” suggest that the transition between life and death will be an easy one, and the stanza suggests that life will be happily left behind. This eagerness to embrace a new world, with a Heavenly Bridegroom, is reflected in The Eve of St Agnes. The small gouache depicts an angular young woman, pictured in profile, dressed in the somber gray habit of a nun, with long red hair streaming down her back and a halo. The nun is in her cell, peering through a small window onto wintry wastes outside (though we cannot see the moon to which Tennyson refers), and her attitude is one of longing and pious resignation. Below, through an open doorway, we can see a cross and altar, reminiscent of the prie-dieu in Hughes’s painting of Madeline’s bedroom. The confined space of the painting is emphasized by the deep panels of the frame: the sense of the painting is of a woman confined to earthly life by her own choice. The painting offers two doors to freedom, in a sense—the cross, and the window onto the natural world where the nun surveys the mountains. These are themselves powerful biblical symbols, and one of Siddal’s innovations, since they are not mentioned by Tennyson. In the Bible, mountains often indicate a space where one may be closer to God, both spiritually and physically, and they are also often figured as a place of safety and blessing. Siddal’s figure, then, is a young woman who is waiting eagerly, on St Agnes’ Eve, for a vision of her bridegroom, perhaps one she will conjure from her own imagination; but unlike Madeline, this is no earthly love, and there is no-one watching her reverie. Though in this image there are echoes of Madeline’s dreamy rapture, this woman’s chastity will be preserved, like

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that of Agnes of Rome, and thus her independence from all but her God is maintained. Her halo is a symbol of her sanctity, not only spiritual but physical, like St Agnes whose chastity was preserved by God. Jan Marsh suggests: Images of nuns were popular, if controversial, subjects in the paintings of the 1840s and ’50s … and Siddal’s image falls within the Pre-Raphaelite mode, where the religious woman devoting her life to Christ was an admired representation of femininity.14

Though this version of female devotion fitted into the gender schema of a patriarchal society, Siddal’s version offers a very different view of womanhood to that of Millais, Hughes and Hunt. This woman requires no male validation apart from that of her Bridegroom, and thus this painting, like so many of Siddal’s (and indeed Christina Rossetti’s) poems, privileges spiritual over earthly love. The nun, made both popular and also a figure of suspicion with the rise of the Anglican sisterhoods at the time, was an acceptable role model for women in that it offered them a productive and often contented way of life, but it was certainly seen socially as a last resort; ideally, women would marry, and channel their devotion into their families. Siddal would have been well aware of these controversies given that her sisters-in-law, Maria and Christina Rossetti, were associated with an Anglican sisterhood, with Maria becoming a full Sister in 1872. Siddal’s version is close in form to Millais’s illustration to Tennyson’s poem which appeared in the Moxon Tennyson (1857). We do not have an exact date for Siddal’s painting, so it is impossible to tell if either painter were influenced by the other. However, there are subtle significant differences. Millais’s engraving is much closer to Tennyson’s poem, even depicting the nun’s breath as Tennyson describes. Her breath on the cold air seems to represent her physicality, demonstrating that this is a living, breathing woman. Millais’s nun is also a woman on show, in a way that Siddal’s is not; the robes of Millais’s nun give more hint of the body underneath, her face is more clearly formed, and it is overall a lighter picture, rather than shrouded in monochromatic tones as in Siddal’s piece. Millais includes a lighted taper as the figure ascends the stairs, but her stance is more casual, as though she is glancing out onto the moonlit scene. Her hair is fastened back as a nun’s might be under her wimple, but there is something self-conscious in the pose, as though this nun is aware that she may be watched. Siddal’s nun, however, is musing, dreaming, contemplating: there is no doubt that she is lost in her thoughts of the life to come. Siddal’s figure is one with a strong vocation, which perhaps can be paralleled with the painter’s own artistic and literary ambitions.

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The space in which these women are positioned is crucial. All are, in some way, doubly trapped, within the gendered social conventions of the time (both the Victorian period and the loosely medieval time in which the poems are set), and within the rooms in which the figures are situated. Though Siddal’s nun offers a very different representation of woman, presenting us with woman as subject rather than woman as object, the gendered readings of this are not as straightforward as this might suggest. In all the images, these are women who are in enclosed spaces who seek a method of escape. Millais’s Madeline is dreaming of hers, through the medium of marriage, though she is simultaneously an object for the male gaze. Hunt’s Madeline is on the brink of escape, surveying the distasteful scene of the place of her imprisonment. Hughes’s Madeline is shown progressing towards escape through the triptych, and Siddal’s nun, like Millais’s Madeline, is only dreaming of hers. The difference, of course, is that for Siddal and Tennyson, this escape can only come through death, which represents the marriage of apocalyptic Bridegroom with his earthly Church. These contrasts with potential readings of Keats’s poem, in which Porphyro can be seen as liberating Madeline from death: “Madeline is associated with death in the form of religion, ritual and sterility … and Porphyro … is the contrasting embodiment of life, passion and imagination.”15 Death offers liberation and independence for Siddal’s nun, though this is itself problematic, given the tendency of Victorian male painters, not just the Pre-Raphaelites, to depict the beautiful, dead woman as one to be worshiped yet under masculine control. Antony Harrison discusses Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s fetishization of the dead woman, constructed as a passive object of love who is untouchable in death, while George Landow considers Christina Rossetti’s poems such as “When I am Dead, my Dearest” to be ironic subversions of this masculine tendency.16 This irony, however, does not seem present in Siddal’s paintings or poems. The medieval naïveté of style which Siddal utilizes is genuine: her work is simple and straightforward—which is not to suggest that it is lacking in skill, but rather that she offers us her approach directly. Her nun is absorbed in her contemplation, and to suggest otherwise is irrelevant. She is confined within the space of the picture, and yet Siddal makes it clear that she is also free: from the patriarchal gaze, from threats to her chastity, from social mores and from corporeality. Moreover, her shrouded body and averted face create the effect of a kind of androgyny, or at least a figure which rejects contemporary femininity. The restricted space may press in on her, but it cannot restrict her mind. We know more of what Madeline dreams of than we do of the nun, and this unknown and unknowable reverie lends Siddal’s nun a mysterious ambiguity which imbues the figure with a status she could not otherwise have attained.

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Notes 1. Sabine Baring-Gould, Virgin Saints and Martyrs (New York: Thomas Crowell, 1901), 40–52. 2. Thomas Wright, Womankind in Western Europe (London: Groombridge & Sons, 1869), 7. 3. J. Simpson and S. Roud, The Oxford Dictionary of English Folklore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 4. William Holman Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. 2 vols. (London: MacMillan, 1905–6), vol. 1, 107. 5. Hunt, vol. 1, 86. 6. Elizabeth Prettejohn, The Cambridge Companion to the Pre-Raphaelites (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 110. 7. Prettejohn, Cambridge Companion, 21. 8. Jon Whiteley, Pre-Raphaelite Paintings and Drawings (Oxford: Phaidon and Christie’s, 1989), 16. 9. Jack Stillinger, Reading “The Eve of St Agnes” (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 10. Paul Barlow, “Pre-Raphaelitism and Post-Raphaelitism: The Articulation of Fantasy and the Problem of Pictorial Space,” in Pre-Raphaelites Re-Viewed, ed. Marcia Pointon (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 66–82 (73). 11. Barlow, “Pre-Raphaelitism,” 71. 12. W. David Shaw, Tennyson’s Style (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1976), 46. 13. Deborah Cherry, “Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Pre-Raphaelites, ed. Elizabeth Prettejohn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 183–195 (185). 14. Jan Marsh, The Legend of Elizabeth Siddal (London: Quartet Books, 1989), 185. 15. Stillinger, Reading “The Eve of St Agnes,” 46. 16. Antony H. Harrison, Christina Rossetti in Context (Brighton: Harvester, 1988); George Landow, “The Dead Woman Talks Back: Christina Rossetti’s Ironic Intonation of the Dead Fair Maiden” (2002), accessed June 12, 2014, http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/crossetti/gpl1.html.

2. “Good pictures … are always another poem”: Mapping Spatialities in Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” and Elizabeth Siddal’s The Lady of Shalott Divya Athmanathan

Alfred Tennyson’s narrative poem “The Lady of Shalott” (1842) has become well-known for the numerous compelling illustrations it inspired among painters and book illustrators during the nineteenth and early twentieth century.1 Especially striking are some of the lavishly detailed, symbolically rich and sensuous paintings of the supernaturally afflicted Lady of Shalott by Pre-Raphaelite painters: William Holman Hunt’s iconic painting, begun in 1886 and exhibited in 1905; Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s illustration for the 1857 Moxon edition of Tennyson’s Poems; and John William Waterhouse’s 1894 version, capture in a surreal and an archaic manner the turmoil and tragedy in the narrative of the Lady of Shalott. Contrary to such pictorial representations that adhere in spirit and tone to Tennyson’s medieval and magical discourse of “The Lady of Shalott,” the 1853 drawing of a scene from the poem by Elizabeth Siddal—a model, artist and poet associated with the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood—is a complex re-presentation of the crisis in the poem. In an apparently simple execution, Siddal weaves a potent narrative that seamlessly threads together multiple social and cultural trajectories, thus redrawing Tennyson’s poem to subtly challenge dominant nineteenth-century discourses of gender and class while also strategically co-existing with them. “The Lady of Shalott” describes the narrative of a lonely lady on the remote isle of Shalott, who “weaves by night and day / a magic web with colors gay” (37–38).2 This lady is to all purposes held captive in isolation in her

30Divya Athmanathan chamber by a curse that will doom her if she “look[s] down to Camelot” (41) from her window. She therefore gazes on the sights or “shadows of the world” (48), that appear on her mirror that “hangs before her all the year” (47). Her loneliness is stressed by her single status—“she hath no loyal knight and true” (62)—and by her response to the pair of newly married lovers that she spies on her mirror: “‘I am half sick of shadows’” (71). Therefore, when her mirror captures the reflection of Sir Lancelot, a “bold” (77) and handsomely decked knight travelling to Camelot, the lady leaves her web to look down from the window on the outer world. The mirror cracks, the curse befalls her, and she leaves her space of confinement. She dies as she sings and travels by boat to Camelot, watched by spectators who had hitherto only heard but had never seen her figure. Sir Lancelot speaks the final lines of the poem as he ruminates on nothing but her beauty—“‘She has a lovely face’” (169)—and asks for the conventional blessing of God’s grace for the departed lady. Writing about the relation between poetry and the painting it inspires, Victorian art-critic John Ruskin comments that “good pictures … are always another poem, subordinate but wholly different from the poet’s conception.”3 While Siddal’s drawing, inspired by Tennyson’s tale, is not “subordinate” to the original, it also reorients the central figure and in so doing illuminates the possibility for alternate trajectories for the domestic Victorian woman the poem conventionally describes. Siddal thus challenges expectations regarding discourses of domestic space that see the woman as removed and isolated from society, and somehow unable to step beyond the borders of the home. An exploration of the spatial dynamics that underpin this painting is useful to map the social, cultural and literary trajectories of the illustration. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “spatiality” as something that possesses a “spatial character, quality, or property,” the term “spatial” referring to anything that has “extension in,” occupies, pertains to space and is “governed by” it.4 The spatial theorist Doreen Massey argues that spaces do not contain “single, essential, identities,”5 but are the product of the simultaneity of heterogeneous trajectories. She also states that space is “always in the process of being made. It is never finished or closed.”6 Massey’s concept of “coexisting heterogeneity” is conducive for reading Siddal’s drawing that contains numerous socio-cultural narratives.7 In this chapter I illustrate how Siddal inflects the medievalism of Tennyson’s narrative to orchestrate the domesticity of the working woman, whose modesty and piety is almost imperceptibly reoriented to challenge accepted and dominant Victorian heterosexual and religious discourses. Elizabeth Siddal’s The Lady of Shalott [Plate 2.1], “among the earliest representations of his verse” and her “first dated work,” captures the moment

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Plate 2.1: Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal, The Lady of Shalott, 1853, pen and ink on paper. Private Collection. Photo ©The Maas Gallery, London/Bridgeman Images.

when the mirror cracks in Tennyson’s story.8 However, the arriving Sir Lancelot in Siddal’s drawing can only be seen in the cracked mirror, and “the web” that the lady is creating clearly does not flow out of the lady’s room nor does it float “wide” as the poem suggests (114). Instead the threads from the tapestry that she is weaving are pushed out from the loom as if by a forceful gust of wind. In addition Siddal does not represent the reapers or any of the village community such as the “market girls,” “a curly shepherd-lad,” or “long-haired page in crimson clad” who populate the landscape of Tennyson’s poem (53–58). Tennyson’s description of the interiors of the lady’s chamber is indistinct, with only a mirror and the reference to the web that she creates in the narrative poem. However, Siddal’s delineation of the lady’s room is sharp and concrete, containing everyday objects such as a crucifix; a bird that has flown in from the window; a storage cabinet that doubles as an altar, and some creepers bordering a side of the window. Siddal represents the Lady’s labor in a more tangible form through the large loom that dominates the drawing. While the web floats away from the lady in Tennyson’s poem,

32Divya Athmanathan the tapestry that the lady has created in Siddal’s vision is firmly in place on the wall next to the mirror, not at all affected by the outcome of the “curse” that features in Tennyson’s narrative. What is apparent in a comparison between Tennyson’s narrative and Siddal’s re-presentation of the climactic scene is that the former is a literary rendering of a discourse that is from a medieval literary tradition born out of a confluence of feudal/patriarchal and magical narratives. In other words, while there is an obvious trajectory of medieval revivalism in Tennyson’s work, Siddal’s rendering is more complicated as she, in addition to acknowledging and rewriting the original source, clearly places her discourse within the lived reality of a woman using her domestic space for productive and artistic labor.

Collapsing Medievalism in Siddal’s “The Lady of Shalott” One of the effects of the narrative of medievalism in Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” is to apparently distance the concerns of the poem from contemporary society’s preoccupations. The medievalism of the narrative is established spatially and textually. In terms of spatial markings, Tennyson’s poem is constructed chiefly out of the relational network between the space of confinement, embodied in the isle in which she is enclosed and forced to experience reality second hand through the images on her mirror, and the space of freedom that is signified in the open space, the “highway” (50) between the isle of Shalott and Camelot, where lived reality is represented through a cross-section of classes, genders and professions. The isle of Shalott where the lady is forced to stay and Camelot of King Arthur’s legend are structured ambiguously to create a similarity in their spatiality. Camelot is introduced in the first stanza of the poem as “many-tower’d Camelot” (5). The second stanza that orchestrates the landscape surrounding the isle of Shalott is also described as the silent isle of “four gray walls” and, more importantly, of the “four gray towers,” a distinctive spatial feature of Camelot that becomes a refrain or epithet for the city in the narrative poem. Little breezes dusk and shiver Thro’ the wave that runs for ever By the island in the river Flowing down to Camelot. Four gray walls, and four gray towers, Overlook a space of flowers, And the silent isle imbowers The Lady of Shalott (10–18)

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Tennyson also implies that the lady is in a tower, a space from which she can “look down to Camelot” if not for the curse that binds her from that action. The common element between the land of Camelot and the island of Shalott is this architecture that has come to represent “imbowerment” or imprisonment through the figure of the lady. All these spaces in the poem are linked to the medieval narrative about the ancient British King Arthur of Camelot. Though Tennyson denies links specifically between Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur and his story of “The Lady of Shalott,” the references to Camelot and Lancelot, and the notions of magical curse and “embowerment” keep alive the spirit of the ancient legend in his poem for readers.9 Palgrave offers “an Italian romance upon the Donna di Scalotta” as the source for the poem.10 Significantly, this Italian source narrates the death of the “Damsel of Shalot [who] died for love of Lancelot du Lac,” the “best knight of the world and … the most cruel,” because he refuses to return her love as he is in love with Queen Guinevere.11 Potwin also suggests: the poem in both editions has a very different story from the novella. It contains no reference to King Arthur and his Queen. The mirror, the weaving, the curse, the song, the river and island are all absent from the Novella … The main bond of connection between novella and poem is that Camelot is made the end of the funeral voyage, and is on the sea-shore (emphasis added).12

While the main thrust of the novella, the putative source of Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” (both editions), is about the death of a lady brought about by disappointment in love, Tennyson’s versions make the relationship more about sexuality rather than romantic love. The instant and impulsive reaction of the lady on seeing the physically attractive Lancelot reveals that it is sexual instinct that drives her to forget the curse that forbids her to look outside her window. There is no romantic narrative, not even a hint at a one-sided affection, on the part of the Lady towards Lancelot, or any male. Camelot, to which the lady sails to die in the Italian novella, is significant in the context of Tennyson’s poetic imagination. The island of Shalott or the “many-towered Shalott” is the scene of imprisonment of the lady while the gates of the many-towered Camelot is the scene of her death. The mobility of the lady in Tennyson’s poem leads from incarceration to death. Mobility while signifying a momentary sense of freedom, individual expression, and progress is ultimately one of eternal and symbolic incarceration, objectification in the death of a beautiful lady, and regression, as she is consumed by the male gaze. While the concluding lines of the 1832 version of Tennyson’s poem offer space for the assertive voice of the dead lady through her letter that comments on

34Divya Athmanathan the “broken” “charm” (178) and commands the spectators to “Draw near” (179) her, Lancelot appropriates that space, textually and ideologically, by replacing her voice at the end of the poem to comment on her attractiveness. The 1842 version reorients the spatial position of the lady to offer her as the object of the gaze of Lancelot and the knights. The spatial and narrative landscape of Tennyson’s poem is rightly interpreted by critics as patriarchal in spirit and design. Extending the reading of Carl Plasa on the patriarchal underpinnings of the poem, Ellen J. Stockstill states that “[T]he Lady’s position is contained and constructed by the phallic architecture surrounding her—a patriarchal structure of power.”13 Siddal’s representation of Tennyson’s poem subtly re-spatializes and re-narrates the story of the lady of Shalott, and in the process crucially destabilizes the source narrative’s medieval/patriarchal framework. Her spatial design clearly marginalizes the “many-tower’d Camelot” (5), the destination/site of import in Tennyson’s poem, in her drawing; thus the patriarchal/phallic structure of the tower of the medieval town of Camelot is indistinctly rendered in the drawing. The hazily represented town becomes insignificant—unimportant because it is illegible, and intriguingly can be seen as an island, as it seems to be surrounded by water with a noticeable presence of boat traffic. In such a spatial design the central patriarchal site of Camelot, the space which receives the funeral boat of the lady becomes isolated, resembling rather the isle of Shalott itself. Siddal also crucially dismantles the notion that the lady of Shalott is situated within a tower on an island. Her spatial plotting of the drawing elides such dual confinement of the lady, instead placing her in a room that clearly does not give evidence of her incarcerated status. She also crucially undercuts the perception that the lady is isolated in a silent tower by the placement of a bird at the top of her loom, the only “towering” object in the picture. The bird that is uncaged and free can be seen as a symbolic parallel to the lady in the drawing. The figure of Lancelot, the knight who sings merrily as he rides on his horse towards Camelot, is represented in Siddal’s drawing as only a mirror image, a sketchy reflection. It is significant that Siddal does not capture Lancelot as a tangible figure akin to the lady within the frame of the “real” landscape of the pictorial narrative. Moreover, it is not clear if the lady, who is depicted as having turned away from the loom, is looking at the arriving knight Lancelot through her window—which would imply that she is on the ground floor or the street-level as she cannot “look down” from her seated position at the loom—or the crucifix on her table. By focusing on the interiors of her chamber, Siddal draws attention away from the carceral architectonics that frame the lady until she quits the tower to sail towards

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death in Tennyson’s narrative. In Siddal’s representation, the window in the lady’s chamber is crucial in reading the spatial and its concomitant ideological context of the lady. The window in the drawing does not clearly suggest that it belongs to a tower and that the lady is looking down on the attractively dressed knight. If the built structure in which the lady is situated is not a tower, then it is a domestic structure that houses her. In making Lancelot an indeterminate object of attention for the lady, Siddal’s drawing poses a subtle but significant challenge to the medieval patriarchal narrative of Tennyson’s poem. While Lancelot is a distant and indistinct figure captured on a broken mirror, the gaze of the lady seems to be directed at the crucifix. This ambiguity of gaze, strengthened by the embodied “absence” of Lancelot within the picture plane, is significant as it places in question the subtle sexual fall that is generally interpreted in the lady’s discarding of her domestic activity in favor of gazing at the sexually attractive Lancelot. The accoutrements of the knight are emphasized in Tennyson’s poem, pointing to the glamorous materiality of the feudal order and patriarchal power of the system. In the absence of this tangible male figure within the poetics of Siddal’s picture, the sexual and patriarchal dynamics of the narrative of Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” collapse. The shadowy presence of Lancelot in the cracked mirror that hangs on the wall near the loom is the only concrete acknowledgement that Siddal pays to Tennyson’s narrative. It is one trajectory among many that she weaves in her illustration of the Lady of Shalott. The magic represented in the curse that binds or immobilizes the lady in Tennyson’s poem is subverted in Siddal’s drawing by the image of the crucifixion on the table in the lady’s room. The supernatural medievalism of Tennyson is replaced by the Christian symbolism of the cross. One of the key religious trajectories reflected in Siddal’s drawing includes the Calvinistic ideology of hard work, frugality and proficiency in labor.14 The Lady of Shalott in this pictorial narrative clearly relates all these significant principles of Calvin; she is hard at work; even when she looks away from the loom, her hands are busy weaving. The frugal aspect of her life is signified through her simple clothing, lack of decorative objects on the chest of drawers, which, except for the crucifix on the top, is empty. Her successful labor is indicated in the completed tapestry that hangs on the wall next to the mirror. Principles of orderliness, and a rejection of the sensuous, noticeable in the Puritan-like simplicity of the lady, suggest this strand of Christianity in Siddal’s Lady of Shalott. While Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott in the aftermath of the fulfilment of the curse is disarrayed—her robes “loosely flew to left and right” (137), symbolically suggesting sexual turbulence—Siddal’s lady is physically impeccable and is an embodiment of equanimity.

36Divya Athmanathan Furthermore, it is significant that the crucifix in Siddal’s drawing is not bare but carries the body of Christ, thus crucially allowing the object to be interpreted as a Catholic symbol too. The instructions for the preparation for the mass in The General Instruction of the Roman Missal mention that “on the altar or close to it, there is to be a cross adorned with a figure of Christ crucified.”15 J. B. Bullen in The Pre-Raphaelite Body importantly draws attention to the fear on the part of contemporary art critics of the prevalence of Catholicism in the works of the Pre-Raphaelites. Interestingly, while the crucifix on the table of Siddal’s Lady of Shalott can be perceived as a Catholic object, the shape of the loom’s stand and the framework on the floor that supports it resemble the image of the bare crucifix, an image identifiable as sacred to Protestants. The Catholic strand in the weaving of Siddal’s drawing is possibly a sympathetic embrace of this religious discourse, an attribute that the Pre-Raphaelites were accused of by their contemporary critics.16 Nevertheless, it is therefore apparent that multiple strands of religious narratives appear to co-exist in this pictorial representation of the Lady of Shalott. The seat on which the lady sits in Siddal’s drawing is significant for the detail of the cat/griffin-like figurine on the length of one of the legs of the chair. This furnishing is gothic in tone and is suggestive of the Gothic Revival, usually associated with Augustus Pugin’s medievalism in architecture initiated in the 1840s. Pugin, in his book Contrasts (1836), crucially drew the connection between medieval architecture and a more morally superior society that sought to protect the weak (and the class hierarchy) and strove for a spiritual way of life, and contrasted this medieval code in built structure and thought with the modernity and urbanization of nineteenth-century Britain that he believed was regressive in both areas. The fault lines in Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” with its medieval architecture of towers, reflecting an ideology that preserves the class system of the age and its concomitant built environment, is exposed primarily through its gender narrative that kills the upperclass lady for stepping outside the confines of her assigned role. In contrast, in the absence of the apparent framework of the tower environment in Siddal’s drawing, the medieval feudal system becomes insubstantial as an image in a broken mirror. With the unperturbed lady sitting at the loom, the notion of her incarceration by “a curse” representing societal injunctions become questionable, as there is no indication of her spiritual or physical confinement. With the lady and her loom dominating the picture and in the absence of any other figure—Lancelot is a tiny reflection on the mirror—or substantial medieval structure to dictate her thought or action, Siddal’s woman appears to be self-sustained, self-contained and self-regulating.

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Hybrid Domesticity Interpreting the interiors of the room in Siddal’s drawing, Elaine Shefer writes: More than a period interior, it is the woman’s room. The furniture—the chair she sits upon, the loom she works on, the table that holds the crucifix for her personal devotion as well as the perched bird that is her companion—all are pedestrian elements that locate the woman’s action in the present and give no hint of either the past or the consequences she will face. The tapestry-like hanging on the wall behind her is the only clue of her past activity.17

Shefer envisions the Lady of Shalott’s domestic interiors as the generic space of a woman, one unbounded by the present or the past. While such a view ignores the complicated social, historical and literary networks evident in the scene of the lady at the loom in Siddal’s drawing, Shefer’s notion of “the pedestrian” to characterize the domestic interiors is significant.18 The concept is linked to the important tenet of Pre-Raphaelitism that rewrites the extraordinary in the form of the ordinary, and Siddal demonstrates this feature obliquely in her drawing by capturing the medieval narrative associated with knights as an intimate domestic scene. In this regard, Siddal’s The Lady of Shalott is ideologically similar to John Everett Millais’s Christ in the House of his Parents (1849–50). Millais’s controversial painting, provocative primarily because of its representation of the sacred through the space, characters, and activity of a type of the working classes, is parallel to Siddal’s representation. She too places an apparently culturally superior, if not sacred, narrative about the feudal elite— the medieval and magical tale of Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott”—within a kind of domestic space. The spatial signifiers in Siddal’s drawing lead to the assumption that “the drawing has little to do with Tennyson’s poem.”19 The carpenter’s shop and the weaver’s room convey similar meanings in terms of the ideological perspectives of Millais and Siddal. They highlight, and thereby draw significance to the “pedestrian” lifestyle as well emphasize the fact that the simple and functional spatialities of the ordinary, the everyday and the working classes can accommodate a variety of narratives. The key element of the pedestrian picture of Siddal’s domestic interior is the lady of Shalott’s labor which is often interpreted as being an artistic expression. While her creativity and artistry is undeniable—as the finished tapestry on the wall attests to her expertise—her productive labor with a possible commercial venture is often ignored at the expense of the fame of artistry that is seen as her aspiration. Interpreting the significance of this Tennyson’s poem, Thomas J. Jeffers asserts that it is “rife with implications about the vocation of the artist and the prospects,

38Divya Athmanathan specifically, for any woman who wants that vocation.”20 For the Pre-Raphaelite painters of this poem, the Lady of Shalott was “at once the woman and the artist, and therefore implicitly a woman artist” who sought the same “experience” and “market opportunities” as male artists.21 Despite Jeffers’s comment about the illustrators’ awareness of the commercial aspect of her artistry, the Lady of Shalott’s creativity in the most well-known Pre-Raphaelite illustrations, such as those by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, and John William Waterhouse, becomes secondary to concerns about her sexuality. One possible reason for the inability to envision her art as vocation could be due to the ideological incongruity of associating hard labor with an upper or middle class lady. Associating art with commerce is also generally resisted. While artistic activity is acceptable in a lady as a pastime, the expending of labor for commercial purposes was frowned upon as the class status of upper and middle-class ladies depended on their non-productive labor in their households. Commenting on the relationship between the lady and the workers’ community in Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott,” Ellen J. Stockstill suggests that The only people aware of her existence are the “reapers, reaping early” and “by the moon” who hear her singing. Perhaps these workers identify her because they are tied to the land they work, similarly denied mobility by their positions as working-class people.22

This significant comment, though not explored by Stockstill in depth in the context of Tennyson’s narrative, is useful to interpret the working woman at the center of Siddal’s drawing. In the absence of the reapers in the drawing, the only figure to perform physical labor in the illustration is the lady. She is therefore the only worker in the narrative. In a study on the “Handloom weavers in mid nineteenth century Norwich,” a visitor to the home of a female worker describes the domestic setting: As usual the loom was in the upper room, which was used as a workroom, bedroom, and in winter, to save a second fire, as a sitting-room. A diminutive little woman—all Norwich weavers are so—was busily engaged at the loom, and during the intervals of putting the fresh bobbins on the shuttle, I obtained the following information from her:—“I do the best kind of barege work. If I commence work at light, and keep on till eleven at night, without being called off to do anything else, I can weave eleven dozen in a week, and I should get 11s. 11d. for that—that is, 13d.a dozen.”23

The hybrid domestic setting—the domestic space doubling up as work space—and the extended labor of the lady who “weaveth steadily” (43) are aspects that resemble the spatial dynamics and the activities of the Norwich weaver who is “busily engaged at the loom” from dawn till dusk. Just as the

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Norwich weaver’s room is a combination of “workroom, bedroom and … sitting room,” the Lady of Shalott’s room functions as both a workroom and a sitting room. She is surrounded by objects that are both work-related and domestic. While the loom signifies her productive labor within the home, the storage cabinet, the tapestry that is both an aesthetic object of display and proof of her productivity, and the crucifix are elements that simultaneously construct the domestic and work space of the lady. The bird on the loom can be interpreted in the religious and domestic context. It can be seen as the dove signifying the Holy Spirit; it can also represent a pet in a domestic household. The spatial context of the Lady of Shalott in Siddal’s drawing clearly depicts the harmonious co-existence of the domestic and the workplace environment, a spatial phenomenon that John Tosh states was a common feature of middleclass households until the eighteenth century. For the majority, work and business was carried out from the home. Tosh asserts that for the most part, unlike the home of the previous century, the Victorian middle-class home was not a “productive unit”, increasingly becoming a “refuge” from work: The Victorian middle-class domestic unit represented the final and most decisive stage in the long process whereby the rationale of the Western family shifted from being primarily economic to become sentimental and emotional. More specifically, it reflected a steadily increasing separation of work from home.24

Interpreted in light of this middle-class construct of domesticity, the Lady of Shalott of Siddal’s representation embodies a domesticity that does not partake of the dominant discourse of the Victorian middle-class home. The lady is engaged in productive labor with a possible commercial endpoint, and though the tapestry that hangs on the wall simultaneously functions as a decorative object, the nature of the loom and the simplicity of the décor of the room indicates that she is a woman who is contributing to the market economy from within her home. In such a context, the drawing possibly recreates the domestic spatiality of the earlier century when the home for the middle-classes was a commercial site in addition to the domestic. There is also the possibility that the drawing alludes to the spatial context of the working classes where the home and the work spaces collapsed into one another as was the situation in the lives of the female Norwich weavers. In any case, Siddal’s own drawing was also produced with the intention of being circulated in the market economy in addition to the artistic. If the Victorian home with its cluttered and ornate drawing-room acted as a synecdoche for femininity and a class symbol for the middle-classes, Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott through her spatial context conveys her upper-class status. The floating away of her web at her transgression underlines the fact

40Divya Athmanathan that it is her physical confinement—which is assisted/made palatable by her weaving—that apparently secures her sexual purity, and is of vital signification in the narrative of the poem. However, the serene but professional woman with her uncluttered domestic décor, containing objects that decorate as well signify financial security, creates a new paradigm for an ideal woman’s identity. Most of the illustrators of Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” highlight the turmoil faced by the lady and brought about by her transition from an immobile to a mobile situation, underscoring her sexuality subtly or overtly through her body. Siddal on the contrary presents the lady austerely through her simple attire, and the non-sexual delineation of her body. Shefer, assuming the Lady of Shalott to be Siddal’s self-portrait, states that Siddal “chose the dress that Christina [Rossetti] wore [as a model] in [Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s] The Girlhood [of Mary Virgin] because, in her self-portrait, she wanted to identify with the image that Christina symbolized in the latter work: the innocent, the pure, and modest virgin.”25 She concludes that in the drawing Siddal offers her figure as a “conventional” object of attraction, thus catering to the “needs of the Victorian man.”26 However, Siddal’s representation clearly depicts a woman turning away from the male image in the mirror, a gesture that defiantly refuses to engage with the gaze of the viewer. Siddal thus undercuts the regressive sexual narrative of the original version by rejecting the heterosexual dynamics it describes, by making the woman the only figure of import, and by relegating the male figure to a sketchy shadow in the mirror. Siddal’s The Lady of Shalott, despite taking its point of departure from Tennyson’s poem “The Lady of Shalott,” is a uniquely creative work in its own regard. It offers a visual poetic delight in the manner in which it weaves together literary, cultural and social trajectories effortlessly to quietly question and reorient accepted discourses of class and gender. Tennyson’s narrative clearly circumscribes the figure of the woman physically, sexually, and spiritually within its poetic world. The poem renders the exotic Lady of Shalott an aesthetic object of enjoyment even in her death for the male audience. Siddal however dismantles the spatial framework that incarcerates her lady, and celebrates her equanimity by showcasing her artistic profession and her freedom of vision that is unperturbed by male presence.

Notes 1. Christine Poulson, “Death and the Maiden: The Lady of Shalott and the PreRaphaelites,” in Reframing the Pre-Raphaelites, ed. Ellen Harding (Bournemouth: Scholar Press, 1996), 173. In Poulson’s estimation there are more than fifty illustrations based on “The Lady of Shalott” produced between the second half of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth century.

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2. Parenthetical figures refer to line numbers in Tennyson, “The Lady of Shalott,” accessed at http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/tennyson/los1.html. 3. Elizabeth Nelson, “Tennyson and the Ladies of Shalott” in Ladies of Shalott: A Victorian Masterpiece and its Contexts (Providence: Brown University Department of Art, 1985), 15–16. 4. The Oxford English Dictionary Online, accessed September 2014. 5. Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 152. 6. Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005), 9. 7. Massey, For Space, 9. 8. Jan Marsh, The Legend of Elizabeth Siddal (London: Quartet, 1989), 176. 9. Tennyson states that “‘The Lady of Shalott’ is evidently the Elaine of the Morte d’Arthur, but I do not think that I had ever heard of the latter when I wrote the former.” George O. Marshall, A Tennyson Handbook (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1963), 59. 10. Palgrave is quoted in Robert W. Hill, Jr., ed. Tennyson’s Poetry (New York & London: Norton, 1999), 41. 11. L. S. Potwin. “The Source of Tennyson’s the Lady of Shalott.” Modern Language Notes 17.8 (1902): 238, accessed September 12, 2014, doi:10.2307/2917812. 12. L. S. Potwin, “The Source of Tennyson’s the Lady of Shalott,” 238. 13. Ellen J. Stockstill, “Gender Politics in Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott.” The Explicator 70.1 (2012): 14, accessed September 15, 2014, http://dx.doi.org/1 0.1080/00144940.2012.656737. 14. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London & New York: Routledge, 2005), 15–19. 15. Joseph DeGrocco, A Pastoral Commentary on the General Instruction of the Roman Missal (Chicago: Liturgy Training Publications, 2011), 95. 16. Dinah Roe, “The Pre-Raphaelites,” in The British Library, accessed March 2, 2017, https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/the-pre-raphaelites#footnote2. 17. Elaine Shefer, “Elizabeth Siddal’s ‘Lady of Shalott.’” Woman’s Art Journal 9.1 (1988): 26, accessed September 13, 2014, doi:10.2307/1358359. 18. Thomas L. Jeffers writes that Siddal’s “rendering of the weaver is the only Pre-Raphaelite image to show correctly the probable medieval technique, with a high warp loom …” (232). Thomas L. Jeffers, “Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott and Pre-Raphaelite Renderings: Statement and Counter-Statement.” Religion and the Arts 6.3 (2002): 231–256, accessed September 21, 2014, doi:10.1163/15685290260384407. 19. Shefer, “Elizabeth Siddal’s ‘Lady of Shalott,’” 26. 20. Jeffers, “Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott and Pre-Raphaelite Renderings,” 231. 21. Jeffers, “Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott and Pre-Raphaelite Renderings,” 233. 22. Ellen J. Stockstill, “Gender Politics in Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott,’” 14–15. 23. Morning Chronicle, 29 Jan 1850 (Letter XVII), quoted in “Handloom Weavers in Mid-Nineteenth Century”, accessed September 12, 2014, http://www.history-pieces.co.uk/Docs/HANDLOOM_WEAVERS.pdf. 24. John Tosh, A Man’s Place. Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven and London, 1999), 13–14. 25. Shefer, “Elizabeth Siddal’s ‘Lady of Shalott,’” 28. 26. Ibid.

Dante Alighieri’s Dreams in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Paintings

3. “A Dramatis Personae of the Soul”: Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Proserpine Laurence Roussillon-Constanty

Each art may be observed to pass into the condition of some other art, by what German critics term an Anders-streben—a partial alienation from its own limitations, through which the arts are able, not indeed to supply the place of each other, but reciprocally to lend each other new forces.1

As Walter Pater expresses in this well-known quote, the relationship between sister arts is a dynamic process in which each art strives to imitate and perhaps surpass the other, a process exemplified in many of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s so-called double works of art. In some instances, however, the relation between text and image does not simply demonstrate such duality; rather it can open up unexpected perspectives on the artist’s overall oeuvre and aesthetics. One such case is Rossetti’s Proserpine [Plate 3.1], which he worked on from 1872 to 1879, and for which he composed two distinct sonnets, one in Italian and the other in English. In its most accomplished version (1874, Tate Gallery) the painting has often been considered as Rossetti’s masterpiece not only for its imposing size and dark, profound color scheme but also for the way it exemplifies the poet’s original syncretic approach to two expressive modes, the verbal and the visual. This chapter will demonstrate how this poem-picture offers Rossetti’s most coded homage to Jane Morris while representing his most successful attempt at going beyond the text and image divide by blending a multiplicity of voices. The first section will address the painted poem, and the second will examine the Dantean subtext in relation to Rossetti’s work to suggest the singularity of the artist’s own poetic voice.

46Laurence Roussillon-Constanty Proserpine (for a picture) Afar away the light that brings cold cheer   Unto this wall,—one instant and no more   Admitted at my distant palace-door. Afar the flowers of Enna from this drear Dire fruit, which, tasted once, must thrall me here.   Afar those skies from this Tartarean grey   That chills me: and afar, how far away,   The nights that shall be from the days that were.        Afar from mine own self I seem, and wing        Strange ways in thought, and listen for a sign:              And still some heart unto some soul doth pine,        (Whose sounds mine inner sense is fain to bring,        Continually together murmuring,)—              “Woe’s me for thee, unhappy Proserpine!” Proserpina (Per un quadro)        Lungi è la luce che in sù questo muro              Rifrange appena, un breve instante scorta              Del rio palazzo alla soprana porta.        Lungi quei fiori d’Enna, O lido oscuro, Dal frutto tuo fatal che omai m’è duro.              Lungi quel cielo dal tartareo manto              Che quì mi cuopre: e lungi ahi lungi ahi quanto        Le notti che saràn dai dì che furo.        Lungi da me mi sento; e ognor sognando          Cerco e ricerco, e resto ascoltatrice;              E qualche cuore a qualche anima dice,        (Di cui mi giunge il suon da quando in quando,        Continuamente insieme sospirando,)—              “Oimè per te, Proserpina infelice!”2

As many critics have observed, the production history of Proserpine is a complex one: we know from Rossetti’s letters to his brother William that the artist started working on the idea for a picture in 1872.3 As with his other paintings inspired by classical mythology, the textual source for the project probably was Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which Proserpine (Persephone) is described as the daughter of Ceres (Demeter) and the unwilling wife of Pluto, who abducted her as she was gathering flowers in the vale of Enna. Once she was transported to the dark underworld of Hades, Proserpine’s mother went looking for her and eventually obtained from Pluto her release from the underworld.

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Plate 3.1:  Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Proserpine, 1874, oil on canvas. ©Tate, London 2017.

48Laurence Roussillon-Constanty However, as she had eaten six pomegranate seeds, she was only allowed to stay with her mother half the year and doomed to spend six months of every year with him in Hades. The theme had been a popular one among poets since antiquity and Rossetti was certainly familiar with recent rewritings of the tale such as the one by his friend Swinburne (The Garden of Proserpine, 1866). The various symbols for the pictorial representation of Proserpine were inspired by the description of the goddess in Lemprière’s dictionary of classical mytho­ logy. The first Rossetti picture recording the composition study is a pastel and chalk drawing (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford) probably executed in 1871, in which Rossetti’s monogram appears in the right-hand corner (where he eventually placed the sonnet). The sonnet was first written in Italian and later translated into English by Rossetti himself. Both sonnets were published in The Athenaeum in 1875 and later included in the Sonnets for Pictures series in the 1881 version of Rossetti’s poems, which underlines Rossetti’s awareness that the work could be regarded either as a painted poem or as a poetic diptych. The various versions of the composition surviving today include an oil painting in which the sonnet in Italian is shown inscribed directly on the canvas (1877, Tate Gallery), and another oil wherein the English sonnet is inscribed on the canvas (1882, Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery). In that version of the picture, Proserpine’s hair color has been altered from black to red, and the overall tone of the picture is a lot lighter. From its initial conception to this final version the picture which Rossetti regularly alluded to in his letters as “the doomed picture” (a reference to the many accidents suffered by the various versions) figures as one of his best attempts at combining competing modes of expression and of representing absence.4 Indeed, just as in The Blessed Damozel, to which it is closely related, the picture stages the disappearance of its main female character—or at least her removal from sight. In the picture of Proserpine, the familiar story of the young goddess’s abduction by Pluto has already taken place: contrary to famous paintings representing the episode in earlier art, the scene only implicitly refers to the event as Proserpina is shown standing alone, trapped in the underworld. As the artist indicates in his prose commentary to the picture, the young woman is represented in a gloomy corridor of her palace, with the fatal fruit in her hand. As she passes, a gleam strikes on the wall behind her from some inlet suddenly opened, admitting for a moment the light of the upper world; and she glances furtively towards it, immersed in thought.5

In the painting the contrast between the overall gloom pervading the picture and the fine ray of light in the background stages the division between

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the flowering plains of Enna and the darkness below. The marked contrast between both color schemes is repeated in the body of the female figure, her pale face and hands contrasting with the dark green color of her dress. In both corners of the picture (Tate Gallery version), the painted text shows the same light and dark contrast: at the bottom left-hand corner of the canvas, the fine inscription «Dante Gabriel Rossetti ritrasse ne capo d’anno del 1874» (Dante Gabriel Rossetti painted this in 1874), looks back to the painterly tradition of the Italian Primitive school while inscribing it in a modern, contemporary period. In the upper right-hand corner the painted sonnet first appears as a decorated frame reproducing the stark contrast between the woman’s dark hair and white face: within the painted sonnet, the graphic representation of three words draw the viewer’s attention to the distance one has to travel to discover or recover the body of Pluto’s victim: “Lungi … lungi … Proserpina.” As in medieval manuscripts where the reading experience is visually marked by illuminated letters, the painted words guide the reader through the depths of the underworld and invite him/her to share in her alienation. Faced with the monumental painting the viewer either has to stand at a distance to see the picture in full or to move forward in order to read the painted poem, thus setting the picture in motion. At the same time, as Barrie Bullen has observed, in the picture “the lack of spatial depth behind the figure pushes her forward and like many figures of the period she gives the appearance of invading the space of the spectator.”6 Thus, on the one hand, the distance required to view the painting in full entails standing beyond the threshold, effectively from the other side of Proserpine’s imprisoned state and away from the darkness within. On the other hand, reading the attached text entails entering the picture and moving beyond the painted, purely graphic surface. When the viewer thus draws up close to the painting, the female character seems to fade from view, and the viewer is compelled to share in the paradox of the trapped woman’s condition, reminiscent of the version of this story from Homer’s Hymn To Demeter, where an emphasis is placed on Proserpine’s being heard, not seen.7 Indeed to both her mother looking for her and to the nymphs happening to hear her desperate cries, Proserpine is reduced to a disembodied voice echoing through the earth. In the same way, in the poem, the reader is drawn into the prison of the painted image through the blurring of the enunciating agent and the use of deictics such as “this” (2) and “here” (5) that place the reader in the same position as the female character. As in his poem The Portrait (Sonnet X), reading the sonnet means to both witness a performance—the painter’s act of representing a woman arrested in time and represented in space—and being part of it by lending one’s voice to the painted character and possibly embodying it.

50Laurence Roussillon-Constanty At the same time, both the Italian and the English versions of the sonnet stage the heroine’s isolation through the use of two expressions that draw attention to remoteness (“lungi” and “afar away”) but which, being repeated at the beginning of each stanza, also suggest the young woman’s continuous effort to sustain her plea and bridge the gap between the upper and the lower worlds. The gap between the ray of light which metonymically refers to the viewer’s discovery of the scene and the dark atmosphere of the painting within the created space allows a narrative to unfold. The contrast in color, observed earlier in the pictorial composition, is verbally expressed through an alternation between open and closed vowels (“fiori d’Enna” / “the flowers of Enna,” and “tartareo manto” / “Tartarean grey”), which also suggests an alternation between light and dark. In the Italian version, a similar opposition between daylight and night is played out in an opposition between “o” and “a” (“palazzo,” “muro,” “oscuro,” and “porta,” “scorta”) which culminates in: “Dal frutto tuo fatal che omai m’è duro” (“from this drear dire fruit”). From a formal point of view, the marked division between both worlds is emphasized by the octave/sestet division of the sonnet and the shift from direct to reported speech. However, the stasis implied by such a binary structure is overcome by the flowing rhythmical movement in the poem (“cerco y ricerco”) and the whirling movement of the painted lines: beyond the visual framing of the character, the lines delineating the drapery describe a spiral movement that directs the viewer’s eye to the half-eaten pomegranate (again a symbol of division) and to the woman’s red mouth. The dramatic turn (signalled by the enjambment of lines 4–5) has already taken place and yet the trompe l’oeil placard with its Italian sonnet clearly points to the mise en abyme spelled out in the text: when the first two quatrains directly express Proserpine’s tragedy, the two tercets further distance her by suggesting a shift from speaker to listener, or from narrator to fictional character. In both Italian and English, the expression “Lungi da me sento” and “Afar from mine own self I seem” (9) indicates a further turn away from expression to impression, from public utterance to inner questioning and eventually from the sense of sight to the sense of hearing. Indeed, from the first two descriptive quatrains to the two more allusive tercets, the change is not only a stylistic turn but also a tonal one: the discord— which is in a sense the main reason for the entrapment of Persephone in the classical version of the story is made audible through various channels: first, through poetic devices such as multiple assonances but also through changes in punctuation that signal the emergence of several voices.8 With this device, the spectator is meant to vicariously experience the woman’s distress and lend her his/her voice: as she is herself torn between heaven and hell, life and death, so the reader/viewer is expected to react to her pain by re-enacting

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her grief and voicing her complaint. Beyond the paradigm of “mute painting” and “silent poetry” and through prosopopeia, Rossetti invites his reader to move beyond the visual realm and not only listen to the various voices depicted in the poem but also to embody them. Before analyzing what distinctive voice is perceptible in the poem, it seems appropriate here to make a few preliminary remarks on prosopopeia, a figure of speech more commonly associated with drama than with poetry. In his book La voix verticale (The vertical voice), philosopher Bruno Clément insists that the rhetorical device of prosopopeia is a compact figure that points to opposite directions while containing multiple layers of meaning: it allows the reader or viewer to go beyond the surface of things and catch a glimpse of the truth that might otherwise only be seen in mirrors and through reflection.9 In relation to painting, prosopopeia is a way of offering multiple perspectives on a particular scene—a technique closely allied to Rossetti’s desire to depict female figures from an “inner standing-point,” an expression he used when referring to his wish “to paint a Venus surrounded by mirrors, reflecting her in different views.”10 In Rossetti’s Proserpine, prosopopeia is used as a rhetorical device that allows the reader both to give his/her voice to the emerging female persona (Proserpine literally meaning “emerging”), and to engage with her in a dialogue where she is the listener and the reader/viewer the absentee. In a similar process as the one used in Rossetti’s picture-poem, The Blessed Damozel (1855), where a young woman is seen looking down from heaven to address her earthly lover, in Proserpine Rossetti stages the distance between the upper world and the underworld by appealing to more than one sense and using visual and musical devices: in both the Italian and the English versions, the verb of perception to hear (“ognor sospirando” / “I listen for a sign”) marks the gradual transition from dramatic monologue or prosopopeia to dialogue and verbal apostrophe. When read aloud, both versions of the poem also invite a shift in tone that is clearly indicated in the semi-colon (and colon) at the end of the octave and suggested in the very choice of words. When the first part of the sonnet expresses Proserpine’s loud yearning for the plains of Enna plena voce through the use of long, rhapsodic sentences, the second part resolutely invites the reader to a quieter mood and a slower rhythm through the use of longer words and less sonorous vowels (“continually together murmuring”). From a formal point of view, the presence of various punctuation marks such as the dash and the brackets also emphasize a sudden hush, or sotto voce utterance that signals the unveiling of another primary scene which points to a more archaic lyrical voice subsumed in the sonnet.

52Laurence Roussillon-Constanty What I would like to suggest here is that within the sonnet Rossetti is not only presenting the reader with a familiar mythological scene but that he is also referring him/her back to a host of images and voices that paved his artistic way to invent a personal mythology. For one thing, when considered within the tradition of lyric poetry, his sonnet does hark back to romantic ballads and lyrics; in particular, the final line, “Woe’s me, unhappy Proserpine,” may strongly remind the reader of Wordsworth’s unhappy lonely characters in a ballad like “The Thorn” (1789). All the same, the heroine’s soliloquy does recall the use of the dramatic monologue one finds in Elizabeth and Robert Browning’s poetry. However, in the last stanza of the poem the single poetic voice seems to both multiply and dissolve into a larger chorus whose refrain echoes an older complaint. The change occurs in lines 10 and 11 where the indefinite, allusive “qualche cuore a qualche anima” (“some heart unto some soul”) introduces indeterminacy. Whose heart and soul is the poetic persona referring to here? Is this a reference to the viewer of the painting, whose response is anticipated by Proserpine herself? Or is it rather an allusion to other, invisible and unnamed prisoners, whose fate is akin to that of the unhappy young woman and whose presence somehow filters through? Both interpretations seem valid as they imply distinct vantage points and associative thoughts—a process inscribed within the sonnet in the lines “ricerco y ricerco” “wing / Strange ways in thought” (9–10) which invite the reader/viewer to follow his/her train of thoughts and fully respond to the work of art both intellectually and emotionally. Through the meanders of intertextual references and polyphonic echoes, one might therefore infer that another voice slowly emerges—a persistent basso continuo whose presence is felt and heard throughout the poem. Unsurprisingly in Rossetti’s case the language it speaks is Italian and takes us back to the poet’s most admired author: Dante, and his two canonical texts, The New Life and the Divine Comedy. Indeed, one can see that the whole sonnet resonates with undertones recalling Dante’s journey through Hell in the Divine Comedy: from a visual perspective, the scene takes place in a region reminiscent of the dark wood that Dante and Virgil first encounter in the opening lines of the Divine Comedy and in both cases similar terms are used to describe the darkness around (the “lido oscuro” in the sonnet recalling the “selva oscura” in line 2 of the second Canto). From an aural perspective, in Dante’s “blind world” (as it is called in Canto IV), as in Rossetti’s poem, the sense of hearing is also heightened as Dante is often depicted as frightened or appalled by terrifying sounds. In the third canto, for instance, the poet is introduced to a universe where the human voice is reduced to producing horrible sounds and beastly shrieks.11

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In other places silence prevails or else is filled with the disquieting murmur of people one can barely see. For instance in the first circle, we read that Dante can only hear the whisper of lost souls.12 Thus, in both the Divine Comedy and Proserpine there is constant oscillation between the visual and the aural and the whole narrative moves forward as one sense takes over. In the Divine Comedy, the narrative technique hinges on Dante’s almost systematic losing of senses and falling asleep—a necessary step that allows Dante and Virgil to make progress through the various circles of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. In Rossetti’s poem-picture too both the eye and the ear seem to compete for attention but the picture’s composition draws both senses together by picturing the half-eaten pomegranate and the red mouth of the dark beauty as central features in the painting. As in canonical Virgin and Child paintings the half-eaten pomegranate is not only a symbol of immortal love but also recalls the Fall of Man and Eve’s eating of the forbidden apple in the Garden of Eden. Placed as it is at the centre of the picture, the tasted fruit and the clinging hands both evoke the sense of touch as well as the lovers’ broken word and invite the viewer to consider the female character as arrested in movement rather than static, as speaking as well as listening. At the same time, the overall spiral movement that is perceptible in the drapery, which a French critic aptly described as a gigantic ear-shaped shell,13 invites the viewer/reader to empathetically commune with the female figure and identify with her. In this way, the very last line of the sonnet, “Woe’s me for thee, unhappy Proserpine!” (14) not only expresses the viewer’s natural reaction to the spectacle of the unfortunate woman, but reverses the roles usually assigned to the various positions (reader/viewer/character) by displacing the poetic voice from the female character in the painting to the person reading the poem or viewing the painting. In endowing the reader/viewer with the power to express pity and share the burden of the woman’s fate, Rossetti again uses a recurrent feature in Dante’s poetry—empathy. Indeed, in both Dante’s The New Life and the Divine Comedy the various episodes are connected through the strong feeling of empathy expressed either by the poetic persona or by the witnesses to an often traumatic event. In many cases, the narrative strategy used by Dante heavily relies on mirroring effects and replicas. When Dante feels, he feels for someone. Conversely, passers-by, onlookers and friends look on his pain and feel for him. The overall effect is that individual pain becomes universal and can be shared within the fictional realm, extended to include the reader of the book or the viewer of a scene. For instance, in The New Life, The Lady of Pity (which Rossetti painted as La Donna della Finestra) casts such a compassionate eye on Dante’s mourning

54Laurence Roussillon-Constanty over Beatrice’s death that Dante sees her as a sort of double of his dead love, able to witness his pain and help him overcome his grief. In the Divine Comedy, Dante’s encounters with the various characters is also often marked by empathy and a feeling of deep compassion (pietà) for the souls trapped in Hell (for instance in Canto IV) that share the same fate as Proserpine—living a living death. Among all the tragic figures encountered in Hell, Paolo and Francesca in particular attracted Rossetti’s attention, as they not only epitomize immortal love, but illustrate the potency of art works to elicit bodily response and exacerbate love. Paolo and Francesca are unfortunate lovers, condemned for betraying Francesca’s husband. The story of Paolo and Francesca resonates in Rossetti’s poem-picture of Proserpine, and acts in the broader sense as an allegory for what might be termed the lyrical voice of Rossetti’s art. As an early drawing featuring the two lovers (dating from 1846–1848) testifies, Rossetti was first moved to illustrate the Paolo and Francesca episode while still a very young artist. A later sketch (dated 1849) shows the couple drawn in various attitudes on the same piece of brown paper, clearly showing Rossetti experimenting with various visual interpretations of the story. A subsequent watercolour drawing of the scene (from 1855) and a later enlarged replica (from 1862) divides the episode into three separate moments that make up a triptych where each panel is inscribed with a text quoted directly from Dante’s Divine Comedy: “Oh lasso, quanti dolci pensier, quanto disio meno costoro al doloroso passo!”14 As in the Proserpine painting, the relation between text and image is intended to highlight the descending spiral into which the protagonists are drawn. Placed at the center of the triptych, Dante and Virgil appear as mediating figures between the couple and visually convey the three-fold rhythm of the terza rima that Dante used in his poetry. On either side both scenes illustrate the narrative sequence of events. The first panel shows the moment when the two lovers kiss and enact the forbidden act of love and betrayal, and the second panel reveals them as Dante and Virgil encounter them in Hell, carried away in the wind and doomed to endlessly swirl in the air. In Rossetti’s interpretation of the scene empathy also pervades the picture and conveys the notion that the artist is not just translating words into pictures—as Swinburne made clear in his description of the picture: [In Rossetti’s watercolour] the lovers drift before the wind of hell, floated along the misty and straining air, fastened one upon another among the fires, pale with perpetual division of pain; and between them the witnesses stand sadly, as men that look before and after.15

Interestingly Swinburne’s commentary takes up the major aspects identifiable in Rossetti’s Proserpine: the isolated protagonist, the embedded narrative, and

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the empathetic response. Furthermore, the endless circular relation between text and image is reinforced in Dante’s narrative when Francesca describes how she and Paolo fell in love through the act of reading. In Rossetti’s visual interpretation of the scene the book itself is illuminated in the first panel, so that one can imagine that reading includes both reading aloud (as when reading holy texts) and contemplation. As a go-between (the text says Galahalt) or shared object, the book is instrumental in driving the lovers to perform what is being depicted or described.16 In a similar way, in Dante’s Divine Comedy, the lovers’ tragedy is being reactivated by memory and speech so that telling implies recalling old memories and again experiencing the pain of lost happiness. As Francesca declares twice in Rossetti’s translated version of the episode, she “weeps and says” because “There is no greater woe / Than the remembrance of happy days / In misery.”17 In the same fashion, in Rossetti’s Proserpine the young goddess alludes to her past happiness and the lost flowers of Enna, resenting the distance between “the nights that shall be [and] the days that were” (8). However, in this case all traces of a masculine presence have been erased, only subsisting in the allusive “me” of the last line. Just like the two lovers, Proserpine has erred through the consumption of that which was forbidden (the pomegranate), and thus condemned to live her split existence. What this detour via Dante reveals is two-fold. It first confirms the very biographical and intimate nature of the poem-picture: just as Paolo and Francesca are condemned to experience “perpetual division of pain,”18 Rossetti’s Francesca alias Proserpine—alias Jane Morris—is doomed to live away from her lover who has all but faded from view, and only survives as a sympathetic witness to her misery. The picture-poem may act metonymically here as a coded message addressed to Jane and a record in the full sense of the word to their past love. As such, it is the first in a series of works where Rossetti meditates on the antagonistic nature of memory which, while allowing for memory, also incorporates regret—a paradox he later explored in the poem-picture Mnemosyne, and verbally expressed in a bilingual fragment called la Ricordanza/Memory which is strongly reminiscent of Francesca’s words to Dante in Canto V19: “Is Memory most of memories miserable or the one flower of ease in bitterest hell?” / “Maggiore dolore ben la ricordanza O Nell Amaro inferno amena stanza?”20 In the Italian version the pun on the word “stanza,” which means room as well as line does point to the spatial and temporal dimensions of poetry where the old and the new can collide in the hic et nunc vocalizing of the text. At a more artistic level, what the Dantean subtext ultimately uncovers is the power of the painted poem to go beyond its permanent latency on the canvas and allow the reader/viewer to perform speech so as to symbolically

56Laurence Roussillon-Constanty bridge the gap between word and image, past and present. In his search for a new poetic voice, Rossetti repeats the narrative devices used by Dante but also rehearses the strikingly visual scenes depicted in the latter’s epic poem. In Rossetti’s hand Proserpine not only epitomizes the desirable fusion between lovers, but the artist’s will to enmesh text and image and use both media to move the reader. Writing to Hake in 1870 about his collection of sonnets The House of Life, Rossetti famously declared that he wished “to deal in poetry chiefly with personified emotions” and “put in action a complete dramatis personae of the soul,”21 the term dramatis personae referring to Robert Browning’s poetry collection of the same name. In the poem-picture Proserpine too, one may argue that Rossetti offers a unique and dramatized response to Dante’s poetry and visual imagination—a response that moves beyond the mere descriptive and invites both the painted character and the reading viewer to merge into a single voice. By doing so, not only does Rossetti achieve his poetic dream of personifying emotions but he may also be seen to achieve a painter’s ultimate challenge to record the voice.

Notes 1. Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 85. 2. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. William Michael Rossetti (London: Ellis, 1911), 252–253. Subsequent quotations will be followed by line numbers indicated in parentheses. 3. Letter to Michael Rossetti, 3 November 1872, C 92., ed. William Michael Rossetti, The Family-Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, with a Memoir by William Michael Rossetti, vol. II (London: Ellis and Elvey, 1895), 265. 4. Letter to Ford Madox Brown, 6 January 1874, 74.4; ed. William E. Fredeman, The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti 6: The Last Decade, 1873–1882: Kelmscott to Birchington I. 1873–1874 (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2012), 376. 5. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 634. 6. John Barrie Bullen, Rossetti, Painter & Poet (London: Frances Lincoln Limited Publishers, 2011), 236. 7. The Homeric Hymns, trans. Andrew Lang (London: George Allen, 1899), accessed February 26, 2017, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/16338/16338-h/16338-h. htm. 8. The various versions of the story tell us that Proserpine was the daughter of Ceres and Zeus and the latter was instrumental in Proserpine’s abduction. For reference, see Ovid, Metamorphoses V, 341–408, accessed on February 24, 2017, http://data. perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:latinLit:phi0959.phi006.perseus-eng1:5.341-5.408. 9. Bruno Clément, La voix verticale (Paris: Belin, 2013), 38. 10. Jerome McGann, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Game That Must Be Lost (Yale: Yale University Press, 2000), xvii.

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11. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. John Ciardi (New York/London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1970), Canto III, l. 22–30, 14. 12. Dante Alighieri, Comedy, Canto IV, l. 25–26, 20. 13. Danielle Bruckmuller-Genlot, Les Préraphaélites (Paris: Armand Colin, 1994), 344. 14. Dante Alighieri, La Divine Comédie, trans. Jacqueline Risset, L’Enfer/Inferno de Dante (Paris: GF-Flammarion, 1992), Canto V, l.112–114. The translation in English reads: “Alas, What Sweetest Thoughts, What Green and Young Desire Led these Two Lovers to this Sorry Pass.” Dante Alighieri, Comedy, 28. 15. Algernon Charles Swinburne, William Blake: A Critical Essay (London: J.C. Hotten, 1868), 74. 16. The Italian text reads: «Galeotto fu’l libro e chi lo scrisse: quel giorno piu non vi leggemmo avante.», Dante Alighieri, Comédie, Canto V, l.137–138, 64–65. In his translation of the episode into English written in 1878, Rossetti also chooses to keep the word Galahalt as Jan Marsh notices in her notes to the poem. See Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Collected Writings, ed. Jan Marsh (London: J. M. Dent, 1999), 504. 17. Rossetti, Collected Writings, 349. 18. Swinburne, William Blake, 74. 19. The similarity between both texts is evoked in the Rossetti Archive record of the poem. Accessed February 24, 2017, http://www.rossettiarchive.org/docs/17-1880. raw.html. 20. Rossetti, Works, 255. 21. The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. William Fredeman et al. (Cambridge and Rochester: D. Brewer, 2002), 450.

4. Portrait of the Artist as an Italian Poet: Rossetti’s Dante Martina John

Dante Gabriel Rossetti saw himself as a poet who painted not the other way around. “My own belief is that I am a poet (within the limit of my powers) primarily,” he writes in a letter from 1870, “and that it is my poetic tendencies that chiefly give value to my pictures: only painting being—what poetry is not—a livelihood, I have put my poetry chiefly in that form.”1 It is hardly surprising that a large part of his visual works constitute attempts to represent literary content in painterly form. Among these adaptations of literary sources, the works of the medieval poet Dante Alighieri serve as Rossetti’s most important source. Throughout his life Rossetti remained dedicated to his Florentine namesake. He was particularly fascinated by the Vita Nuova, Dante’s youthful masterpiece written in 1295. Simultaneously a poetological work and a tale of courtly love, the Vita Nuova utilizes poetry and prose to chronicle the fictional Dante’s unrequited love for Beatrice and his grief after her early death in 1290. In consequence of his loss, the poet resolves to “di dicer di lei quello che mai non fue detto d’alcuna”—“write concerning her what hath not before been written of any woman,”2 already pointing towards the Divina Commedia where Dante and Beatrice are finally reunited in Purgatorio XXX. Rossetti not only translated the Vita Nuova into English, but throughout his career he returned repeatedly to the medieval text, producing various visual adaptations of the key scenes in a variety of media. His first important Dantean work dates from the early Pre-Raphaelite period and was given to his artist friend and fellow PRB John Everett Millais in 1849; the last major illustration of a scene from the Vita Nuova was finished a year before Rossetti’s death in 1882. Here I examine Rossetti’s strategies for transforming

60Martina John and translating Dantean sources and the means by which he reinterprets the poetic text of the Vita Nuova—and to a lesser degree the Divina Commedia— through visual means. I focus on three main examples, the early Pre-Raphaelite drawing The Salutation of Beatrice [Plate 4.1], the large oil painting Dante’s Dream3 and the late “Double Work of Art” La Donna della Finestra.4 I then demonstrate how Rossetti’s paintings do not simply translate the text into images, but also manipulate the literary content according to his personal concepts of art and artistry.

Plate 4.1: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Salutation of Beatrice, 1849–50, black ink, gray wash, and graphite on cream wove paper, darkened. Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Bequest of Grenville L. Winthrop, 1943.739.

Translating and Transforming the Vita Nuova One of the lesser-known works from Rossetti’s Pre-Raphaelite period, the pen and ink drawing The Salutation of Beatrice was created between 1849 and 1850. As a so-called “multi-panel painting,” it was composed as a diptych.5 The left compartment, signed 1849, displays Beatrice and Dante’s confrontation on earth, the right compartment, signed 1850, represents their reunion in the afterlife. A narrow panel depicting the figure of a cupido, as an allegory of love, divides the two scenes in the middle. All compartments contain literary quotations from Dante’s Vita Nuova and Divina Commedia.

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With its inclusion of multiple pictorial panels and verbal quotes from Dante’s writings into a single material unit, The Salutation of Beatrice can be called a truly intermedial work of art.6 However, the relations of image and text are far more complex than apparent on first glance. Even if the verbal and visual are all part of the same pen-and-ink-drawing, they do not merge into each other as they would, for example, in William Blake’s “illuminated printings” or Rossetti’s own late, Blake-inspired, allegorical drawing The Sonnet, but retain their individual characteristics. Jerome McGann describes the relation of image and text in Rossetti’s works as a “dialectical rather than an organic approach.”7 Through this dialogue of its visual and verbal components the Salutation of Beatrice deviates from its Dantean sources in various ways, reinterpreting the text through visual means and the careful selection of verbal elements. The left compartment depicts Dante and Beatrice’s encounter on the streets of Florence largely as it is described in the Vita Nuova. The impact of Beatrice’s first blissful greeting will haunt the poet-narrator throughout his life. As described by the quotation inscribed below, “He who she greeteth feels his heart to rise,” her salutation makes his heart tremble. However, it is through this inscription that the picture contradicts the Dantean source. While the pictorial part shows events from Vita Nuova III, the text below is not taken from the same chapter. “He who she greeteth feels his heart to rise” is a line from the sonnet “My lady carries love within her eyes” 8 which belongs to Vita Nuova XXI. The actual poem featured in Vita Nuova III, “To every heart which the sweet pain doth move,”9 mainly relates to the dream vision of Amor and Beatrice which Dante experiences earlier in the chapter, rather than to the later encounter in the streets of Florence. While the actual Vita Nuova III sonnet has little connection to the scene in which Beatrice grants Dante her salutation, the quotation from Vita Nuova XXI adequately summarizes the overwhelming impact of Beatrice’s greeting. Dante “feels his heart to rise / and droops his troubled visage full of sighs.”10 Although it originates in the “wrong” chapter, the quotation offers a transition from the outer level of the salutation as a visual sign towards the verbal level beyond the surface of the depicted scene. Unable to convey the “rise” of Dante’s heart, the emotional process happening inside him, the image depends on the lyrical text to render the internal as well as the external events that occur during Beatrice and Dante’s Florentine encounter. The cupido situated between the two large compartments is also equipped with an inscription, taken from the Vita Nuova canzone “The eyes that weep for pity of the heart.”11 The lines “Beatrice is gone up into high Heaven” and “… and hath left Love below, to mourn with me” describe how Beatrice

62Martina John ascends to heaven while Dante has to remain on earth and all he can do is mourn his beloved.12 Contrary to the inscription below the Florentine panel, there is no misleading connection between the quote and the image to which it has been attached. In combination with the cupido carrying an inverted torch as a symbol of Thanatos, the Greek god of death, and a sundial to represent the hour of Beatrice’s passing, the inscription simply refers to Beatrice’s death, which takes place “off stage” between the two panels. The panel on the right represents Dante and Beatrice’s reunion during the final cantos of the Purgatorio of the Divina Commedia, where they meet on top of Mount Purgatory. It is here Rossetti first quotes the line “Look on me well; I indeed am Beatrice” (“Guardami ben; ben son, ben son Beatrice”), from Purg XXX, 73, establishing a leitmotif that will permeate much of his later Dantean work. Still, the Salutation’s depiction of Dante and Beatrice’s reunion in Paradise does not illustrate the course of the events exactly as they are described in the Purgatorio. Rossetti’s drawing omits the fact that when Dante first encounters her in Purg. XXX, 17–37, Beatrice is standing on a chariot drawn by griffins, accompanied by a triumphal religious procession. In The Salutation of Beatrice Beatrice and Dante’s encounter appears far more personal and intimate. Here, Beatrice’s sole entourage consists of two female musicians, mirroring the two ladies attending her in the Florentine scene. Moreover, Beatrice is depicted in the act of lifting her veil, revealing herself with the words “Look on me well; I indeed am Beatrice.” When she utters these lines in Purg. XXX, 73, however, Beatrice’s face remains covered with a veil. She only reveals her face in Purg. XXXI, 136–45 after Dante has been submerged in the river Lethe. Rossetti’s artwork combines Beatrice’s verbal revelation from Purg. XXX, 73 with the moment she lifts her veil at the end of Purg. XXXI and Dante gazing at her countenance in Purg. XXXII, 1–3. By leaving out the ecclesiastical procession and focusing on the exchange of gazes between Beatrice and Dante, the emphasis shifts from the theological context towards the private subject of love. In Rossetti’s drawing the theological implications from the Purgatorio scene have given way to a close personal encounter.13 Beatrice’s allegorical significance from the Commedia has been exchanged for a depiction of her as a very human beloved.14 A similar shift towards the more subjective, personal dimension of the literary episode is evident in Dante’s Dream, Rossetti’s adaptation of Dante’s dream vision in Vita Nuova XXIII. He first adapted the scene as a watercolor in 1856. In 1871 a replica in oil was painted for his patron William Graham. With the oil version of Dante’s Dream being too large for its intended position in Graham’s house, Rossetti had to paint a third version with two added predellas that he finished in 1880.

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Dante’s Dream is based on a scene in Vita Nuova XXIII, where Dante contemplates the transience of life after having suffered from a feverish illness for nine days. He then realizes that one day even his beloved Beatrice will die. Afterwards he experiences a series of apocalyptic visions, concluded by the sight of the dead Beatrice accompanied by a group of ladies, who cover her with a veil. Typical for the Vita Nuova, the scene is not only rendered in prose, but is accompanied by a poem, which elaborates and comments on the event. Dante’s Dream, Rossetti’s 1871 oil painting, exhibits the formal structure of a history painting, featuring a large format, multi-figured composition on a single panel with inscriptions on the frame elaborating on the depicted scene.15 A classical history painting attempts to condense a literary or historical scene into a single “pregnant moment” that can be rendered visually.16 As they are meant to have a moral or didactic impact, history paintings also aim for easy readability. Ideally, no previous knowledge of the depicted scene is required by the spectator. The majority of these criteria apply to Dante’s Dream, which features a large-scale format, multiple figures in an architectural setting and concentrates on the moment when Dante’s first person narrator first encounters the dead Beatrice. Several inscriptions on the Rossetti-designed frame serve to explain the events depicted on the main panel. Similar to the Salutation of Beatrice, Rossetti’s depiction of Dante’s dream undermines the traditional image-text-relation of history painting by making the visual depiction deviate from, and even contradict its textual source. First of all, instead of focusing on the apocalyptic imagery that takes up a large part of Dante’s dream sequence in Vita Nuova XIII, Rossetti’s adaptation focuses on personal, emotional aspects. Dante’s Dream emphasizes the externalization of Dante’s emotions by adding the figure of Amor. The personification of Love is not mentioned in this specific Vita Nuova episode. It is not only the visual rendition, however, that deviates sharply from the description in the Vita Nuova. The inscriptions on the frame and even the painting’s title explicitly contradict the events described by Dante: the supposed date on which the dream takes place, is stated as June 9th 1290 on the frame of the watercolor as well as the oil version—and thus equated with the date of Beatrice’s death. However, according to the Vita Nuova, Dante’s dream does not take place when Beatrice dies, but happens several days beforehand. Enough time passes between the dream vision and Beatrice’s actual death that Dante is able to experience another visionary encounter with Amor, and watches as Beatrice (still very much alive) passes through the streets of the city in Vita Nuova XXVI and XXVII. Eventually, in Vita Nuova XXIX, Dante-the-narrator states that he was busy composing a new canzone

64Martina John when he received the news of Beatrice’s death: “I was still occupied with this poem, (having composed thereof only the above written stanza).”17 Relocating the dream vision to the day of Beatrice’s death, Rossetti’s painting does not just deviate from the Vita Nuova source, it also reinterprets the depicted scene. Instead of foreshadowing Beatrice’s impending death, the dream now represents its emotional impact on Dante. Although the poet is not present when his beloved dies, the event affects him with such intensity that he experiences a vision during which he witnesses her soul ascending to heaven. Thus, Rossetti’s painting attempts a symbolical representation of the emotional-psychological consequences of the shock Dante suffers due to the sudden death of his beloved. Once again in Rossetti’s works, the events of the Vita Nuova are shifted from the transcendental cosmic scale towards the subjective emotional experience of Dante as a person.18 La Donna della Finestra, a portrait of Jane Morris as the Lady at the Window from the later Vita Nuova chapters, does not deviate as significantly from the Vita Nuova source as is the case with Dante’s Dream. As a so-called “Double Work of Art,” a painting equipped with a sonnet written or translated by Rossetti, in La Donna della Finestra text has been assigned a much larger role than in the previous two paintings.19 Moreover, compared to the Salutation of Beatrice and Dante’s Dream, both of which used the visual language of history painting, the Donna takes on the characteristics of a portrait painting.20 The painting, finished in 1879 and sold to Rossetti’s patron F. S. Ellis, depicts a woman in grey gazing enigmatically as she sits at a window, her hands resting on the windowsill. The Donna della Finestra is first mentioned in Vita Nuova XXXVI, shortly after Beatrice’s death when Dante-the-narrator wanders aimlessly through the streets of Florence. Looking up, he encounters the gaze of the unnamed lady as she looks out from a window. Overwhelmed by her compassion, he withdraws full of shame. Over the course of the next chapters, he experiences several encounters with the mysterious lady. Eventually, he feels guilty for almost neglecting his love for Beatrice. He writes two sonnets about his emotional struggle, until he experiences a celestial epiphany and all of his feelings for Beatrice return. Even though the Donna della Finestra appears in three Vita Nuova chapters, the text offers little in terms of her visual appearance. She is simply described as “very young and very beautiful”21—her resemblance to Jane Morris in the painting has no base in the literary source.22 The only descriptive detail mentioned in the text is her position at the window. Contrary to most of his earlier Dantean works, Rossetti’s visual rendition does not explicitly deviate from the text, but it “zooms in” on the Lady at the window.

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Neither Dante nor the streets of Florence can be seen in the painting. Apart from her position at the window no elements in the painting identify the figure as Dante’s Donna della Finestra. Literary anchorage is provided solely by the inscriptions on the frame, including the title and a sonnet in English and Italian: Mine eyes beheld the blessed pity spring Into thy countenance immediately A while agone, when thou beheld’st in me The sickness only hidden grief can bring; And then I knew thou wast considering How abject and forlorn my life must be; And I became afraid that thou shouldst see My weeping, and account it a base thing. Therefore I went out from thee; feeling how The tears were straightway loosen’d at my heart Beneath thine eyes’ compassionate control. And afterwards I said within my soul: “Lo! with this lady dwells the counterpart Of the same Love who holds me weeping now.”23 Videro gli occhi miei quanta pietate era apparita in la vostra figura, quando guardaste li atti e la statura ch’io faccio per dolor molte fiate. Allor m’accorsi che voi pensavate la qualità de la mia vita oscura, sì che mi giunse ne lo cor paura di dimostrar con li occhi mia viltate. E tolsimi dinanzi a voi, sentendo che si movean le lagrime dal core, ch’era sommosso da la vostra vista. Io dicea poscia ne l’anima trista: “Ben è con quella donna quello Amore lo qual mi face andar così piangendo.”

It is this sonnet on the frame that constitutes the main connection between the work of art and the Dantean source. Taken from Vita Nuova XXXVI, it describes the gazes exchanged between Dante and the Lady at the Window. Dante perceives the pity in her eyes while the lady senses his sadness until the poet withdraws from her, too ashamed to show his sorrow in public. Apart from this, no external action takes place; the poem describes an internal process almost impossible to render in visual terms. Thus, instead of trying to depict the external circumstances of the encounter, Rossetti’s painting completely refrains from including the figure of Dante in the composition.

66Martina John Instead of visually rendering the internal process, the text of the sonnet itself has been attached to the artwork and the emphasis shifted towards the interaction of painting and spectator through the poem.24 The sonnet is engaging with the Donna—by reading it, the viewer addresses her in second person. By contemplating the painting and reading the sonnet, the spectator can be equated with Dante, the speaker from the poem, who is also contemplating the image of the Lady at the Window. While The Salutation of Beatrice and Dante’s Dream both display an “act of looking,” with Dante gazing at a woman within the pictorial world, in La Donna della Finestra visual relations have changed according to the paradigm shift that occurred in Rossetti’s work in the wake of the emerging aesthetic movement during the early 1860s. Instead of two pictorial figures looking at each other (or one looking at the other), the painted figure is looking out of the painting, establishing eye contact with the spectator. The Donna bearing Jane Morris’s features seems to be looking at the viewer as much as he or she is contemplating her. With its “Double Work of Art” status, La Donna della Finestra represents a new attempt to translate the Vita Nuova into visual terms. While the spectator was just witnessing the events from the outside in the Salutation and Dante’s Dream, where Dante was present as a figure in the painting, a shift of perspective has now taken place. By viewing and verbally addressing the Donna from Dante’s point of view, the spectator has assumed Dante’s position—he or she has become a part of the work of art.

Artistic Isolation—the Poet as an Outsider The theme of Dante as a Romantic outsider who produces his visionary work in isolation from society, runs through the majority of Rossetti’s Dantean illustrations.25 Both panels of the Salutation of Beatrice, for example, represent Dante as spatially separated from the group of women he encounters. The left compartment shows Beatrice with two attendants and a page boy, while Dante is standing on the other side of the scene, all alone with a book in his hand. The women occupy the width of the narrow walkway, while Dante remains awkwardly in the niche on the left. The composition indicates the poet’s separation from courtly life. He is not a part of the world represented by Beatrice and her elaborately dressed attendants. The First Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice (Dante Drawing an Angel),26 Rossetti’s first “official” adaptation of a subject from Dante drawn in 1849, already presents the medieval poet as a poet-painter not unlike how Rossetti saw himself.27 The decision to illustrate the minor episode from Vita Nuova

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XXXV, where Dante is drawing an angel in memory of Beatrice, cements his identification with the Florentine poet. Dante Drawing an Angel presents Dante as a poet who dabbles in the visual arts, trying to overcome the loss of his beloved by expressing his feelings through artistic means. Caught during the act of drawing, he seems disturbed by the three visitors peering over his shoulder. Dante’s art is shown as something that happens in private. Signing the drawing as “Dante G. Rossetti,” Rossetti emphasizes his connection with the medieval poet and creates a new identity.28 The artist “Dante G(abriel) Rossetti” constitutes a construct created by Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti, through which he aims to present his art in a certain context. By rearranging the order of his first names and choosing to draw a subject from Dante he explicitly identifies with Dante, suggesting that Dante serves as a stand-in for D. G. Rossetti the painter-poet.29 In Rossetti’s second adaptation of the same subject, The First Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice,30 a watercolor from 1853, however, the relationship between Dante and his visitors has changed. Dante is still creating art in his dark studio, withdrawn from the sunny Florentine cityscape outside, but he does not seem alienated from society anymore. Here, his three visitors are presented as friends rather than nosy intruders. They express empathy for his loss, with one of them stroking Dante’s shoulder in a gesture of comfort. But even in the visual rendition of his dream vision, Dante’s Dream, Rossetti shows Dante remaining detached from the main events. In the 1856 watercolor version of Dante’s Dream, the poet is standing in front of a low pedestal, on top of which Amor, Beatrice, and the two attendants are situated, almost like actors on a theatre stage. In the 1871 oil painting the pedestal is gone. Still Dante’s black robes contrast sharply with the glowing red and golden hues of the Amor/Beatrice group, and like a spectator in front of a painting, he is not part of the “picture” within the “frame” formed by the golden rectangle structure in the background. He only observes, but does not take part in the events, except for being led by Amor—their clasped hands being the only physical point of contact between Dante and the dream scene. The 1880 replica of Dante’s Dream features two additional predellas below the main panel. The first one shows Dante asleep on his bed with a small version of the dream scene from the main panel floating above his head as an “image-within-the-image,” while a group of women attendants are surrounding him. In the second predella the poet has woken up and recounts his dream to the ladies. While providing context for the dream scene, the predellas also demonstrate the inability of an adequate communication between the visionary poet and his mundane audience.

68Martina John The depiction of Dante within his social environment demonstrates how even while the people around him express their sympathy, they are still unable to take part in Dante’s artistic and poetical vision or his love for Beatrice. Instead of the imaginary world of Dante’s dream, the women from the predella only see Dante’s sleeping body without being able to comprehend his vision.

Art about Art: Self-Reflexivity in Rossetti’s Vita Nuova-Adaptations The dream-vision situated mise en abyme as an “image within an image” in the predella of the 1880 version of Dante’s Dream, is not the only instance of self-reflexivity in Rossetti’s paintings.31 Much of his work can be regarded as art about art, paintings about painting. In La Donna della Finestra, for example, the painting’s status as a painting is emphasized through the deliberate incorporation of the window. The Lady—an object supposed to be contemplated visually—is placed in the titular window, which functions as a picture frame. Since Leon Battista Alberti’s De Pictura, paintings and their frames have been equated with windows.32 Moreover, in the Vita Nuova the Donna is already treated like an image. She remains passive and only “acts” through her gaze or rather through her visual impression. She never speaks, and while Dante feels comforted and inspired by her visual qualities, no dialogue is established between him and the lady at the window. The Donna remains a silent object, available for the projection of the masculine fantasies of the male artist/poet—a passive image.33 Rossetti’s early works Dante Drawing an Angel and The First Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice, on the other hand, establish a self-referential correlation between drawing/painting technique and subject matter. Both works represent Dante as he produces an image of Beatrice, commemorating her death, a scene based on the episode in Vita Nuova XXXV. In Dante Drawing an Angel Dante produces a pen and ink drawing— Rossetti’s drawing depicting this act is also executed in pen and ink. In The First Anniversary, however, Dante renders Beatrice’s image as a watercolor painting in red, blue and yellow—as does Rossetti when he paints the scene in watercolor, incidentally using a color palette that features these exact three hues. Art and artists in general represent an important theme in Rossetti works of the early to mid-1850s: Fra Angelico Painting (1853), Giorgione Painting (1853), Fra Pace (1856) and Bonifazio’s Mistress (1856), all feature depictions of artists in the act of painting. Together with the Dantean illustrations,

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these works form an attempt to render the essentially un-representable act of artistic creation in visual form, while simultaneously demonstrating the impossibility of this very effort. Even if a lot of Rossetti’s works attempt to claim the superiority of poetry over painting, the visual activity of painting is of course easier to render in visual form than the “invisible” act of composing poetry. Therefore, Rossetti’s “meta-artistic” pictures mainly feature artists instead of poets—even presenting the poet Dante in the act of creating works of visual art. As demonstrated above, many of Rossetti’s works interpret the artist’s position in society as that of an isolated figure, a visionary outsider. Artistic vision is presented as opposite to social consensus. Like the visitors in The First Anniversary, even the most sympathetic non-artists are shown as unable to comprehend the personal and emotional implications of a visionary artwork. Just as Dante’s Vita Nuova was meant for an intimate circle of “Fedeli d’Amore,”34 the audience of these artworks is automatically reduced to a limited circle of “insiders.”35 In addition to dealing with art and artistic identity in their subject matter, Rossetti’s paintings never deny their artificiality and their status as paintings when it comes to technique and painting style. Their pictorial status is emphasized by a deliberately flat spatial conception, a lack of three-dimensional perspective and the focus on pattern and ornament.36 A work like the watercolor The First Anniversary even constitutes an intertextual collage, an “artwork made out of artworks” with visual quotations from Albrecht Dürer, Hans Memling and other artists making up the background—here Rossetti works in the Pre-Raphaelite tradition quoting from the Old Masters and the painters of the quattrocento. In a way, the quotation “Guardami ben; ben son, ben son Beatrice,” which appears several times in his adaptations from Dante, summarizes how Rossetti’s works aim to break the pictorial illusion and point out the symbolic function of all the elements that make up his paintings. “Look at me” the depiction of Beatrice says, demonstrating her own illusory status: “I truly am Beatrice—I mean Beatrice, I am the symbol that represents Beatrice.” With this Rossetti follows in the footsteps of Dante Alighieri himself, who was prone to break the fictional illusion in the Vita Nuova, and the Commedia (where he frequently addresses the reader “o, lettore,” reminding him of the fictional status of the text he is reading).37 While the Vita Nuova always features the voice of Dante the poet next to Dante the lover, Dante the poet can be heard next to Dante the pilgrim in the Commedia. Equally, Rossetti the artist remains present within his paintings. Even if it is just through his highly stylized monogram that recalls his name and thus once again his association

70Martina John with the eponymous Florentine, all representations of Dante Alighieri also feature the self-representation of Dante Rossetti. This fictionalization of his artistic self reaches its peak in Beata Beatrix, a work that not only conflates Rossetti’s own persona with that of Dante, but also blurs the lines between Rossetti’s model, muse, artistic partner and later wife, Elizabeth Siddal, and Dante’s beloved Beatrice, who both died young and were commemorated through works of art. Rossetti continues this merging of autobiography and literary fiction with La Pia de’ Tolomei and La Donna della Finestra. Both paintings feature Jane Morris as the protagonist— as the prisoner of a jealous husband (comparing Pia’s imprisonment to Jane Morris’s marriage to William Morris), and as a source of comfort after the death of the beloved (Rossetti finding new love with Jane Morris after Siddal’s death)—compared to Dante being comforted by the Lady at the Window after the death of Beatrice. While Rossetti himself remains within the role of the metaphorical Dante, however, Jane Morris’s identity oscillates between that of several Dantean figures. In the late painting Dante’s Dream from 1880, Rossetti finally merges Morris’s features and Siddal’s red hair into a hybridized Beatrice. The image from the head of the dreaming Dante is simultaneously a product from the imagination of Dante Rossetti—it is through Rossetti’s medium of painting that the dream can be perceived by non-dreaming spectators. The dream-vision and the work of art are one and the same: Dante Alighieri’s dream and Rossetti’s painting have finally become one. Rossetti’s visual adaptations from Dante constitute very loose translations. By freely combining textual elements from Dante with visual renditions that do not necessarily originate in the same sources, Rossetti’s artworks deliberately reinterpret the medieval text.38 This act of re-interpretation has often been summarized with the quote “allegorizing on one’s own hook,” an expression Rossetti used in a letter to William Allingham in 1855 to describe his approach to illustrating Edward Moxon’s edition of Tennyson’s Poems.39 William Michael Rossetti describes his brother’s approach to Tennyson as: “[Rossetti] only and not Tennyson was his guide. He drew just what he chose, taking from his author’s text nothing more than a hint and an opportunity.”40 The same can be said for Rossetti’s adaptations of Dante Alighieri’s works. His adaptations from the Vita Nuova and Commedia exhibit a strong subjective dimension, emphasizing the personal, psychological aspects of the depicted scenes over an authentic rendition of the literary sources. Rossetti’s Dante produces visionary works in order to express his inner emotions through art, in a position isolated from society. By re-contextualizing the person of Dante as a poet-artist like himself, Rossetti eventually creates his own, “personal Dante.”

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Notes 1. William E. Fredeman, The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Vol. 4. The Chelsea Years: 1863–1872; Prelude to Crisis (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2002–2010), 449. 2. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “The New Life,” in The Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. William Michael Rossetti (London: Ellis, 1911, Reprint. Hildesheim: Olms, 1972), 346. 3. Dante’s Dream, 1871, The Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. 4. La Donna della Finestra, 1879, Fogg Museum of Art, Harvard University. 5. I define multi-panel paintings as artworks characterized by the combination of two or more panels with textual inscriptions on the frame or within the pictorial field. All panels are framed together or otherwise materially connected. 6. With reference to Irina O. Rajewski’s definition of the concept (Irina O. Rajewski, Intermedialität (Tübingen and Basel: Francke, 2002), 15–17), Werner Wolf describes intermediality as: “in a broader sense every crossing of borders between media that are conventionally regarded as distinct/separate from each other; in a closer sense focused on the workings inside the work of art […] the use or integration of at least two media within one artifact” (Werner Wolf “Intermedialität,” in Metzler Lexikon Literatur- und Kulturtheorie: Ansätze - Personen—Grundbegriffe, ed. Ansgar Nünning (4th ed. Stuttgart and Weimar: Verlag J. B. Metzler, 2008), 327). 7. “Rossetti is careful to preserve the distinct integrities of picture and text” (Jerome McGann, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Game That Must Be Lost (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 71). See also Linda M. Shires’s comparison between Rossetti and Blake: “Blake deploys composite visual and verbal elements with and against each other to shift a viewer/reader’s perspective and understanding. Significantly, however, Rossetti does not make his visual and verbal art composite like Blake’s. Most often he accentuates a division bar, or what McGann calls a gap, as he illustrates literally in his most famous painting The Blessed Damozel.” (Linda M. Shires, Perspectives. Modes of Viewing and Knowing in Nineteenth-Century England (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 2009), 39) “Rossetti aims to bring poetry and painting closer together without merging them, but also without making one form primary as an explicator of the other. In terms of form, he asks us to see words and letters as graphics and to read paintings as iconic signs” (51). 8. Rossetti, The New Life, 326. 9. Rossetti, The New Life, 313. 10. Rossetti, The New Life, 326. 11. Rossetti, The New Life, 337/338. 12. Rossetti, The New Life, 337. 13. “Rossetti has cut out all the heavenly procession attending on Beatrice in accordance with his idea of what love is: a private affair between man and woman with a minimum of unwelcome onlookers” (Steve Ellis, Dante and English Poetry: Shelley to T. S. Eliot (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 114). 14. William Michael Rossetti describes how his brother’s interpretation of Beatrice differs from the allegorical interpretations their father propagated in La Beatrice di Dante: “It would have been contrary to his very nature to contemplate [Beatrice] as any other than a woman once really living in Florence, and there really loved by Dante as a woman is loved by man.” William Michael Rossetti, “Notes on Rossetti and his Works.” Art Journal 43 (1884): 205.

72Martina John 15. Holländer Hans, “Der modus illustrandi in der deutschen Malerei des 19. Jahrhunderts,” in Buchillustration im 19. Jahrhundert. Vorträge, gehalten anlässlich eines Arbeitsgespräches in der Herzog August Bibliothek vom 12.-14. November 1986, ed. Regine Timm (Wiesbaden: Harassowitz, 1988), 13–45. 16. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laokoon, oder, Über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie, Studienausgabe, ed. Ingrid Kreuzer (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1964), 103. 17. Rossetti, The New Life, 335. 18. Rossetti’s focus on Dante’s personal life, which started in the 1850s, corresponds to the mid-Victorian interest in the younger, more emotional Dante of the Vita Nuova, initiated by the discovery of the Bargello portrait in 1840. For an overview of the changing perception of the Florentine poet in Victorian England see Ellis, Dante and English Poetry (104–107), and Giuliana Pieri, “Dante and the Pre-Raphaelites. British and Italian Responses,” in Dante on View: The Reception of Dante in the Visual and Performing Arts, eds. Antonella Braida and Luisa Calé (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 111. Suzanne Waldman offers a psychoanalytical interpretation of the changes Rossetti incorporates into the oil version of the painting. Compared to the watercolor from 1856 “the general effect of these revisions is to transform the illustration of Dante’s dream from a view into the individual unconsciousness into a sacramental vision,” Suzanne Waldman, The Demon and the Damozel. Dynamics of Desire in the Works of Christina Rossetti and Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2008), 86. 19. See McGann, The Game That Must Be Lost, 71; Shires, Perspectives, 38, 48, and Ainsworth Maryan Wynn, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Double Work of Art (New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 1976), 7, for elaborations of the concept of the Double Work of Art. I define Rossetti’s double works as artworks that combine two autonomous visual elements (e.g. a painting and a sonnet or an original translation of a sonnet) through a physical connection (for example through the sonnet attached to the painting’s frame). 20. See David G. Riede, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Limits of Victorian Vision (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1983), 239; and Elizabeth Prettejohn, “‘Beautiful women with floral adjuncts’: Rossetti’s new style,” in Dante Gabriel Rossetti, eds. Julian Treuherz, Elizabeth Prettejohn, Edwin Becker (London: Thames & Hudson, 2003) for an in-depth discussion of Rossetti’s portrait-like works of the 1860s. 21. Rossetti, The New Life, 341. 22. The choice of Jane Morris as the model for this painting has often interpreted in a biographical context. Like the Lady at the Window who comforts Dante after Beatrice’s death, Rossetti’s new love for Jane Morris offers him comfort after the passing of his wife, Elizabeth Siddal. A similar biographical correlation is often made for Rossetti’s painting La Pia de’ Tolomei. Here, Jane Morris’s marriage to William Morris is compared to La Pia’s imprisonment by her husband. 23. Rossetti, The New Life, 341. 24. “Materially, he [Rossetti] forces the viewer/reader to move back and forth in space and in time between words and images” (Shires, Perspectives, 38). 25. Compare Ellis, Dante and English Poetry, 102, for concepts of Dante as a Romantic/ Byronic hero. Rossetti himself emphasizes this notion of Dante in his poem Dante at Verona. See also Hilary Fraser, The Victorians and Renaissance Italy (Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1995), 148. 26. The First Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice (Dante Drawing an Angel), 1849, City of Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.

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27. Jan Marsh, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Painter and Poet (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999), 125–127. 28. McGann emphasizes the relevance of Rossetti changing his name, calling it “a cultic rite, a secular baptism” (The Game That Must Be Lost, 60). 29. Rossetti himself acknowledged Dante’s influence on his life (together with the legacy of his father, Gabriele Rossetti) in the poem “Dantis Tenebrae.” See also Hilary Fraser’s remark on Rossetti’s “complete identification with the life and work of Dante” (The Victorians and Renaissance Italy, 112). Alison Milbank states: Rossetti “created a double-persona for himself as Gabriel to his family and Dante to the world at large” (Alison Milbank, Dante and the Victorians (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1998), 124). 30. The First Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice, 1853, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. 31. The concept of mise-en-abyme is commonly defined as an image containing a smaller copy of itself. See also Wolf, Intermedialität, 502–503. 32. Alberti Leon Battista, “De Pictura,” in Leone Battista Albertis kleinere kunsttheoretische Schriften, ed. H. Janitschek (Wien: Braumüller, 1877, Reprint. Osnabrück: Zeller, 1970), 47. 33. See also Elisabeth Bronfen, Over her Dead Body: Death, Femininity, and the Aesthetic (New York: Routledge, 1992), 102; Straub Julia, A Victorian Muse: The Afterlife of Dante’s Beatrice in Nineteenth-Century Literature (London: Continuum, 2009), 63. 34. Walter Wehle, Dichtung über Dichtung: Dantes Vita Nuova: Die Aufhebung des Minnesangs im Epos (München: Fink, 1986), 15. 35. In a letter to his patron McCracken from May 1854 Rossetti writes about The First Anniversary: “the sketch is full of notions of my own in a way, which would only be cared about by one to whom Dante was a chief study.” William E. Fredeman, The Correspondence of The Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Vol. 1 The Formative Years: 1835–1862; Charlotte Street to Cheyne Walk; 1835–1854 (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2002– 2010), 350. In his poem “Dantis Tenebrae” he compares Dante’s oeuvre to a “vale of magical dark mysteries.” 36. “For Rossetti […] painting is not a mere extension of vision. It is material. It calls attention to its own materiality, presenting itself as other than easily assimilable, to vision or to language” (Shires, Perspectives, 49). In his comments on multiple perspectives in Rossetti’s paintings Jerome McGann also emphasizes Rossetti’s antiillusionism (The Game That Must Be Lost, 106–107). 37. Inf. XVI, 127/128: “e per le note/di questa comedìa, lettor, ti guiro” (“Reader, by the notes / Of this my Comedy to thee I swear”); Purg. IX, 70–72: “Lettor, tu vedi ben com’io innalzo / la mia matera, e però con più arte / non ti maravigliar s’io la rincalzo.” (“Reader, thou seest well how I exalt / My theme, and therefore if with greater art / I fortify it, marvel not thereat”). 38. Giuliana Pieri calls Rossetti’s Dantean illustrations “actual commentaries of Dante’s work” (Dante and the Pre-Raphaelites, 112). 39. “where one can allegorize on one’s own hook on the subject of the poem without killing, for oneself & everyone, a distinct idea of the poet’s” (William E. Fredeman, The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Vol. 2 The Formative Years: 1835–1862; Charlotte Street to Cheyne Walk; 1855–1862 (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2002– 2010), 7. 40. William Michael Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Family Letters with a Memoir (London: Ellis and Elvey, 1895), 189.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Poems in Paintings: Photography, Realism and Painting

5. Interpretation and Representation in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “Sonnets for Pictures” Enrique Olivares

In Picture Theory W. J. T. Mitchell describes ekphrastic poetry as “the genre in which texts encounter their semiotic ‘others,’ those rival, alien modes of representation called the visual, graphic, plastic, or ‘spatial’ arts.”1 This encounter is not limited to the thematic representational aspects of respective media; rather, the focus is on dynamic possibilities of exchange and transformation. Poetry inspired by painting has confrontation as its imperative, but this contact between mediums is not contentious but fruitful. The ekphrastic encounter allows for the spatial fixedness of visual art to acquire another dimension through the temporal textuality of the lyric narrative. These interart experiments bring us to complex questions this essay will seek to resolve through an examination of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s visual and verbal images: how does the experience of art transform the text and vice versa? What are the affinities between art and poetry? What are their differences and limitations? The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had envisioned a cult of art and beauty in which literature and paintings corresponded freely in a creative and dynamic dialectic. It is under these circumstances that the poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti composed his sequence “Sonnets for Pictures” in 1850. The collection consists of poems inspired by works of art and explores the contact between words and images. In what follows I intend to analyze the dynamics of interpretation and representation in this overlooked work of one of the Brotherhood’s principal members. 1849 was a busy year for the Pre-Raphaelite brothers William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. They had just recently sold their paintings Rienzi vowing to obtain justice for the death of his young brother, slain

78Enrique Olivares in a skirmish between the Colonna and Orsini factions, and Girlhood of Mary Virgin, respectively, and the Brotherhood’s journal The Germ was set for publication later that year. There was a lot at stake and quite a lot to do and the young artists of England took reasonable action: they packed their bags and set sights for the continent, touring France and Belgium in hopes of reveling in the art of past masters. They took a liking to Paris with its gothic Notre-Dame cathedral and museums, spending their time in the Musée de Cluny, the Beaux-Arts and the Luxembourg Gallery. In the Louvre they devoured the great pictures of the past: “A most wonderful copy of a fresco by Fra Angelico, a tremendous Van Eyck, some mighty things by that real stunner Leonardo, some ineffably poetical Mantegnas,” reported Rossetti thrillingly to his brother William Michael Rossetti, “several wonderful early Christians [Italians] whom nobody ever heard of, some tremendous portraits by some Venetian whose name I forget, and a stunning Francis I by Titian.”2 After a fortnight, they lighted out to Belgium, stopping in Brussels, Antwerp, and Ghent, where they admired Van Eyck’s altarpiece at the Cathedral of St. Bavo. It was Bruges they liked best, where they were introduced to the art of Hans Memling in St. John’s Hospital. “Dear PRB,” wrote Rossetti to fellow brother James Collinson, “this is a most stunning place [Bruges], immeasurably the best we have come to. There is a quantity of first-rate architecture, and very little or no Rubens.”3 This excursion would prove to be the longest and most extensive continental wandering of Rossetti’s life. It was also his most formative artistic experience; he was in contact with the work of some of the Pre-Raphaelite “Immortals” while discovering the Flemish painters of the Northern Renaissance. In between trips to the French can-can, Rossetti managed to write poetry. While most of the lyrical musings sent back to his brother consisted of descriptions of found corpses and perceived French rudeness, he did compose a set of sonnets inspired by the art he had witnessed. Perhaps their stark emotional content resonated with the young painter, but it was through writing that he envisioned consolidating his two creative impulses: art and poetry. He sent his brother a set of six sonnets, and they were published as “Sonnets for Pictures” in the fourth and final installment of The Germ in 1850. Rossetti would later re-publish this sequence, albeit with some alterations, in his Poems of 1870. This discussion will concentrate largely on the original publication of these works in The Germ.4 Though it did not form part of the original publication, Rossetti’s sonnet “For Our Lady of the Rocks, by Leonardo Da Vinci” demonstrates the ekphrastic logic of the sequence:

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Mother, is this the darkness of the end, The Shadow of Death? and is that outer sea Infinite imminent Eternity? And does the death-pang by man’s seed sustained In Time’s each instant cause thy face to bend Its silent prayer upon the Son, while He Blesses the dead with His hand silently To His long day which hours no more offend? Mother of grace, the pass is difficult, Keen as these rocks, and the bewildered souls Throng it like echoes, blindly shuddering through. Thy name, O Lord, each spirit’s voice extols, Whose peace abides in the dark avenue Amid the bitterness of things occult.5

Standing in front of the Leonardo’s The Virgin of the Rocks [Plate 5.1] at the British Institution, Rossetti composed the poem as a kind of prayer. The poem makes reference to the painting, describing the figures in the pieces as well as the scenery of the “outer sea” in the background and the “rocks” that frame them. The role of these details is not to represent the picture in the mind of the reader, but to ground the intellectual content of the poem. The text is a meditation on human suffering and the limits of eternity and art, as Cheeke explains: “Rossetti’s sonnet then is neither a casual work of piety nor a mere gallery piece. It interprets the painting as being about the most difficult pass of all, the ‘dark avenue’ or the moment that divides life from death and death from the possibility of life.”6 The poetic voice is doubtful but urgent, addressing the picture in hopes of finding clarity: “Mother, is this the darkness of the end, / The Shadow of death?” As much as the reader feels that the poem is directed to Da Vinci’s painting, it is also about it. Not only does the poem articulate the poet’s own anxieties and crises, it attempts to describe and represent the visual aspects of the picture through words. Vilayath and Lance assert this process of selective representation concerning poem and painting: “Choice” is an important word to note because it highlights the fact that the poet includes and excludes certain information about the visual work that they feel is important in order to convey a particular reading; it is not simply a regurgitation of the visual work in literary form.7

The “Sonnets for Pictures” follow the same pattern of “Our Lady of the Rocks” as sonnets that take images as a point of departure, yet retain them as their origin and return to them. The audience is not composed of only

80Enrique Olivares

Plate 5.1:  Leonardo da Vinci, The Virgin of the Rocks, c. 1491-9/1506-8, oil on poplar. ©The National Gallery, London.

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readers of poetry, but “reader-viewers” participating in a debate, as Goldberg states: To understand Rossetti’s intentions in composing a poem on a painting, we must put ourselves into the position of reader-viewers, not readers alone. To do that means attempting to identify the visual correlative of this or any poem written “for” a painting and keeping both components of the pair before us in the discussion of either work. The reading of the poem becomes richer, more complex, and more accurate if it is regarded as one component of a visual-verbal pair, as it was intended to be.8

Both visual and lyrical texts are equal parts of one comprehensive debate, but how these parts are communicated is not so clear. The Germ did not include any reproductions of the works, implying that the reader-viewer must be familiar with the painting as well. This is doubtful, for quattrocento, Flemish, and French academic painting was not popular in Britain at the time and must have been relatively unknown to the very limited number of subscribers to the journal.9 Save for the ubiquitous “for” that indicates the names of the paintings (and their location), most of the poems are untitled (although numbered 1–6). The unfamiliar reader-viewers must have had to rely on the strength of the poet’s verse to build the picture in their imagination. The sonnet sequence commences with two sonnets on two paintings by the Renaissance artist Hans Memling. The poem “A Virgin and Child, by Hans Mem[m]eling; in the Academy of Bruges”10 (actually in St. John’s Hospital in Bruges), stresses the same feelings of doubt and anticipated suffering found in Rossetti’s “For Our Lady of the Rocks,” but this time, the poem explores the idea of interpretation itself. Rossetti is selective as to what he wishes to represent in this poem on Christian art. The symbolic content of the painting is implicit, and the viewer must be familiar with historical meaning of Christian iconography to grasp the devotional nature of the work: Mystery: God, Man’s Life, born into man Of woman. There abideth on her brow The ended pang of knowledge, the which now Is calm assured. Since first her task began, She hath known all. What more of anguish than Endurance oft hath lived through, the whole space Through night till night, passed weak upon her face While like a heavy flood the darkness ran? All hath been told her touching her dear Son, And all shall be accomplished. Where he sits Even now, a babe, he holds the symbol fruit Perfect and chosen. Until God permits, His soul’s elect still have the absolute Harsh nether darkness, and make painful moan.

82Enrique Olivares Rossetti calls attention to the signifying order of the painting: the child reaches for the fruit, a traditional icon prefiguring the redemption of humanity through the sacrifice of Christ, while the “symbol fruit” is “Perfect and chosen.” The poet, however, is not interested in translating visual dogma into written catechism, but in exploring the psychological and emotional experience of the figures within the painting. Much like the sonnet on Leonardo’s Our Lady of the Rocks, the lyric delves into the prefiguration of suffering, of the “ended pang of knowledge” that anticipates not only Christ’s agony, but that of humanity. The poem draws out the interpretative goals of the poet and the painter, while at the same time confronting the reader with the contradictions of Catholic art: knowing the meaning of signs while acknowledging their implicit “mystery.” Rossetti’s interest in the interpretation of Christian art is informed by his family’s Anglicanism, but tempered by the sensuality of Catholic rite. His religious pieces (including these two poems) are based on a purely artistic reinterpretation of the dogmatic “mystery” found in such Christian paintings. The online Rossetti Archive describes his concept of the “Art Catholic,” as an “imaginative project of historical reconstruction.”11 More than just a revivalist approach to art, it is an exegetical rhetoric filtered through a then modern-mind. His idea of the “Art Catholic,” according to the Rossetti Archive, is more of an exegetical rhetoric filtered through a then modern-mind than just a revivalist approach to art. Still, this “mystery” Rossetti speaks of is not intellectual, but sensual. His poem on Memling’s Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine (1479) triptych in St. John’s hospital follows the similar typological formula, but deviates by foregrounding the aesthetic contemplation of the martyr: Mystery: Katharine, the bride of Christ. She kneels, and on her hand the holy Child Setteth the ring. Her life is sad and mild, Laid in God’s knowledge—ever unenticed From Him, and in the end thus fitly priced. Awe, and the music that is near her, wrought Of Angels, hath possessed her eyes in thought: Her utter joy is hers, and hath sufficed. There is a pause while Mary Virgin turns The leaf, and reads. With eyes on the spread book, That damsel at her knees reads after her. John whom He loved and John His harbinger Listen and watch. Whereon soe’er thou look, The light is starred in gems, and the gold burns.12

The first lines are descriptive, creating a cogent image of the scene: the saint kneels next to the Virgin Mary enthroned and the child stretches a ring towards

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her while angels with instruments accompany the rural scene. The emotional experience of the saint is soon made manifest: she hears the “music that is near her” and the voice of Mary Virgin reading. The saint’s sensual participation in the events surrounding her is meant to parallel our own inclusion in the magic of the painting: the reader as spectator is soon transformed into an integral part of the visual field. The “mystery” of this painting is “only fully realized in the intensity of our own response,” as Stein states.13 But we must not forget that this poem is essentially about sublimating the experience of art into that of poetry. Rossetti is transforming visual signs into aural signifiers, transforming the rhetoric of art into that of the lyric. Thus the last line of the sonnet presents a comprehensive view of the inter-art production; we commence by seeing the “light … starred in gems” of Memling’s picture, but we eventually arrive to the tune of the gold burning that is the sound of poetry. In Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Game That Must Be Lost, Jerome McGann articulates this inter-art translation: “the poems thus undertake the idea of ‘looking at a picture’ as an exponent of an act of language that turns pictorial in the reading, as we are called to watch and contemplate Rossetti’s language.”14 While these poems might interpret the Pre-Raphaelite optic of “truth to nature” by defining objects in the utmost lyrical clarity, they are by no means mimetic. They remain faithful to the content of the picture insofar as they help voice new expressions of the painting. These acts of language, or what Elizabeth Helsinger calls “acts of attention,”15 are intense moments of sensual awareness where the aesthetic imagination is at its zenith. These moments foster “centers of alternative consciousness” or spaces in which the viewer-reader can posit themselves within a virtual space of sensual participation.16 It is perhaps with this aesthetic sensibility that Rossetti explores the possibility of a fully immersive subjective experience in his sonnet on Giorgione’s (now attributed to Titian) Concert champêtre (1509): Water, for anguish of the solstice,—yea, Over the vessel’s mouth still widening Listlessly dipt to let the water in With slow vague gurgle. Blue, and deep away, The heat lies silent at the brink of day. Now the hand trails upon the viol-string That sobs; and the brown faces cease to sing, Mournful with complete pleasure. Her eyes stray In distance; through her lips the pipe doth creep And leaves them pouting; the green shadowed grass Is cool against her naked flesh. Let be: Do not now speak unto her lest she weep,— Nor name this ever. Be it as it was:— Silence of heat, and solemn poetry.17

84Enrique Olivares In The Germ the sonnet is accompanied by a descriptive note that reads: “In this picture, two cavaliers and an undraped woman are seated in the grass, with musical instruments, while another woman dips a vase into a well hard by, for water.”18 While the poem begins with a statement about the figure with the vase, Rossetti has chosen to focus on the sound the water produces. This type of interpretative statement enacts the painting’s implied theme of the contemplative power of music. Rossetti focuses on one sonic event and connects it with the simultaneous music playing of the other figures: “Now the hand trails upon the viol-string / That sobs, and the brown faces cease to sing, / Sad with the whole of pleasure.” This pathetic fallacy dramatizes the sound within, but it is not limited to a literal depiction. The sibilance of the lines provides a melodic counterpoint to the iambic rhythm of the stanza, almost doubling the melody of the flute.19 The act of viewing the work of art and reading the poem becomes phonological, creating an aesthetic space where the reader-viewer is placed within the ideal world of the painting. Helsinger looks at the woman piping as a metaphor for this intense emotional experience: She becomes his figure for the melancholy longing of lyric desire, its aspiration beyond the reach of sight or of ordinary language and rational thought. The longing to embody in poetry or paint the peculiar penetrative power of music is registered in a figure attending to an ever-withdrawing presence, the mouth still shaped by the notes of the pipes, the hollowed space of shadow touching naked flank, the silence of music that has ceased made audible by a trickle of water.20

Contact with the eternal is ephemeral, but it is also indescribable. Language and interpretation often taints a non-linguistic contact. The poem ends with a caveat, urging the reader to “Let be” and “Be it as it was:- / Silence of heat, and solemn poetry.”21 This remonstrance serves to preserve the mystery of art as well as the sensations it evokes. “All art aspires to the condition of music”22 wrote Pater almost twenty years later in The Renaissance, referring to the yearning of the arts for an untainted, pure expression of beauty both in content and form. It is through music that Rossetti explores the possibility of new expressive lyrical forms. In his sonnet for Andrea Mantegna’s Parnassus (1497), titled “A Dance of Nymphs, by Andrea Mantegna; in the Louvre,”23 Rossetti equates the aesthetic experience of music and its role in the production of art: Scarcely, I think; yet it indeed may be The meaning reached him, when this music rang Sharp through his frame, a distinct rapid pang, And he beheld these rocks and that ridg’d sea. But I believe he just leaned passively,

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And felt their hair carried across his face As each nymph passed him; nor gave ear to trace How many feet; nor bent assuredly His eyes from the blind fixedness of thought To see the dancers. It is bitter glad Even unto tears. Its meaning filleth it, A portion of most secret life: to wit:— Each human pulse shall keep the sense it had With all, though the mind’s labour run to nought.

Rossetti situates the reader-viewer in front of the painting but through the eyes of Mantegna the artist. Word play is used to signal inter-art dynamics of the creative process such as “when this music rang / Sharp through his frame” referring to both the human body and the physical encasing of the picture and “nor gave ear to trace / How many feet;” alluding to the dancer’s limbs as well as units of poetic meter. The poem becomes an active manifestation of the process of art, as Spinozzi and Bizzotto suggest: From the very beginning, ekphrasis for Rossetti meant transposing visual imagery into verbal form, but also representing creativity, which necessarily involved powerful interart dynamics. Each ekphrastic sonnet re-enacts, expresses itself as a verbal art, and frames a discourse on poiesis.24

The poem is not just limited to “re-enacting” the painting, but “re-interpreting” it as well. The altered title from Parnassus to “A Dance of Nymphs,” implies that the poet is approaching the work as a particular expressive form of meaning. The version published in The Germ also includes an accompanying note that reads: “[it] is necessary to mention that this picture would appear to have been in the artist’s mind an allegory, which we seek vainly to interpret.”25 Mantegna’s painting is understood to be an exercise on a classic theme on the gods: Mars and Venus stand atop the triangular composition; Apollo sits to the left with his lyre with Hephaestus above him, and to the right stands Mercury with Pegasus. The deities are not mentioned in Rossetti’s sonnet, which focuses instead on the dancing graces in the lower foreground. By focusing on the dance, he is directing the reader to make an analogy where the dance stands in for music. Still, the poet hesitates in creating meaning, stressing doubt in his judgment: “Scarcely I think;” and “But I believe he just leaned passively,” as though his own personal uncertainty consisted of a minor art-historical fact. The reader-viewer assumes the same position of the painter and poet, “seek[ing] vainly to interpret” the essence of the scene. Rossetti calls attention to the breach between artistic intention and subjective interpretation, as though there is no single totalizing approach

86Enrique Olivares towards art. It is this multitudinous perspective of interpretation that determines the final two sonnets based on Ingres’s Roger Delivering Angelica (1819).26 While the poems refer to the same painting, they do not necessarily form part of a whole.27 They are thematically similar, but have the mobility to be read separately or together. The first poem attempts to dramatize the violence of the scene into a moment of contentious struggle between the hero and the beast: A remote sky, prolonged to the sea’s brim: One rock-point standing buffetted alone, Vexed at its base with a foul beast unknown, Hell-spurge of geomaunt and teraphim: A knight, and a winged creature bearing him, Reared at the rock: a woman fettered there, Leaning into the hollow with loose hair And throat let back and heartsick trail of limb. The sky is harsh, and the sea shrewd and salt. Under his lord, the griffin-horse ramps blind With rigid wings and tail. The spear’s lithe stem Thrills in the roaring of those jaws: behind, The evil length of body chafes at fault. She doth not hear nor see--she knows of them.

Unlike the previous paintings (and accompanying poems) depicting contemplative scenes of little to no action, Ingres’s painting demonstrates a high level of physical tension and human drama in debt to the works of Raphael. Rossetti’s selection of the painting comes as a rather odd choice, since in part it goes against the ideals of the Brotherhood, particularly the influence of the group’s namesake in post-Renaissance academic painting.28 Still, Rossetti was most likely attracted to the medieval setting and emotional content (that of ideal love struggling against a pernicious and corrupt world) that resonated most strongly with his Pre-Raphaelite taste. Perhaps the poet saw in the maelstrom of the scene the possibility to explore the different dimensions of an eternal moment. The painting is inspired by a scene from Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando in which Ruggiero (Roger) braves the onslaught of a dragon for Angelica. The octave represents the violence of the scene as a static allegory, using descriptive statements to indicate the objects in view (the knight, the “foul beast unknown,” the sea, the rock and the woman chained to it). The sestet serves to animate the scene, bringing the tension of the maelstrom to its crisis. It should be noted that Rossetti at no point provides the names of the principles, referring rather to their respective roles as knight and woman, transforming the literary context of the painting into an allegorical interpretation.

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If the painting represents a phallic contest between beast and man, the poem is a medieval pastiche of styles and themes. Archaic words such as “geomaunt and teraphim” are alienating to the reader, recalling an age past. Rossetti is not only re-interpreting a visual piece, he is also interpreting the lyrical tradition through a modern mind. Part of this re-interpretation consists of re-imagining how poetic thought is transmitted. The final line of the sonnet “She doth not hear nor see-she knows them” provides a glimpse into the psyche of the young woman, where the intensely visceral action surrounding her is communicated intellectually instead of sensually. The reader-viewer must approach the second sonnet on the painting through the figure of the woman: Clench thine eyes now,—’tis the last instant, girl: Draw in thy senses, set thy knees, and take One breath for all: thy life is keen awake,— Thou may’st not swoon. Was that the scattered whirl Of its foam drenched thee?--or the waves that curl And split, bleak spray wherein thy temples ache?— Or was it his the champion’s blood to flake Thy flesh?—Or thine own blood’s anointing, girl?. … … Now, silence; for the sea’s is such a sound As irks not silence; and except the sea, All is now still. Now the dead thing doth cease To writhe, and drifts. He turns to her: and she Cast from the jaws of Death, remains there, bound, Again a woman in her nakedness.

Unlike the first sonnet, the poetic voice is commanding, urging the “girl” to become aware of the events surrounding her. Her “life is keen awake,” that is, at the cusp of a heightened emotional state. While this contradicts the first sonnet’s final line (that of knowing versus feeling), it only stresses the gap between viewing the painting as a spectator and experiencing the psychological turbulence from within. The intensity of the scene is conveyed through the confusion of foam and roar of the scene. This aesthetic experience becomes so unbearable that she cannot distinguish the knight’s blood from her own: “Or was it his the champion’s blood to flake / Thy flesh?—or thine own blood’s anointing, girl?” The sonnet then moves from a moment of extreme agitation to one of tranquility. The sestet represents the aftermath of the event, an imagined aesthetic space not found in the poem. The stanza break is a prelude to the meditative sextet, drawing attention to language itself, focusing on the change in lyrical mode. Here, the sea has turned calm and the beast is found dead and we are left with the figure of the girl “Again a woman in her nakedness.” Just as the girl is now cognizant of the passing of

88Enrique Olivares the storm, so we too draw back from this sensual moment to be confronted with the artificial and material nature of merely looking at a picture. Art has limitations: it is confined to the possibilities of its particular medium. Poetry and painting use altogether different signs and modes of expressions, but this does not imply that they are isolated from each other. Rossetti’s “Sonnets for Pictures” transforms the act of looking into a whole mise-en-scène, composing a contemplative space for poetry in front of the painting. Consider the poem as a prayer not only as a devotional ritual of art but also as an attempt at mediating between disciplines. His introductory sonnet to the House of Life (“The Sonnet”) would enunciate this attempt at capturing a sense of eternity in a moment: “A Sonnet is a moment’s monument— / Memorial from the soul’s eternity, / To one dead deathless hour.”29 Though the poems speak to and about art, they also refer to an audience indirectly. The reader/viewer is both absent and ubiquitous, the taciturn companion of the poet’s gallery visit. Nonetheless, the poet’s experience is reproduced in word for the reader/ viewer. While visual art might have been the sequence’s origin, the result is to create an emotional and sensual contact with the reader, elucidated as a binding vision of the Pre-Raphaelite’s editorial aim through The Germ. At the end of each issue, the group printed their artistic mission statement of simplified, yet nonetheless sincere, aesthetic aims: With a view to obtain the thoughts of Artists, upon Nature as evolved in Art … this Periodical has been established. Thus, then, it is not open to the conflicting opinions of all who handle the brush and palette, nor is it restricted to actual practitioners; but is intended to enunciate the principles of those who, in the true spirit of Art, enforce a rigid adherence to the simplicity of Nature either in Art or Poetry.30

In Pre-Raphaelite criticism the “Sonnets for Pictures” sequence is often overlooked in favor of Rossetti’s “Hand and Soul” story and over-shadowed by the monolithic House of Life, but the sonnet sequence transcends its role as a product of wanderlust and juvenilia. Its wording and musicality denote a precocious and lyrical mind, but it also demonstrates a profound commitment to participating, transforming and preserving both an artistic and poetic legacy. It is also a cultural object, functioning as an extension of the Brotherhood’s ideology of art, attempting to incorporate their influences through poetry, as well as going from aesthetic theory to praxis. The sequence also presents the germ of Rossetti’s intellectual design for his later experiments with the dialectic of his double work of art as well as his later aestheticism. More importantly, it marks a shift in inter-art relations in Victorian England towards a more sensual imagination, anticipating the aesthetic prose of Pater and Oscar Wilde. Rossetti’s sequence goes beyond painting and chooses to represent

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the act of viewing and engaging art itself. Interpretation, of which both the poet and reader-viewer participates, is phenomenological because not only does it uncover the hermetic content of the arts, but because it defines the interior world. In “Sonnets for Pictures” Rossetti manages to consolidate the intellectual and critical content of an avant-garde with a new and imaginative artistic vision.

Notes 1. W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1994), 156. 2. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Family-Letters (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1895), 133. 3. Rossetti, His Family-Letters, 143. 4. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “Sonnets for Pictures.” The Germ: Thoughts Towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art 4 (1850). The Rossetti Archive includes facsimiles of the original 1850 issue of The Germ. http://www.rossettiarchive.org/docs/ap4. g415.1.4.rad.html#p180. Indicated subsequently as “Sonnets for Pictures.” 5. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Jerome J. McGann (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 322. 6. Stephen Cheeke, Writing for Art: The Aesthetics of Ekphrasis (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), 64. 7. Vilayath Lance. “Rossetti’s ‘For Our Lady of the Rocks’: An Examination of PreRaphaelite Beliefs.” Nines: Nineteenth-century Scholarship Online, accessed April 23, 2014, www.nines.org. 8. Gail Lynn Goldberg, “Rossetti’s Sonnet on ‘A Virgin and Child by Hans Memmeling’: Considering a Counterpart.” Victorian Poetry 24 (1989): 238. 9. The first issue of The Germ sold seventy copies, the second only forty. 10. According to the Rossetti Archive: “So far as this sonnet is concerned, however, while scholars still often see it as an illustration of the left panel of the Hospital of St. John’s altarpiece, it is almost certainly a response to another picture altogether: an outer wing of the Altarpiece of the Baptism of Christ by the Belgian master Gerard David. DGR saw the latter in the museum of the Academy of Bruges, which he also visited in 1849. The painting was commonly attributed to Memling in the nineteenth century. The attribution to David was not made until many years after DGR’s visit to Bruges.” http://www.rossettiarchive.org/docs/41-1849.raw.html. 11. “Songs of the Art Catholic,” Rossetti Archive, accessed July 3, 2015, http://www. rossettiarchive.org/docs/11-1847.raw.html. 12. “Sonnets for Pictures.” 13. Richard L. Stein, The Ritual of Interpretation: The Fine Arts as Literature in Ruskin, Rossetti, and Pater (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 134. 14. Jerome J. McGann, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Game That Must Be Lost (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 78. 15. Elizabeth K. Helsinger, Poetry and the Pre-Raphaelite Arts: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 26. 16. Helsinger, Poetry and the Pre-Raphaelite Arts, 29.

90Enrique Olivares 17. “Sonnets for Pictures.” 18. “Sonnets for Pictures.” 19. It should be noted that Rossetti also plays with the structural form of the poem to imitate the action of the scene. The lines of the final sestet cascade as the water being poured by the woman. 20. Helsinger, Poetry and the Pre-Raphaelite Arts, 411. 21. The modified version of this poem included in Poems (1870) concludes: “Life touching lips with immortality” stressing the ephemeral contact between subject and the eternal. 22. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Collected Poetry and Prose, 83. 23. “Sonnets for Pictures.” 24. Spinozzi Paola and Elisa Bizzotto, The Germ: Origins and Progenies of Pre-Raphaelite Interart Aesthetics (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2012), 172. 25. “Sonnets for Pictures.” 26. Originally seen in the Museé Luxembourg. It hangs now in the Louvre. 27. “Sonnets for Pictures.” 28. Ingres is noted as one of the most important neoclassical painters in French art history. A note on his masters by the artists is unflattering for the PRB: “the great masters which flourished in that century of glorious memory when Raphael set the eternal and incontestable bounds of the sublime in art … I am thus a conservator of good doctrine, and not an innovator” (Condon, 183). 29. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Collected Poetry and Prose, 491. 30. William Michael Rossetti, The Germ: Thoughts Towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art 1 (1850), accessed July 3, 2014, http://www.rossettiarchive.org/docs/ap4. g415.1.1.rad.html#p180.

6. “They that would look on her”: Jane Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and “The Portrait” Daniel Brown

O Lord of all compassionate control, O Love! let this my lady’s picture glow Under my hand to praise her name, and show Even of her inner self the perfect whole: That he who seeks her beauty’s furthest goal, Beyond the light that the sweet glances throw And refluent wave of the sweet smile, may know The very sky and sea-line of her soul. Lo! it is done. Above the long lithe throat The mouth’s mould testifies of voice and kiss, The shadowed eyes remember and foresee. Her face is made her shrine. Let all men note That in all years (O Love, thy gift is this!) They that would look on her must come to me.1

Painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti created during a time that saw the inception and gradual ascendancy of photography as a dominant form of representation. In “Sonnet X: The Portrait” (1869, 1870, 1881), and a dramatic monologue, also titled “The Portrait” (1869), Rossetti describes an artistic practice that attempts to imbue paintings with human memory and emotion, and thus to more fully capture reality than mere photographs. Although the poems do not make explicit reference to photography, recent criticism such as Nancy Armstrong’s Fiction in the Age of Photography (1999), Jennifer Green-Lewis’s Framing the Victorians (1996), and Daniel Novak’s Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (2008), show how this medium’s influence was so pervasive that it set a standard against which all other

92Daniel Brown forms of representation were measured. Moreover, recent articles by Debra M. Mancoff (2001) and Alicia Craig Faxon (1992), demonstrate that Rossetti’s paintings of Jane Morris are still judged by this nineteenth-century standard due to the ways these critics compare the paintings to photographs of Morris. This chapter will begin by outlining the standard photography set for representational practice to show how Rossetti’s works are still being judged largely by this nineteenth-century standard, before demonstrating that Rossetti’s portrait poems anticipate and undermine contemporary criticism that continues to work through this lens. The standard set by photography in the nineteenth century was essentially that of realism. To be sure, the whole issue of whether a work of art is realistic, or even what it means for a work of art to be realistic, is multifaceted and complex, and not necessarily even connected to realism as a formal movement in painting and literature.2 One point that most scholars tend to agree on, however, is that the rise of photography in the nineteenth century played a major role in setting the highly visual, meticulously detailed criteria against which all forms of representation were expected to adhere.3 To appreciate Rossetti as painter and poet, then, we need to first understand the standard that photography set in determining the value of representational practices across a wide range of media. As we will see, in paintings that used Jane Morris as a model, Rossetti often took raw photographic material of her and mediated it into works of art. By adding text in the form of sonnets, introducing allusions to literary figures such as Pandora, and making slight alterations to her appearance, he created works that carried more emotional and narrative meaning than the raw photographs. As a result, his painting/poem works entered into ongoing debates about realism and the real, through which he attempted to both challenge and surpass photography in its ability to capture reality. Many contemporary scholars have argued that nineteenth-century photography not only set a standard for realism, but of the broader standard by which verbal and visual representations have since been measured successful. Nancy Armstrong argues that photographic images “have told us what is real for more than a century now,” and that “[N]ineteenth-century British culture [is] the time when and the place where image and object began to interact according to the rules and procedures commonly called ‘realism.’”4 Similarly, Jennifer Green-Lewis argues that photography contributed to a larger “culture of realism” that struggled with and against the belief that all reality could be reduced to observable phenomena.5 In this “culture of realism,” all works of art were influenced not only by a pervasively empiricist and materialist worldview, but also by a “primary obsession” with “human vision,” and a “preoccupation with subjectivity.”6 It is within this culture, conflicted by the seemingly

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competing truths of inner and outer experience that Rossetti struggled to compete as a commercial painter, and in which he attempted to create works that could capture objective and subjective truth. In fact, Daniel Novak has argued persuasively that photographs were actually considered less real than their mediated products because they couldn’t capture subjective truth.7 In nineteenth-century discourses on photography, Novak argues, “the photographic body acts as a form of abstract linguistic raw material … evacuated of specific meaning, context, or origin.”8 In effect, a work became more real by taking the “raw material” provided by the photograph, cutting it up and then rearranging it into a pastiche that added narrative context and meaning for the viewer.9 In the sonnet quoted at the outset of this chapter, Rossetti’s narrator claims to have achieved this sort of mediation, creating something more real than the unmediated subject with the aid of personified “Love.” The finished “shrine” is Love’s “gift” (line 13), something that could have not been created without the intervention of human emotion, but it is also now the only means by which the artist’s subject can ever be truly known. Indeed, the writings of John Ruskin—one of the century’s leading influences on popular taste and opinion towards art—and Rossetti’s own correspondence show a belief in the inadequacy of photography in comparison to painting. Although Ruskin was one of the earliest advocates of both PreRaphaelitism and photography, in his Lectures on Art, Vol. 20 (1870), he would reverse his initially favorable opinion of the latter: Let me assure, once for all, that photographs supersede no single quality nor use of fine art … and will themselves give you nothing valuable that you do not work for. They supersede no good art, for the definition of art is “Human labour regulated by human design,” and this design, or evidence of active intellect in choice and arrangement, is the essential part of the work; which so long as you cannot perceive, you perceive no art whatsoever.10

While Pre-Raphaelite painters needed to rival the verisimilitude of the photograph, and were sometimes accused of merely painting over photographs,11 they would also have needed to surpass the photographic image in terms of effort, style and ingenuity for their work to be considered art. Ruskin even defended them in an 1853 lecture: The last forgery invented respecting them is that they copy photographs. You observe how completely this last piece of malice defeats all the rest. It admits they are true to nature, though only that it may deprive them of all merit in being so.12

Rossetti himself was open to the use of photography as an aid in painting, but when at one point he did actually did paint over a photograph, he worried

94Daniel Brown about what the discovery of this act might do to his reputation.13 In an 1867 letter he confessed, saying it was “the only instance in which I ever painted on a photograph and will remain the only one; and were the matter unexplained in this instance, misunderstandings might arise as to the nature of other works of mine.”14 Thus, we see that while Pre-Raphaelite artists relied on photography in their work, they considered it inferior to art produced through what they would have believed to be their own human ingenuity and effort, traits we see Rossetti championing in his portrait poems. Because Rossetti believed in the necessary display of an artist’s personal intervention in painting, it might have galled him to find that contemporary art criticism has tended to diminish his artistry to a perceived ability to capture the physical likeness of models as revealed through photographs. Critics have been especially drawn to a series of photographs of Jane Morris, shot in 1865 in the garden of Rossetti’s home in Chelsea by a little-known artist named John Robert Parsons. These photographs were clearly used to aid Rossetti’s memory in the creation of such artworks as Reverie (1868), Mrs. William Morris or The Blue Silk Dress (1868), The Portrait (1869), Pandora (1869) [Plate 6.1], and The Roseleaf (1870).15 Yet, in these cases photographs essentially provided what Novak describes as “raw material,”16 and are thus, I suggest, a poor standard for critical assessment of the paintings. Recent critical responses to Rossetti’s paintings in respect to their resemblance to Morris’s photographic likeness warrant revision, as they betray a reliance on the photographic standard that I will argue Rossetti was attempting to transcend. Art historian Colin Ford, in one example, uses the existence of the “photographic evidence” in an effort to show how closely Rossetti’s seemingly stylized depictions of Morris actually depicted the “real” person.17 Ford places a particular emphasis on Rossetti’s depictions of Morris’s eyes, mouth, and throat, the features we will also see other critics—and Rossetti himself— emphasizing. Ford observes: These extraordinary photographs demonstrate that the statuesque Jane Morris was truly a “stunner” in the flesh, and not just through Rossetti’s transformative imagination. She actually did have the thick neck, strong jaw and hands, fiercely waving hair and defined musculature which, in the paintings, can seem mannered … Jane really could hold the relaxed, loose-limbed poses that—did the photographic evidence not exist—we might think were distorted and elongated by Rossetti’s imagination.18

Ford’s word choice (“was truly,” “actually did,” “really could”) reflects a wonderment that might seem more obviously naïve if we did not generally take it for granted that photographs provide a more direct access to reality than painting—the photographs are here granted the ability not only to show

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Plate 6.1:  Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Pandora, 1869, chalk on paper. Faringdon Collection, Buscot, Oxon, UK/Bridgeman Images.

96Daniel Brown us what Morris looked like, but also what she was personally capable of doing with her body. If we suspect Rossetti of embellishing her appearance to suit his fantasies, the photographs, Ford believes, suggest otherwise. While these observations might defend Rossetti against being a mere fantasist, Ford nonetheless overstates the importance of the “photographic evidence,” missing the point that Rossetti’s mediations were as crucial to his artwork as his faithfulness to superficial appearances. The standard applied by Ford here only appreciates one dimension of Rossetti’s work, validating it for its ability to resemble the photograph, but not—as was more important—for surpassing or transcending the photographic image. While other critics give greater attention to the signs of mediation made evident when comparing the photographs alongside the paintings, these critics tend to see his mediations as falsifications rather than as attempts to depict a fuller, more personal form of truth. Art historian Debra Mancoff suggests: By concentrating on Jane’s most distinctive features—her brooding eye, the lift of her upper lip, the strong line of her jaw, and the length of her neck—Rossetti forged a new standard for his female ideal and transformed Jane’s face into his own icon. But as the photographs reveal, that ideal did not stray very far from the reality.19

Like Ford, Mancoff grants the photographs a more direct access to reality, using them to show how closely Rossetti’s “ideal” matches the real. Also like Ford, she pays particular attention to Morris’s eyes, mouth and throat, noting that such features are what have made Rossetti’s works iconic. Likewise Michael Bartram makes a note of what he sees as the “prettification” of the photographs used for Reverie and The Roseleaf, again focusing on eyes, mouth, and throat: One elongates the neck already remarkable for its length, removes an anxious angularity from the wrists, and expels the disorder in the eye; the other lifts the hair to make room for a perfect make-up-artist’s eyebrow. Sullen lips are reshaped. A final fashion-plate touch is supplied by a graceful yet obviously appended arm and by the sprig which gives the picture its name.20

Although the phrasing here is somewhat curious (“anxious angularity,” “disorder in the eye”), Bartram comes closer than Ford in appreciating the confluence between the “real” Morris, and Rossetti’s rendering of her on canvas, noting, for example, Rossetti’s elongation of a “neck already remarkable for its length.” Rossetti’s process of “prettification”—a misleading choice of words—is also noted by Alicia Faxon, who believes that

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Just as [Rossetti] repainted earlier work to make it better, refined his poetry, and primed his patrons to see his works in the most favorable light, he retouched the supposedly objective negative to enhance its impact and conform to his most optimistic view of it.21

Mediation is once again acknowledged here, but in a way that casts Rossetti as a fantasist—an interpretation that Ford seems to question. Even Mancoff, who acknowledges how closely Rossetti’s “ideal” came to the real, seems to agree with Faxon that his mediations were meant to put his subjects in “the most favorable light” and with the “most optimistic view.”22 Mediation suggests something other than realization for Mancoff, Bartram, and Faxon, and the ideal something other than the real. The tribute paid to Rossetti by these observations is thus somewhat of a backhanded compliment, excusing the obvious signs of mediation because they were after all not that far from the truth, rather than recognizing that the mediations were the principle sign of the handiwork of the individual artist. As in the previous quote from Ruskin, in response to accusations that the Pre-Raphaelites painted over photographs: “It admits they are true to nature, though only that it may deprive them of all merit in being so.”23 To be fair, such critical recognitions are likely a reaction in part against criticism that argued that such apparent distortions of the female form were endemic of broader cultural misogyny. For example, Bram Dijkstra sardonically dismisses Rossetti’s depiction of Morris in The Day-Dream (1880) as one of his “characteristic [and characteristically sexist] large-lipped, droopy-eyed ladies of languorous pallor.”24 Of course, Rossetti’s overwriting the image of his female subject with his own stylistic mediations does take away some part of her agency—even his sister, Christina, noted in her poem, “In an Artist’s Studio” (1856), that Rossetti depicted his subject “Not as she is, but as she fills his dream” (line 14).25 However, judging Rossetti’s paintings only on the grounds of how closely they may or may not have resembled their subjects causes us to miss the ways he attempted to imbue his paintings with an inner life shared by artist and subject. This attempt is what Rossetti describes in his poems on portraiture, to which I shall now turn. The remainder of this essay will examine two of Rossetti’s poems, both titled “The Portrait,” and both with 1869 publication dates. To avoid confusion, I will refer to the sonnet quoted at the start of this chapter as “Sonnet X”—the title it was given in Rossetti’s 1881 edition of The House of Life—and to the dramatic monologue as “The Portrait.” Notes for “Sonnet X” in the online Rossetti Archive indicate that it “forms part of a double work,” but that it is not clearly paired with any specific painting, which “makes it a unique instance of this Rossettian genre.”26 Furthermore, according to the Rossetti Archive, although “No hard evidence connects the sonnet to the famous picture Beata

98Daniel Brown Beatrix [1864] … this connection is commonly made.”27 The Rossetti Archive provides more evidence connecting the sonnet to an 1869 chalk portrait of Jane Morris, which “is said to have been inscribed with lines 4 and 8.”28 However, the Rossetti Archive also notes that Ford Madox Brown claimed “the sonnet ‘was written to accompany Mrs. Morris in a Blue Dress’” and that “[F.G.] Stephens says that the sonnet referred chiefly to Alexa Wilding.”29 “The Portrait,” on the other hand, “hangs just on the edge of being a double work,” its closest pairings being Beata Beatrix, and How They Met Themselves (1851–1860), an illustration Rossetti created to accompany his unfinished and posthumously published short story, “St. Agnes of Intercession” (1850).30 However, both of these poems might well double with any number of paintings Rossetti made of any of his models, as both describe the creation of a portrait in general more than they describe any particular portrait itself. “Sonnet X” is an artist’s narration of the conception and creation of a portrait of his lover. Throughout the octave, the unnamed narrator implores the personification of “Love” for the ability to paint his “lady’s picture” (2) in a way that captures the inner “sky and sea-line of her soul” (5), which lies beyond the surface of “sweet glances” (6) and “sweet smile” (7). At the start of the sestet, the speaker declares the painting completed—“Lo! it is done” (9). Very few details are provided to connect the painting in the poem with any specific painting of Rossetti’s, but those that are provided could easily apply to any of his paintings of women. In particular, reference to the model’s “long lithe throat” (9), “mouth’s mould” (10), and “shadowed eyes” (11) suggest a hallmark of Rossetti’s erotically-charged style that is often used, as we have seen, to accuse him of exaggerating and deforming the appearance of his models. Even the long, full vowels used in these descriptors force a drawn-out, exaggerated reading. That these metonymic features stand in for the subject’s “soul” is a point I will return to, as this use of detail is central to Rossetti’s response to the “culture of realism” described above. Given Rossetti’s consistent emphasis of such features, however, it is not surprising that responses to photographs of Jane Morris invariably make particular note of her neck, mouth, and eyes. The speaker’s final declaration in “Sonnet X,” “They that would look on her must come to me” (14), is thus quite prophetic of Rossetti’s own renderings of models such as Morris, as attempts to use photographs to discern her “true” appearance merely lead us back to Rossetti’s provocative paintings. In fact, the challenge proclaimed at the end of “Sonnet X” that the artist’s model can only be known by way of the artist seems implicit to Rossetti’s paintings, as if daring the viewer through apparent exaggeration of physical forms to question the veracity of his representations, or to discover more accurate depictions. The boast, of course, is at least partly sexual—the eroticized

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painting is a claim on the model as an object of desire. However, the boast is also one of technical superiority, and a challenge to any artist—or, given the contemporary rise of photography, machine—to represent the model with greater skill and accuracy.31 The fact that photographs have since been used to test the accuracy of Rossetti’s paintings, with scholars surprised to see how closely he came to matching the photographs, suggests a reversal of what the mid-Victorian artist would have hoped for—using the photographs as final arbiter would have been like using a cheap copy to judge the merit of the original. For, however much photography is trusted now, we have seen how it was less regarded in the mid-nineteenth century, and the representation done by human hands was considered more faithful to lived reality. The triumph expressed at the end of “Sonnet X” thus indicates success at something beyond photographic accuracy. The artist’s portrait, such as the 1869 chalk drawing of Morris to which a fragment of “Sonnet X” was initially appended, captures the likeness of his mistress, the iconic mouth, throat and eyes by which Rossetti’s own works have come to be known, but it also captures the “sky and sea-line of her soul” (8). Herein lies the influence of Green-Lewis’s “culture of realism,”32 in which representational practice was expected to both languish lovingly on surface details, but simultaneously explore the vast, unmeasurable horizon of unseen forces—personality, memory, emotion, and so on—in a way that would have been more real to its audiences than a religiously-conceived “soul.” And even though “Sonnet X” breaks the subject down to only a few superficial details, these details nonetheless carry on lives of their own. While Rossetti’s word choices of “enthroning” (9) and “mould” (10) draw attention to the constructed, artificial nature of the subject’s respective throat and mouth, the mouth still “testifies of voice and kiss” (11), and the “shadowed eyes remember and foresee” (12). This is a not a lifeless photograph “evacuated of specific meaning, context, or origin,”33 as Novak puts it, but a speaking and remembering work of art. “The Portrait” is also an artist’s narration on the conception and creation of the portrait of his lover, although as an extended dramatic monologue. In the first stanza, the artist begins his contemplation of a finished portrait: This is her picture as she was: It seems a thing to wonder on, As though mine image in the glass Should tarry when myself am gone I gaze until she seems to stir,— Until mine eyes almost aver That now, even now, the sweet lips part To breathe the words of the sweet heart:— And yet the earth is over her. (1–9)

100Daniel Brown Already we see a conflation of the artist and his subject, as he imagines the painting as an object that will outlive both of them—the image will “tarry” when he is “gone” (4) and she is already apparently deceased (9). The phrase “mine image in the glass” (3) is ambiguous—the artist makes an analogy between seeing the likeness of his model captured in painting and his own image reflected in a mirror, but that he specifically refers to his own image and not hers suggests that the portrait is as much an image of himself as it is of the model. Yet, looking at it causes her “to stir” (5) and to animate in the same way as the finished portrait in “Sonnet X”: her “sweet lips” part, revealing “the words of the sweet heart” (7–8). Outer and inner worlds are thus both revealed simultaneously in a work that could be a photographic replica—i.e. a “glass” (3) or mirror—but that ultimately aims to capture something deeper. The portrait not only captures her inner self, but, as the narrator continues, he reveals his intentions that it capture his own inner self as it was entwined with hers. Yet, “The Portrait” has a much less triumphant tone than “Sonnet X,” and much of it suggests the apparent futility of trying to capture the personal and subjective in a painting—at least in the way intended by the artist. In the second stanza, the artist laments of the portrait that, “only this, of love’s whole prize, / Remains; save what in mournful guise / Takes counsel with my soul alone,” (13–15). He is not, as in “Sonnet X,” thanking the personification of “Love” (13) for the “gift” (13) of a “shrine” (12) to his lover—“love” here is in a sad lower case, and the “prize” is an inadequate compensation for a memory that will live and die with the artist. Nonetheless, he says—just as the artist in “Sonnet X”—that “In painting her, I shrined her face” (19), and then describes the dim, woodland setting in which he placed her.34 This leads to reflections on the memories that inspired him to create the portrait in the first place, yet even in the poem these memories are fragmentary, like photographic snapshots. Use of imagery throughout “The Portrait” is vivid, yet fleeting, a few crisp details abruptly cut together to produce a montage-like effect. In the following lines, the artist recalls walking with his lover through a wooded area and stopping by a spring, where they shared an unspoken desire for each other that was interrupted before consummation: But when that hour my soul won strength For words whose silence wastes and kills, Dull raindrops smote us, and at length Thundered the heat within the hills. That eve I spoke those words again Beside the pelted window-pane; And there she hearkened what I said, With under-glances that surveyed

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The empty pastures blind with rain. Next day the memories of these things, Like leaves through which a bird has flown, Still vibrated with Love’s warm wings; Till I must make them all my own And paint this picture. (46–59)

In these lines, the artist jumps quickly between three different time frames, each marked only by fragmentary images. The pair stand together by the spring, missing their moment, and after a jump to the next stanza we see the artist clumsily attempt to recreate the moment again in the evening. What comes of this attempt remains unstated—the remaining half of the stanza has to do with the artist once again attempting to recreate a moment and its associated memories by painting a picture. This effect of cutting together details to create a composite whole suggests photography’s influence on Rossetti’s poetry as well as on his painting, as Novak argues photographic realism relied on the piecing together of raw, abstract data into a recognizable narrative.35 Yet, in “The Portrait” Rossetti’s narrator leaves out more detail than we might need to fully understand what occurred between the artist and his model. In fact, much of “The Portrait” seems to question the efficacy of the artist’s project, driving home the artificial nature of his attempts to preserve the emotions associated with his lover. In stanza six, he describes staging his model, much as Rossetti would have done for the Parsons photographs of Jane Morris, “among the plants in bloom / At windows of a summer room, / To feign the shadow of the trees” (61–63). Reflecting on the intensity of the emotions felt when painting his model, even under staged circumstances, he abruptly returns to a realization that she is now dead and their time together lost in the past. Brought back to the present, the artist revisits the wooded spring where he had walked with his lover, and reflects on his own eventual death. In the last stanza, he returns to the portrait: Here with her face doth memory sit Meanwhile, and wait the day’s decline, Till other eyes shall look from it, Eyes of the spirit’s Palestine, Even than the old gaze tenderer: While hopes and aims long lost with her Stand round her image side by side, Like tombs of pilgrims that have died About the Holy Sepulchre. (100–108)

The painting, imbued with inner life by way of the artist retains memory as an animated object—the “shrine” that depicts inner and outer truths about its

102Daniel Brown subject—but also serves as a repository for his own memories. Yet, when he dies, the painting itself will literally change, and “other eyes shall look from it” (102). The subject will continue to live on, but as something other than what the artist intended. While the speaker of “Sonnet X” believes that future viewers of his painting will have no choice but to see his subject through his own interventions, here the artist realizes that the meaning of those interventions will be lost—present, but ghostlike and invisible—to future audiences. Indeed, given that “Sonnet X” comes early in the House of Life sequence, the narrator here may be presented intentionally as naïve in his assumptions regarding the painted image. If Rossetti attempted to surpass the power of photography in his portraits, his poems suggest that this would not only be a partial victory, but that this partial success was the point. The signs of mediation that represented the artist’s subjective relationship with his model remain, but in ways that alienate and puzzle his audiences. Apparent distortions of Morris’s form are troubling, causing some to dismiss Rossetti as a fantasist, or worse, a misogynist. Turning to the “photographic evidence,”36 as Ford calls it, only confuses matters because it reinforces the myth that photographs provided unmediated access to direct reality. Rossetti seemed to have anticipated the problems this myth would cause—in “The Portrait,” the narrator’s can only remember past events in brief, photographic moments that, while vivid, are fleeting and enigmatic. His attempts to fix memory through portraiture—much as we might still take a photograph to hold on to a cherished memory—are doomed to failure. Yet, his failure to capture the subjective in a work of visual art only reiterates the inadequacy of photography to provide direct access to its subjects. If photography offers the lie of an objectively knowable reality, Rossetti’s portraits offer the truth of a reality that is varied, enigmatic, and ultimately unknowable through strictly objective means.

Notes 1. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “Sonnet X: The Portrait,” Rossetti Archive, accessed February 25, 2017, http://www.rossettiarchive.org/docs/1-1868.s212.raw.html. All references to this poem are taken from this source. Line numbers indicated in parentheses. 2. Attempts to define realism as a movement prove difficult, with results that have always been controversial. In its narrowest sense, Realism applies strictly to a select group of French, avant-garde and essentially materialist painters and writers: Courbet, Manet, Flaubert, Zola, etc. See Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner, Romanticism and Realism: The Mythology of Nineteenth-Century Art (New York: Viking, 1984), 139. Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1957), is generally considered the seminal work to define realism in English literature, but it is not without its critics. Another important work on realism in English literature is George

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Levine’s The Realistic Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), which responds to criticisms that the form was overly simplistic and constraining. For realism in (primarily French) painting, Linda Nochlin’s Realism (London: Penguin, 1971) is generally considered the seminal work. 3. The impact of photography and other new visual technologies on literature and painting in the nineteenth century has been a popular topic among scholars: in addition to those cited in this chapter, other notable works include Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991); Lindsay Smith, Victorian Photography, Painting and Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Kate Flint, The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Chris Otter, The Victorian Eye (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 4. Nancy Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 3–4. 5. Jennifer Green-Lewis, Framing the Victorians: Photography and the Culture of Realism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 20. 6. Green-Lewis, Framing the Victorians, 34. 7. Daniel Novak, Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 4. 8. Novak, Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 5. 9. Novak, Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 5–8. 10. Quoted in Quentin Bajac, Discoveries: The Invention of Photography (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002), 146–147. 11. See Michael Bartram, The Pre-Raphaelite Camera: Aspects of Victorian Photography (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1985), 23; Jeremy Maas, Victorian Painters (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1969), 192–193. 12. Maas, Victorian Painters, 192. 13. Bartram, The Pre-Raphaelite Camera, 23; Maas, Victorian Painters, 197. 14. Ibid. 15. Bartram, The Pre-Raphaelite Camera, 135; Alicia Craig Faxon, “D.G. Rossetti’s Use of Photography.” History of Photography 16.3 (1992): 257; Colin Ford, “A PreRaphaelite Partnership: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Robert Parsons,” The Burlington Magazine, May 2004, 313; Maas, Victorian Painters, 197; Debra M. Mancoff, “Seeing Mrs. Morris. Photographs of Jane Morris from the Collection of Dante Gabriel Rossetti.” The Princeton University Library Chronicle 62.3 (2001): 385, 395–397. 16. Novak, Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 5. 17. Ford, “A Pre-Raphaelite Partnership,” 317. 18. Ibid. 19. Mancoff, “Seeing Mrs. Morris,” 396. 20. Bartram, The Pre-Raphaelite Camera, 135. 21. Faxon, “D. G. Rossetti’s Use of Photography,” 26. 22. Ibid. 23. Maas, Victorian Painters, 192. 24. Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 94. 25. Christina Rossetti, “In an Artist’s Studio,” Victorian Poetry Network, accessed February 25, 2017, http://web.uvic.ca/~vicpoet/2011/10/poem-of-the-month-christina-rossettisin-an-artists-studio/. 26. Rossetti, “Sonnet X.”

104Daniel Brown 27. 28. 29. 30.

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “The Portrait,” Rossetti Archive, accessed February 25, 2017. All references to this poem are taken from this source. Line numbers indicated in parentheses. http://www.rossettiarchive.org/docs/50-1869.raw.html. 31. Readers of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Between Men (1985) will be familiar with the model of triangular desire, in which the rivalry between two men is more important than the female object they supposedly fight over. 32. Green-Lewis, Framing the Victorians, 20. 33. Novak, Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 5. 34. According to the notes for this poem on the Rossetti Archive, “Stanza 3 (which formed part of the first state of the exhumed text) strongly suggests that DGR associated the poem with two of his own pictures: the earliest painted version of Beata Beatrix, which DGR had been working on well before his wife’s death in 1862; and How They Met Themselves, DGR’s “bogie” picture which so preoccupied him around 1861 (see Virginia Surtees, A Catalogue Raisonneé I, 74).” 35. Novak, Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 5. 36. Ford, “A Pre-Raphaelite Partnership,” 317.

Modernity’s Kaleidoscopic Views

7. Poetic Narrative in William Morris’s and Edward BurneJones’s Pygmalion Project Amelia Yeates

A man of Cyprus, a sculptor named Pygmalion, made an image of a woman, fairer than any that had yet been seen, and in the end came to love his own handiwork as though it had been alive; wherefore, praying to Venus for help, he obtained his end, for she made the image alive indeed, and a woman, and Pygmalion wedded her.1

During the 1860s William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones worked closely together on the collaborative project of The Earthly Paradise (1868–70), a lengthy poem by Morris in the vein of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The poem was intended to be illustrated throughout with designs by Burne-Jones, although in the end was published with only a frontispiece.2 By this time though the artist had undertaken many illustrations for the individual poems that make up the narrative, including several for “Pygmalion and the Image,” the classical story of the Cypriot sculptor who falls in love with his own creation, re-told in The Earthly Paradise.3 These designs would form the basis for two sets of finished paintings (1868–70 and 1875–78). The first set was a commission for Euphrosyne Cassavetti, the wife of an Anglo-Greek merchant, Demetrios Cassavetti, living in London, and mother of Maria Zambaco,4 whilst the second set was exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1879.5 Although the Pygmalion paintings are referred to frequently in accounts of Burne-Jones’s work, they have rarely received any sustained critical attention. When the works are discussed, it is often through a biographical lens, critics viewing the paintings as an expression of Burne-Jones’s feelings for the artist Maria Zambaco, with whom he had an affair at the time the first set of paintings was being produced. Going beyond a biographical model, this chapter

108Amelia Yeates explores the relationship between Pygmalion and the Image and the related Morris poem, arguing for a textual-visual relationship which has yet to receive the attention it deserves. Thus this chapter seeks to elide the frequent identification of Burne-Jones with the mythical figure of Pygmalion, and instead locate his works within more complex debates concerning the shared exploration of desire and romantic love by Burne-Jones and Morris. Challenging dominant readings of Pygmalion and the Image as a reflection of the Burne-Jones— Zambaco relationship, I closely examine visual aspects of the paintings, for example the transformation motif and the depicted relationship between Pygmalion and Galatea, to argue that the key context for the series is not Burne-Jones’s romantic life but other representations of Pygmalion, especially Morris’s poem. Within this inter-textual, rather than biographical, framework, I consider the degree to which both Morris and Burne-Jones engaged with the Ovidian version of the Pygmalion story, a textual archetype which is surprisingly neglected in discussions of both their treatments of the tale. The essay therefore considers Morris’s and Burne-Jones’s engagement with the Pygmalion myth as a collaborative project (resulting in one lengthy poem, over forty-five drawings and two sets of paintings), rather than isolating Burne-Jones’s paintings as expressions of personal romantic desires, biographical readings being often both unpersuasive and reductive. The essay thus seeks to identify an alternative interpretative framework for Morris’s and Burne-Jones’s project, as well as explore its engagement with textual traditions of Pygmalion, and with other contemporary visual and literary representations of Pygmalion. Morris’s “Pygmalion and the Image” is one of the twenty-four poems which make up The Earthly Paradise. The poem borrows from Ovid, whose retelling of the Pygmalion story in Book 10 of the Metamorphoses is the earliest extant written version of the tale.6 Burne-Jones’s Pygmalion and the Image series has its basis in the illustrations undertaken for Morris’s poem. The first painting of the series, The Heart Desires,7 pictures the sculptor, deep in thought as two local women pass the studio, and the Three Graces appear in the background. The second painting, The Hand Refrains [Plate 7.1], shows Pygmalion contemplative, having sculpted his own vision of perfection. In the third scene, The Godhead Fires, Venus visits the artist’s studio when Pygmalion is away praying and brings the statue to life.8 Pygmalion returns in the fourth image, The Soul Attains, to discover the animated statue and to claim her as his love.9 The composition of the later set is mostly unchanged from the first, the main difference being an increase in size and different use of coloring, in keeping with the lightening of Burne-Jones’s palette in the 1870s. Maria Zambaco modelled for both the Galatea and Venus figures, as surviving sketches demonstrate.

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Plate 7.1:  Edward Burne-Jones, Pygmalion and the Image II. The Hand Refrains, oil on canvas, 1868–69. Photo ©Birmingham Museums Trust.

110Amelia Yeates

“The Hand Refrains” Pygmalion was famed at various historical points for being an artist-lover and was typically represented as heroic. By the medieval period his name was frequently cited alongside those of other great artists such as Apelles and Zeuxis.10 In the nineteenth century Pygmalion was still seen as an amorous character, The Edinburgh Review referring to him as “the Cyprian lover.”11 In John Tenniel’s Pygmalion and the Image (1878),12 the vast sculpted head in the studio is that of Zeus—one of the most powerful gods in Greek mytho­ logy.13 The presence of Zeus, who took many lovers, both mortal and immortal, can be seen to reinforce Pygmalion’s reputation as a classical heroic lover who transcends boundaries in his love for Galatea, a sculpted body. As already identified, the primary interpretative framework for Pygmalion and the Image has been a biographical one, prompted by the fact that Burne-Jones at some point became romantically involved with Maria Zambaco, who modelled for the first set of paintings.14 Biographical accounts conflate Burne-Jones’s and Zambaco’s relationship with the Pygmalion narrative, and rely on a connection between artistic activity and love-making, the same connection underlying the Pygmalion story. In fact, Zambaco herself was a sculptor, but as this role disrupts the Burne-Jones—Pygmalion / Zambaco—Galatea identification, little is made of it in accounts of the paintings, and Zambaco is instead cast as Burne-Jones’s muse. Richard Jenkyns sees Galatea as a personal, erotic expression of Burne-Jones’s feelings for Zambaco. Galatea, for Jenkyns, is a “smoothed” Maria.15 Similarly, Stephen Kern claims that Burne-Jones “projected his frustration [at the affair] into this [the Pygmalion] myth.”16 The 1993 Sotheby’s sales catalogue entry for the first set of Pygmalion paintings likens Burne-Jones to “the legendary Pygmalion” in “submitting to his own passion.”17 Burne-Jones is portrayed as the great artist-lover, struggling, like Pygmalion, with the forces of female beauty in “his own painful predicament.”18 Liana de Girolami Cheney’s recent study of Burne-Jones’s mythological paintings makes the common biographical elision of Burne-Jones and the classical sculptor in its subtitle: The Pygmalion of the Pre-Raphaelite Painters. The story of Pygmalion may have been a resonant one for Burne-Jones at the time of his affair with Zambaco but there is every possibility that Burne-Jones had already worked out the designs for his Earthly Paradise illustrations before he had met Zambaco, in which case the works were not biographical in origin even if they received a biographical inflection as they developed.19 The characteristics of Burne-Jones in the narrations cited above—(male) artist and lover—are also the distinguishing traits of Pygmalion, allowing a

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biographical slippage to occur as though Burne-Jones and Pygmalion were simply interchangeable characters. However, I suggest that the artist-lover is the very model which Burne-Jones seeks to undermine in Pygmalion and the Image. Kern, despite his biographical speculations, recognises an ambiguity in Burne-Jones’s depiction of the usually heroic figure of Pygmalion, claiming the paintings “are not those of the male artist in command over his nude creation, but a mixture of suffering and uncertainty, a groping for reciprocal love and visual recognition.”20 This lack of “command” is precisely what makes Pygmalion and the Image different to other visual representations of the sculptor. Robert Upstone has also briefly referred to the problematic role of desire in Pygmalion and the Image. He suggests that in The Hand Refrains Pygmalion, although admiring of his creation, appears to be “disturbed about the feelings stirred in him.”21 This disturbance on the part of Pygmalion deserves further consideration as it seems to be the most salient quality of the image, if not of the whole series. In The Hand Refrains, Pygmalion’s gaze is distant and remote and he seems somewhat nervous of his creation; his arm on the side facing Galatea is raised and the other hand leans on the ledge as his body is tilted slightly away from her. His head slightly to one side, Pygmalion treads tentatively on the floor and adopts a somewhat defensive pose. Rather than excited at the prospect of his ideal sculpture, it seems Pygmalion is troubled by, or even suspicious of, Galatea. The Builder reviewer appeared to recognize this awkward pose: “the sculptor stands apart from and almost shrinking from his work.”22 I propose that this treatment of Pygmalion is due to Burne-Jones’s ambivalence about a story of desire for a statue and the trope of the artist-lover upon which it relies, an ambivalence which is further evident if we consider Burne-Jones’s distance from Ovid’s treatment of Pygmalion. Ovid depicts Pygmalion as a virile and libidinous figure, described in conventionally masculine terms, using the metaphor of fire as a signifier of the phallus and of artistic creativity. Ovid’s Pygmalion frequently touches his sculpture and gives her “burning” kisses (24).23 “Fired” with the thought of the ivory which he imagines to be skin (23), he touches her breasts (25) and explores her body so enthusiastically that “His hands had made a dint” (32) on the statue. Pygmalion even makes a bed for the statue, resting her head on a “plumy pillow” (56). Similarly, the early Christian writer Arnobius of Sicca has his Pygmalion “as if it were his wife … lift up the divinity to the couch.”24 As Jane M. Miller notes, “[D]espite his absence from the company of women, [Ovid’s] Pygmalion proves to be an accomplished lover,” flattering his statue with jewels and gifts.25 Morris’s poem in many ways represents male desire in much the same way as Ovid’s and contains several descriptions of a libido-driven Pygmalion.

112Amelia Yeates At first Pygmalion is not “made glad” (10) by “any damsel” and the local women in particular were to him “an accursed race” (12).26 After having created Galatea, however, Pygmalion grows desirous for her. His desire, like that of Ovid’s Pygmalion, takes on the qualities of fire: it “’gan to flame” (130) and continues to grow until Pygmalion is “panting, thinking of nought else” (132), his desire an “ever-burning, unconsuming fire” (181–82). Like Ovid’s Pygmalion, Morris’s sculptor engages in sexual play with his statue, asking men from the street to carry her to his bed chamber where he decorates her with jewels. Both Ovid and Morris, therefore, represent Pygmalion as libidinous and virile through phallic and flame-like imagery, and Pygmalion’s treatment of Galatea as a sexual object. There are crucial differences, however, between how the two poets treat desire, differences which may help us to better understand Burne-Jones’s representation of the artist in Pygmalion and the Image. Although Morris relies on the same signifiers of masculinity as Ovid, these co-exist with a degree of reticence about Pygmalion’s desire for Galatea. Desire in Morris’s early poetry, as analysed in several discussions, is rarely fulfilled and often futile.27 Joshua argues that Morris represents Pygmalion’s obsessive love for the statue as foolish whilst love for the living Galatea is expressed in more positive and rewarding terms.28 Miller reads similarly, claiming that “Morris is clear that art, no matter how perfect, cannot replace real life; the statue cannot replace a living girl as an object of love.”29 In contrast, Amanda Hodgson argues that Morris portrays Galatea as preferable in her sculptural form as she is immortal.30 Critics cannot quite agree, therefore, on whether Morris’s Pygmalion prefers his statue or the living Galatea. Certainly there are several moments in “Pygmalion and the Image” where the sculptor’s desire for his statue is a source of disquiet. Whilst Ovid’s Pygmalion has “ardent eyes” and a “beating breast” (327) at the thought of Galatea coming to life, the same thought has a rather more draining effect on Morris’s Pygmalion: “In turn great pallor on his face did fall” (251). In this respect Morris’s Pygmalion is very similar to W. H. Mallock’s sculptor in his poem “Pygmalion to his Statue, Become his Wife” (1869), where Galatea is undesirable once she has come to life, and the sculptor feels “No flush of silly shame / But pallor only” (9–10).31 Although Morris’s “Pygmalion and the Image” features a happy ending, therefore, a close reading of the poem reveals themes of foreboding and uncertainty, which are echoed in Burne-Jones’s paintings. My reading of the hesitation and ambivalence with which Morris and Burne-Jones approach the Pygmalion story is substantiated when considering the position of “Pygmalion and the Image” within the narrative of The Earthly Paradise. The tales comprising the overall narrative are told by a

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group of “Wanderers” who have fled Norway to escape The Black Death. The poems are arranged in pairs, one classical and one medieval, each pair assigned to a particular month of the year. “Pygmalion and the Image” is the classical tale told in August, the introductory poem for this month echoing many of the themes of the Pygmalion poem. August is introduced as a burning, fiery month, with the pleasures of summer still lingering. The Wanderers tell of human nature’s tendency to desire more, however, perhaps with direct reference to the story of Pygmalion: Ah, love! such happy days, such days as these, Must we still waste them, craving for the best, Like lovers o’er the painted images. (15–17)

August is a time which promises “fulfillment of the year’s desire” (1), when the harvest is ready for reaping and fruit is “odorous” and about to fall (31). Florence Boos suggests that the August poem celebrates the “fullness of harvest.”32 However, fulfillment is only a promise and the threat of decay looms large over the plenitude, making the tone of the poem one of lamentation rather than celebration. The tall wheat grows “heavy-headed, dreading its decay” (3) and the elm-trees grow blacker by the day (24). The apple trees are weighed down with the burden of their fruit and the gardens are “grown somewhat outworn” (27). The fruit and crops remain at their best for only a short time, as transient as Galatea’s perfection or The Wanderers’ youth. August, therefore, represents a sensuous time of sweet and heavy odors and ripe fruit ready for the picking, but with the onset of decay imminent. Framed within the August narrative of waning pleasures and the larger Earthly Paradise narrative of the irretrievability of youth and the elusiveness of satisfaction, “Pygmalion and the Image” is invested with a sense of pathos and, although featuring a happy ending, is not straightforwardly celebratory. The tone of the poem framing Morris’s “Pygmalion and the Image” might explain the hesitation Burne-Jones conveys in The Hand Refrains, where fulfilment is deferred or non-existent. As Jane M. Miller suggests: Although Burne-Jones calls the final picture in his series “The Soul Attains,” we must not assume that he found in the story a satisfactory answer to his desire for constant beauty in his life … Burne-Jones was obsessed with the idea of (young female) beauty and would surely have himself considered the problem of the statue’s mortality; once she is vivified her beauty will inevitably fade with age.33

These are exactly the issues with which Morris is concerned in The Earthly Paradise. In fact, Frederick Kirchhoff suggests the month poems are illustrative in their function, “verbal equivalents to the Burne-Jones drawings

114Amelia Yeates that Morris had originally planned to include in the printed volume.”34 The August poem is therefore a crucial frame for Morris’s re-telling of the Pygmalion story and consequently Burne-Jones’s illustrations and paintings. A reading of desire as reticent and ambiguous in Burne-Jones’s Pygmalion and the Image can be further supported by turning to one of the most detailed contemporary accounts of the paintings, appearing in the Athenaeum in 1879 and dealing, in particular, with the issue of desire.35 Of The Heart Desires, the author writes that Pygmalion’s eyes are “fixed in thought and hardly yet fully stirred by passion.”36 The use of the word “yet” when referring to the arousal of Pygmalion’s passion anticipates the sequence of events in the Ovidian Pygmalion narrative, but arguably this anticipated passion never fully appears in the paintings, a fact the Athenaeum critic seems to implicitly observe. The reviewer goes on to suggest, “There is more of the studious force than of amorous fire in his look … The heart of the sculptor desires, but it has not concentrated itself.”37 It is significant here that instead of the “amorous fire” the reviewer expects to find is a “studious force,” evidence of study rather than of passion, the artist a student or worker rather than lover. The phrase “not concentrated itself” is also telling. David Freedberg suggests that “there is a cognitive relation between looking and enlivening; and between looking hard, not turning away, and enjoying on the one hand, and possession and arousal on the other.”38 In the context of this relationship between the gaze and desire, Pygmalion’s failure to look directly at Galatea in either The Hand Refrains or The Soul Attains shows his lack of erotic mastery of her. Of the final painting in the series, The Soul Attains, the Athenaeum reviewer observes, “There is speculation now in her [Galatea’s] eyes, hardly yet moved by passion.”39 This is almost identical to the description of Pygmalion’s eyes—“hardly yet fully stirred by passion”—the anticipated passion of this dramatic love story clearly not palpable for the reviewer. This contemporary description of the paintings suggests a more persuasive reading than the various later accounts, which try to map Burne-Jones’s desire onto the paintings, a projection which considers the pre-existing narrative of the Pygmalion story but not the visual specificities of Burne-Jones’s series. Jenkyns claims that in Pygmalion and the Image, “[T]he passivity and mamoreality of Pygmalion’s statue are in themselves an incitement to desire.”40 However, arguably these qualities lend a kind of sterility to the works, rather than act as an incitement of passion. Similarly, Rebecca Virag claims that in BurneJones’s series, Pygmalion “desires the hard passionless statue to become soft and womanly, to revert back to nature in order that he may gain access, may penetrate and dominate, consummating his desire.”41 However, there is little in the paintings to speak of penetration and domination, tropes borrowed

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from Ovid’s tale; rather the title The Hand Refrains, and Pygmalion’s stance, speak of restraint and reticence and, as Lene Østermark-Johansen notes, the series marks a “chaste” contrast to Ovid’s tale.42

“The Godhead Fires” Burne-Jones’s ambivalence about both the artist as lover and the suitability of the transformed Galatea as a romantic companion is also played out in the representation of Galatea’s transformation, the central motif in the Pygmalion story. Most visual treatments of the story focus on the climactic moment of Galatea coming to life in front of a stunned Pygmalion, as for example in versions by Ernest Normand, William Bell Scott and John Tenniel. However, there is a key narrative difference between these paintings and Burne-Jones’s series: Burne-Jones removes the sculptor from the transformation scene. In Ovid’s verse, after Pygmalion has returned from praying to Venus, Galatea comes to life under his touch in a highly erotic way. In Ernest Normand’s Pygmalion and Galatea (1886),43 the sculpture is in the process of coming to life in the presence of Pygmalion, as he watches and touches his head in disbelief. In Scott’s etching, Pygmalion (1875),44 for his sonnet of the same name, Galatea comes to life as Pygmalion kneels at her feet. Similarly, in Tenniel’s Pygmalion and the Image, an energetic Pygmalion flings his arms around a transforming Galatea, whose upper body is bathed in sunlight and warmth as the metamorphosis takes place. In Burne-Jones’s The Soul Attains, however, Pygmalion returns to find Galatea already alive, a process which has started in The Godhead Fires where Venus breathes life into the statue, as her real hair, eyes and skin testify. This narrative corresponds with Morris’s poem where Pygmalion returns from praying to find Galatea already transformed. The removal of Pygmalion from the moment of physical transformation is a crucial aspect of Morris’s and Burne-Jones’s Pygmalion depictions, for in most narratives Pygmalion’s discovery that Galatea has come to life is cause for wonder, amazement and adoration, and is usually the most dramatic part of the narrative. In Ovid’s verse the moment of transformation in Pygmalion’s presence is replete with sensational and erotic overtones as the marble miraculously softens under his exploratory touch as the pair lie in Pygmalion’s bed. The transformation takes place over twenty-one lines of the one hundred-and-one line verse, therefore taking up a fifth of the poem, and is arguably the most exciting part of the tale. Unlike Morris, other Victorian poets emulate Ovid’s sensational transformation of Galatea in Pygmalion’s presence. In Robert Buchanan’s “Pygmalion the Sculptor” (1863) the transformation is erotic as Galatea’s eyelids grow “moist and warm” (281) and her

116Amelia Yeates hair falls like “yellow leaves around a lily’s bud” (260–61).45 In his rapturous account of Watts’s The Wife of Pygmalion, Swinburne enjoys the eroticism of Galatea’s transformation: “her curving ripples of hair seem just warm from … the breath of the goddess.”46 Removing Pygmalion from the transformation, as do Morris and Burne-Jones, therefore considerably affects the erotic tenor of the scene. This was a particularly important strategy for Burne-Jones. In a discussion of narrativity in the artist’s Love Among the Ruins, Colin Cruise argues that “[O]ne of the expectations of narrative painting—both of history and genre painting—is to suggest a movement of people, in events, through space and time. This end was rejected by Burne-Jones or was perhaps simply unobtainable by him. A melancholic stasis was his achievement.”47 Such stasis is evident in the Pygmalion series, which is divested of the drama of Ovid’s narration. However, despite the omission of the dramatic transformation scheme, Burne-Jones’s contemporaries admired the narrativity of Pygmalion and the Image. The Edinburgh Review claimed that in the series “the story and more than the story is told. They are thought out with an unstrained and unburdened simplicity, directness, and fullness which carries the painter’s art of narration to its highest limit.”48 We know that Burne-Jones had experimented with treating the discovery of Galatea in a more dramatic manner than that used in the paintings, even if he always intended to depict her already transformed. Whereas the artist made one, or occasionally two attempts at most of his Pygmalion illustrations for The Earthly Paradise, there are six sketches of Pygmalion’s discovery of Galatea,49 the most dramatic depicting a joyous Pygmalion rushes to embrace a running Galatea, whose hair and gown flow behind her.50 As this is the only part of the Pygmalion sequence that Burne-Jones worked out so many times, it was clearly of interest to him. In adhering to the narrative of Morris’s poem, Burne-Jones could not show Galatea coming to life in Pygmalion’s presence and what we see in the drawings is therefore his perhaps experimenting with other ways to express the drama of the story. Should the statue be moving or still? In which room should it be? And should it be draped or naked? The rather uncomfortable looking Galatea in Tenniel’s version shows the difficulty of embracing a naked transforming body, which is avoided in The Soul Attains as Burne-Jones’s sculptor chivalrously takes Galatea’s hand, rather than attempt to embrace her naked newly transformed body. In choosing to depict Galatea naked, rather than draped, Burne-Jones represents not only an ideal and elevated body, but also a restrained artist who, on discovering the transformation of his creation, does not embrace her but kneels before her, as the protagonist in Burne-Jones’s painting King Cophetua (1884) sits, reverentially at the feet of his beggar maid. Such a reading is especially fitting

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given the influence of medieval manuscripts on Burne-Jones and, specifically, Pygmalion and the Image, which, as I will now discuss, is inspired more by the tradition of medieval courtly love than the lascivious writings of Ovid. In illustrating the story of Pygmalion finding, rather than witnessing, a transformed Galatea, Burne-Jones may have had in mind illustrations he had seen for the Roman de la Rose, first written in the thirteenth century by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun and admired by Morris and Burne-Jones. The text contains a re-telling of the Pygmalion story and a version entered the Bodleian in 1834.51 Given their admiration for the medieval illuminated manuscripts at the Bodleian,52 it is possible they saw this particular manuscript, especially as Burne-Jones had been so enthused by the British Library’s Harley manuscript of the Roman de la Rose that he took some friends to see the work.53 Burne-Jones also produced several of his own Roman de la Rose designs, culminating in finished paintings such as Love Leading the Pilgrim (begun in 1877, completed 1896–97, Tate), again suggesting a high degree of familiarity with the text. In the Bodleian version, Pygmalion returns from praying to Venus, as in Morris’s poem, to find his statue alive, illustrated in Folio 151v.54 If Morris and Burne-Jones did see this manuscript, it may even have been what prompted Morris to depart from the conventional Galatea transformation scene. Other illustrations in the Bodleian manuscript also suggest a parallel to Burne-Jones’s illustrations; his drawing “Pygmalion playing on the Organ in the Presence of the Image”55 may have been inspired by the manuscript illustration of “Pygmalion playing instruments to his statue,”56 whilst the drawing for “The Hand Refrains,”57 may reference “Pygmalion Overcome by the Beauty of his Image.”58 Such parallels suggest the range of visual and textual reference points Burne-Jones had available to him and support the argument that the paintings cannot be reduced simply to an expression of biographical events. Far more meaningful is the connection to Morris’s poem and the shared explorations of love, including the courtly love represented in medieval illustrated manuscripts. In conclusion, an exploration of some of the prominent visual characteristics of Pygmalion and the Image in relation to other Pygmalion texts, both literary and visual, can take us well beyond a biographical reading of the series and offer instead a more sustained reading of narrative and desire in the paintings and the poem. Whilst Morris’s poem, to some extent, represents Pygmalion as virile and libidinous, and appears to offer a happy ending, I suggest that it does so within a narrative of transience, decay and impermanence, creating an ambiguity around the issue of Pygmalion’s desire for Galatea, one which Burne-Jones would develop in his paintings to create a striking narrative treatment of the classical figure of Pygmalion. Considering the dialogue

118Amelia Yeates between Morris’s and Burne-Jones’s treatments of Pygmalion allows an examination of themes of shared interest, such as desire for the sculpted body and the relationship between the real and the ideal, whilst an examination of their Pygmalion project in relation to contemporary representations of the myth can provide more complex readings than those offered in biographical accounts of Burne-Jones’s work.

Notes 1. Preamble to William Morris’s “Pygmalion and the Image,” The Earthly Paradise (London: Reeves and Turner, 1890), 164. 2. See Joseph R. Dunlap, The Book That Never Was (New York: Oriole Editions, 1971), for an account of the abortive project. 3. Twenty-two (twelve finished designs and ten studies) at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, several in the William Morris Gallery and three in an album sold at Sotheby’s (10 Nov., 1981, lot 26) (Stephen Wildman and John Christian, Edward Burne-Jones: Victorian Artist-Dreamer (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998), 221n). 4. The works remained in the family until 1967 when they went to the Joseph Setton Collection in Paris. They were then purchased by Andrew Lloyd Webber in 1993. 5. This set of paintings is now at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. 6. Essaka Joshua, Pygmalion and Galatea: The History of a Narrative in English Literature (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 161. 7. Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, accession number 1903P23. 8. Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, accession number 1903P25. 9. Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, accession number 1903P26. 10. Joshua, Pygmalion and Galatea, 15. 11. “Burne-Jones: his Ethics and Art.” Edinburgh Review 189.387 (January 1899): 42. 12. Victoria & Albert Museum, museum number 53–1894. 13. Robert Upstone, “The Artist’s Studio,” in Exposed: The Victorian Nude, ed. Alison Smith (London: Tate Publishing, 2001), 204. 14. An exception to this approach is Caroline Arscott’s “Venus as Dominatrix: Nineteenth-Century Artists and their Creations,” in Manifestations of Venus: Art and Sexuality, eds. Caroline Arscott and Katie Scott (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 109–125, which examines desire in Pygmalion and the Image not as a personal and coded expression of Burne-Jones’s own romantic situation but within the context of Aestheticism. 15. Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), 144. 16. Stephen Kern, Eyes of Love: The Gaze in English and French Paintings and Novels 1840–1900 (London: Reaktion Books, 1996), 109. 17. Catalogue of the Sotheby’s Sale, “Important Victorian Pictures.” June 8–9, 1993 (lot 24), 26. 18. “Important Victorian Pictures,” 26. 19. Malcolm Bell dates the drawings as 1867, when Burne-Jones moved to the Grange (Sir Edward Burne-Jones: A Record and Review (London: George Bell and Sons,

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1901), 19, whilst Christopher Newall dates the beginning of the project to 1865 (“Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, online edition, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/ article/4051). In an unpublished PhD thesis Elisa Korb identifies varying evidence for the length of the affair, with some dating the start at 1866, some at 1868 (“Edward Burne-Jones and His Fantasy of the Femme Fatale—Maria Zambaco,” unpublished PhD thesis, University of Birmingham, 2007, 45). 20. Kern, Eyes of Love, 109. 21. Upstone, “The Artist’s Studio,” 203. 22. “The Grosvenor Gallery,” The Builder 37 (3 May 1879): 481. 23. Parenthetical figures refer to line numbers in Ovid. Metamorphoses, trans. Frank Justus Miller (Loeb Classical Library) (London: Heinemann, 1916). 24. Quoted in Joshua, Pygmalion and Galatea, 1. 25. Jane M. Miller, “Some versions of Pygmalion,” in Ovid Renewed: Ovidian Influences on Literature and Art from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century, ed. Charles Martindale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 207. 26. Parenthetical figures refer to line numbers in William Morris, The Earthly Paradise, a Poem (London: Reeves and Turner, 1890). 27. See, for example Amanda Hodgson, The Romances of William Morris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 28. Joshua, Pygmalion and Galatea, 87. 29. Miller, “Some versions of Pygmalion,” 212. 30. Hodgson, The Romances, 72. 31. Parenthetical figures refer to line numbers in W. H. Mallock, “Pygmalion to His Statue, Become His Wife,” accessed at http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk/athens/. 32. Florence Boos, ed. The Earthly Paradise by William Morris, vol. 1 (New York; London: Routledge, 2002), 605. 33. Miller, “Some Versions of Pygmalion,” 213. 34. Frederick Kirchhoff, William Morris: The Construction of a Male Self, 1856–1872 (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1990), 155. 35. Arscott suggests that the review was written by a “sympathetic insider,” probably William Michael Rossetti, which seems likely given the article was published in March 1879, before the series had been displayed at the Grosvenor Gallery (“Venus as Dominatrix,” 114). 36. “New Pictures and Sculptures,” The Athenaeum 1, March 1879, 415. 37. “New Pictures and Sculptures,” 415. 38. David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1989), 325. 39. “New Pictures and Sculptures,” 416. 40. Richard Jenkyns, Victorians and Ancient Greece, 145. 41. Rebecca Virag, “The Clean, The Dirty and the Reflection of the Ideal in BurneJones’s Pygmalion Series,” unpublished conference paper delivered at the Edward Burne-Jones conference, Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham, 1999. 42. Lene Østermark-Johansen, Walter Pater and the Language of Sculpture (Surrey, UK, and Burlington: Ashgate, 2011), 197. 43. The Atkinson Art Gallery, Southport, Merseyside.

120Amelia Yeates 44. Etching to illustrate his sonnet “Pygmalion,” in Poems: Ballads, Studies from Nature, Sonnets etc. (London: Longmans, Green, 1875). 45. Parenthetical figures refer to line numbers in Robert Buchanan, “Pygmalion the Sculptor,” (1863), accessed at http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk/athens/. 46. Quoted in Jenkyns, Victorians and Ancient Greece, 143. 47. Colin Cruise, “Various Loves, Various Ruins: Burne-Jones, Browning and Time,” in Erzählte Zeit und Gedächtnis: Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 29/30, ed. Götz Pochat (Graz: University of Graz, 2005), 121. 48. “Burne-Jones: his Ethics and Art,” 42. 49. These are held at Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, accession numbers 623’27, 624’27, 625’27, 626’27, 627’27, 628’27. 50. 628’27. 51. Douce 195. Late 15thc. http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/dept/scwmss/wmss/online/ 1500-1900/dorvilleCLD/douce2CLD.html. 52. See Wildman and Christian, Edward Burne-Jones (50), and Fiona MacCarthy, The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination (London: Faber & Faber, 2012), 33. 53. Julian Treuherz, “The Pre-Raphaelites and Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts,” in Pre-Raphaelite Papers, ed. Leslie Parris (London: Tate Gallery and Allen Lane, 1984), 153–69; Michaela Braesel, “The Influence of Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts on the Pre-Raphaelites and the Early Poetry of William Morris,” Journal of the William Morris Society 15.4 (Summer 2004): 45. 54. Folio 151v, MS Douce 195, Bodleian Library, Oxford. 55. Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, 615’27. 56. Folio 150v, MS Douce 195, Bodleian Library, Oxford. 57. Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, 614’27. 58. Folio 149r, MS Douce 195, Bodleian Library, Oxford. Treuherz (“Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts,” 167) and Braesel (“Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts,” 47) have noted the influence of the British Library’s Harley MS 4225 on Burne-Jones’s Pygmalion and the Image.

8. Aestheticism and Violent Delight in the Sister Arts of A. C. Swinburne and Simeon Solomon Sarah Banschbach Valles

In Max Beerbohm’s 1904 lighthearted caricature “Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in his back garden,” Rossetti and his circle of friends are depicted with exaggerated features while posing in pursuits “typical” of their personalities.1 William Morris, William Holman Hunt, John Ruskin, Edward Burne-Jones and others are represented. Absent from the drawing is Rossetti’s former protégé and sometime Pre-Raphaelite star, painter Simeon Solomon, whose 1873 legal condemnation for sodomy resulted in his erasure from the PreRaphaelite circle.2 However, Solomon’s close friend and frequent collaborator, poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, is still included in Beerbohm’s sketch. Swinburne, due to his deviant and immoderate lifestyle, had largely retired from public life and saw his Pre-Raphaelite friends only infrequently at the time Beerbohm drew the illustration. That Beerbohm included Swinburne while excluding Solomon is a small testament to how thoroughly Solomon had been cut off from his former good friends while also being an indication of how popular Swinburne was with this circle.3 Though Solomon, prior to his social downfall, was particularly intimate with the Burne-Jones family and with the Hunts, it was Swinburne’s interest in classical literature that generated a dramatic change in Solomon’s work. Solomon’s initial paintings frequently focused on Old Testament subjects or on depictions of religious ceremonial acts. Yet in the 1860s, Solomon, along with other painters such as Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Edward John Poynter and with writers such as Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Swinburne, began experimenting with classical themes.4 For many Victorians, “Greece came to function as the lost original for the nineteenth century’s own modernity, its

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cultural and artistic ambition, its humanism and enlightenment, its democracy, and its rational and scientific culture.”5 Additionally, Hellenic ideas of sexuality entered the social milieu—a sexuality that embraced a Sapphic homosexuality.6 The classical revival, which quickly transformed into the Aesthetic or Decadent movement, also extended to ancient Roman culture and it is in this Greco-Roman Aesthetic nexus that Solomon and Swinburne developed their friendship and their sister arts. Even as the virtues of Greece and Rome were extolled by scholars and statesmen, the eroticism of classical antiquity became a focal point for artists such as Swinburne and Solomon as they coopted the legitimating GrecoRoman heritage to justify their celebration of homoerotic and deviant love. By classicizing and historicizing beauty and less than socially approved behaviors, Swinburne and Solomon attempted to ultimately sanction such subversive ideas and behaviors while at the same time, for the sake of having their work received by the public, implying a condemnation of such behavior. Such a fine line between promoting personal and artistic agendas while also remaining in good standing in society can be seen in the reception of their classically themed companion pieces “Faustine” by Swinburne and Habet! by Solomon. The poem and the painting inform each other and, read together, present more insight into the artistic motivations of these two close friends. Long out of favor with the public due to their lifestyles and at times uncomfortable and daring subject matter, Solomon and Swinburne were nonetheless culturally relevant, leading figures of the time. Drawing upon the critical reception of their work, an analysis of Solomon’s and Swinburne’s mutual interests present in Habet! and “Faustine” displays how these innovative, progressive artists deftly flaunted their Aesthetic values in the face of Victorian morality.

Swinburne’s Aestheticism The driving force behind Swinburne’s poetry at this time and, by extension, Solomon’s paintings, was the Decadent or Aesthetic conception of the value of the “intensity of the experience” in a life that is one “continual, unsatisfied longing.”7 Walter Pater famously articulated this sentiment as “Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself is the end.”8 Immediacy and high passion were key tenets for Pater and the Aesthetes because “A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life.”9 Thus, the best way to expand and fulfill that life is through “art and song.”10 Pater’s final summation of the Aesthetic mantra was “the love of art for art’s sake,” because “art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.”11 The

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old imperative that art should “teach and delight” was firmly foresworn by the Aesthetic movement’s adherents in favor of the visual, the sensual, and the personal. Though rooted in Pater, Swinburne modified the Aesthetic code to suit his own artistic ideals. For Swinburne, one is innately dissatisfied because reality does not match expectation.12 The only way one can combat the void of despair arising from unfulfilled expectation is through recognizing one’s limitations and mortality, which then engenders creativity. Said creativity compels one to live and love intensely, only finding consolation “in that art that results from intense pain and pleasure.”13 The moments that arise from the fusion of pain and pleasure are art-filled, creative moments which combat death for by art, life is given significance; art is thus “a sort of secular religion.”14 Swinburne’s belief that there is no contradiction between pleasure and pain can be found in his defense of Poems and Ballads when he writes that suffering and passion “are indeed the same thing and the same word,”15 having the same root and effect on a person. Swinburne identified this same strain in Solomon’s paintings saying that “[T]he glorious result of aspiration and enjoyment is here legible; the sadness that is latent in gladness; the pleasure that is palpable in pain.”16 The void and finitude of existence was evidence, for Swinburne, of man’s destiny of interminable, non-providential change without progress. The symbol Swinburne adopted for his idea of change without advancement was the sea for, as David Riede phrases it, “the important point was that each wave, once past, never returns, that death is oblivion … [Swinburne’s] main concern was not how man should die but how he should live in the face of death.”17 However, Swinburne repurposed death itself for creative ends by drawing upon classical, homoerotic configurations of death. Stefano Evangelista notes that the “use of death to trope physical desire as a sublime experience” can “be traced back to Sappho in fact, in which desire is persistently reconfigured in the form of death and mourning.”18 Dionysus and Persephone, who are connected with death and rebirth and mystery cults of ancient Greece, captivated Victorians experimenting with subversive lifestyles such as Swinburne and Solomon. Death, rebirth, and the cyclical yet stagnant nature of time created the opportunity not for reincarnation per se, but for reincarnation of types in succeeding generations. Swinburne’s contemporaries noticed his idiosyncratic approach to art and frequently commented upon it. William Michael Rossetti wrote of Swinburne that his “mind appears to be very like a tabula rasa on moral and religious subjects, so occupied is it with instincts, feelings, perceptions, and a sense of natural or artistic fitness and harmony … the facts of the world and of man

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naturally and primarily appeal to him on other than their moral showing.”19 Rossetti sums up his estimation of Swinburne thus: Our poet has a singularly acute and terrible conception of the puppet-like condition of man, as acted upon by the forces of Nature and the fiats of her Ruler; and he draws some appalling outlines of it with an equal sense of power and of powerlessness, an equal entireness of despair and desperation … His only outlet of comfort is his delight in material beauty, in the fragmentary conquests of intellect, and in the feeling that the fight, once over in this world for each individual, is over altogether.20

Rossetti felt that Swinburne, as a champion of the nascent Aesthetic movement, should be free to present the world as it is rather than as it should be, and that he should be unhindered to create art without the attempting to “improve the morals”21 of the reader. As a painter, Solomon, does not verbally qualify his ascription to such sentiments, but his paintings from this period exemplify a similar obsession with hermaphrodism,22 same-sex desire,23 and pleasure and pain.24 Solomon was raised in a devoutly Jewish family, but his contact with Aesthetic ideas created in him a unique blend of Judaism in the treatment of the material objects in his paintings with classicism in his subject matter. Swinburne wrote of Solomon that he possessed “the fervent violence of feeling or faith which is peculiar to the Hebrews with the sensitive acuteness of desire, the sublime reserve and balance of passion, which is peculiar to the Greeks.”25 These elements of desire and pain, reincarnation, death and rebirth, beauty, and despair display themselves in his representation of an empress at the gladiatorial games.

Solomon’s Classicism Solomon’s Habet! [Plate 8.1] is a closely focused, detailed depiction of a group of Roman women watching gladiatorial contests at the Circus Maximus. The arena is not in the picture; rather, the viewer and the women equally gaze upon each other, thus situating the viewer “in” the arena and possibly “in” the place of a wounded gladiator (or Christian or slave) whose life depends on these women.26 In essence, the trajectory of the spectatorship has been reversed. The women are grouped around a central figure that reviewers called “the empress.”27 The principal women in the painting either have thumbs down or are indifferent and seem to enjoy the bloody spectacle while some of the other women swoon or look away. A slave holding a fan stands in the background while the right side of the painting seems to depict a mother putting a protective arm around her pre-pubescent daughter who stares at the violent drama with unnerving, unflinching interest. Solomon’s attention

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Plate 8.1:  Simeon Solomon, Habet!, 1865, oil on canvas. Private Collection. Image courtesy of the Art Renewal Center® www.artrenewal.org.

to the women’s detailed jewelry, their sumptuous clothes, and their luxurious hair highlights the range of negative emotions that he masterfully portrays. The empress’s expression of self-possessed, musing, cruel satisfaction takes on an ominous, sexual tone from her red dress and from the deep décolletage unique to her apparel. The painting draws its title from the word habet, which means “‘he has it’ or ‘he has been hit’”28 referring to the moment in gladiatorial games when one gladiator has prevailed over another. At this moment, the moderator of the games would appeal to the crowd to ask them whether the fallen gladiator should be spared or killed. The typical signals for mercy or death were “missus! (discharge) or iuglua! (cut his throat).”29 Viewers would flap their togas or wave cloths to indicate mercy. Any motion with the thumb—either up, down, or toward the neck—indicated a ruling for death.30 Women were allowed to attend the games though they were generally seated higher up in

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the stands. However, “[S]ome women of the imperial family, at least in the Julio-Claudian period, were given special permission to sit in the front rows or with the Vestals.”31 Solomon’s painting depicts such a cluster of women. Two of the women have thumbs down and, while the other women are in varying attitudes of dislike or concern or blasé indifference, none of them calls for missus! The central figure shows a sense of unexpressive interest through her arched right eyebrow and languid eyes, while the woman to her left displays open delight in death. These beautiful Venuses find pleasure in the macabre. As Swinburne wrote of the women in the painting: All the heads are full of personal force and character, especially the women’s with heavy brilliant hair and glittering white skin, like hard smooth snow against the sunlight, the delicious thirst and subtle ravin of sensual hunger for blood visibly enkindled in every line of the sweet fierce features.32

Displayed in the 1865 Royal Academy exhibition, an exhibition that brought Roman historical painting to Britain,33 Habet! illustrates Solomon’s distinctive blend of Aesthetic and Pre-Raphaelite. As with the other paintings in this exhibition, Solomon depicted new, classical material and also experimented with new ways of presenting the subject. Instead of simply emphasizing the subject’s surroundings or body or actions, Roman historical painters portrayed more “intimate” scenarios which highlighted the subject’s psychology, emotions, and feelings.34 The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood utilized similar methods, and as John Ruskin claimed in Notes on Architecture and Art, the Pre-Raphaelites tried to “conceive a fact as it really was likely to have happened, rather than as it most prettily might have happened” and attempted to make “their fancy so probable as to seem like memory.”35 By doing so, the manner of presenting the image changed and “[T]he picture frame was no longer a barrier; events unfolded before the viewer, and the result was an imaginative elision of past and historical present.”36 Solomon’s Habet! exemplifies the layering of past with historical present as he infuses his painting with subtle notes of enticing, classical, aberrant behavior. The painting was received with much acclaim and the majority of the critics, all of whom acknowledged Solomon’s craftsmanship and ability, felt that this painting accurately displayed the evil and decadent lifestyle of pagan Rome.37 The ferociousness of the women would be disturbing except that these women were so obviously an example of evil lust and cruelty. Through reviewers’ emphases on the lack of sympathy and the “signs of unfeminine cruelty” of the figures, they encouraged viewers to “interpret the entire scene as a morality tale” on the depravity of Rome.38 Thus, while an unpleasant topic, the painting was read as taking a firm, orthodox stance on good and evil.

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Swinburne must have secretly laughed when reading the popular opinion of the painting. Swinburne (and sometimes Walter Pater as well) is credited with introducing Solomon to and encouraging him in deviant lifestyles. Solomon’s close friendship with both Swinburne and Pater exposed him to “the most advanced—and also controversial—aesthetic thinkers of his generation, whose writings in various ways acknowledged and celebrated Hellenic homoeroticism.”39 Swinburne in particular had a strong influence upon Solomon and they collaborated on multiple projects including Swinburne’s poem “Erotion,” based on Solomon’s painting Damon and Aglae. Solomon’s painting Atalanta corresponds with Swinburne’s poem of the same name. Additionally, Solomon illustrated Swinburne’s Lesbia Brandon and “The End of a Month” as well as Swinburne’s collection of poems The Flogging Block.40 Their friendship was deep and their particular shared interests included Sappho, Baudelaire, the Marquis de Sade, and homoerotic literature. Both Solomon and Swinburne experimented with same-sex desire, but Solomon exceeded Swinburne in the openness of his sexuality. Ultimately, this led to Solomon’s 1873 arrest and indictment for sodomy and public exposure. Swinburne did not support Solomon when Solomon was on trial and their friendship cooled considerably.41 Swinburne always considered Solomon a friend but social suicide did not suit him.

Representations of Violent Delight Swinburne’s poem “Faustine” appears to have been the creative spark for Solomon’s Habet! The poem describes the decadent life of Empress Faustina, wife of Marcus Aurelius and mother of Commodus, who was notorious for her love affairs with gladiators.42 Several stanzas in Swinburne’s poem directly discuss her presence and behavior at the gladiatorial games, and Solomon seems to have drawn his imagery directly from Swinburne’s poem. The poem, which first appeared in The Spectator in 1862 and then was included in Swinburne’s much disputed 1866 book Poems and Ballads, presents an inner view of the emotions displayed on the women’s faces in Habet! It also provides insight into the Aesthetic philosophy that motivated both Solomon and Swinburne. Poems and Ballads was sometimes compared to Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal.43 And while Ruskin described the collection as “some of the wickedest and splendidest verses ever written by a human creature,” he added the caveat, “but he [Swinburne] mustn’t publish these things.”44 The poem was composed on a train when Swinburne was travelling with D. G. Rossetti and George Meredith.45 Swinburne apparently wanted to see how many words he could find to rhyme with the name Faustine.46 Scholars

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propose that Swinburne’s inspiration for the poem arose from his despair over his rejection by his cousin Mary Gordon who became engaged to another man.47 Fuller proposes that the poems “Dolores” (literally, the Lady of Pain; the poem is a parody of Mary, Our Lady of Sorrows, weeping over the dead Christ) and “Faustine” are tributes to Mary Gordon.48 In the wake of the attack upon Poems and Ballads, Swinburne penned a defense of his book which described it as a “lyrical monodrama of passion.”49 His defense of “Faustine,” which is included here for the sake of completeness, is both serious and impudent and served with just a touch of sarcasm: I have striven here to express that transient state of spirit through which a man may be supposed to pass, foiled in love and weary of loving, but not yet in sight of rest; seeking refuge in those “violent delights” which “have violent ends,”50 in fierce and frank sensualities which at least profess to be no more than they are … I have heard that even the little poem of “Faustine” has been to some readers a thing to make the scalp creep and the blood freeze. It was issued with no such intent. Nor do I remember that any man’s voice or heel was lifted against it when it first appeared, a new-born and virgin poem, in the Spectator newspaper for 1862. Virtue it would seem has shot up surprisingly in the space of four years or less—a rank and rapid growth, barren of blossom and rotten at root. “Faustine” is the reverie of a man gazing on the bitter and vicious loveliness of a face as common and as cheap as the morality of reviewers, and dreaming of past lives in which this fair face may have held a nobler or fitter station; the imperial profile may have been Faustina’s, the thirsty lips a Maenad’s, when first she learnt to drink blood or wine, to waste the loves and ruin the lives of men; through Greece and again through Rome she may have passed with the same face which now comes before us dishonoured and discrowned. Whatever of merit or demerit there may be in the verses, the idea that gives them such life as they have is simple enough; the transmigration of a single soul, doomed as though by accident from the first to all evil and no good, through many ages and forms, but clad always in the same type of fleshly beauty. The chance which suggested to me this poem was one which may happen any day to any man—the sudden sight of a living face which recalled the well-known likeness of another dead for centuries: in this instance, the noble and faultless type of the elder Faustina, as seen in coin and bust. Out of that casual glimpse and sudden recollection these verses sprang and grew. Of the poem in which I have attempted once more to embody the legend of Venus and her knight, I need say only that my first aim was to rehandle the old story in a new fashion. To me it seemed that the tragedy began with the knight’s return to Venus … the tragic touch of the story is this … the lover who has embraced Venus disbelieves in her.51

For Swinburne, Faustine is a type, seen again and again throughout history. She is a “darker Venus”52 of the murkier passions that society may want to ignore. To highlight Faustine as a type, Swinburne includes “two” Faustines

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in his poem—the actual empress Faustine and the reincarnation of Faustine at a later point in history. The poem is prefaced by an epigraph in Latin: Ave Faustina Imperatrix, morituri te salutant which translates to “Hail, Empress Faustina, we who are about to die salute thee.”53 While the poem appears to chronicle the life of the eponymous empress, it also presents Swinburne’s philosophy of the non-progressive cycle of life where the only meaning can be found in the collision of oppositions. The poem addresses Faustine throughout and begins with describing the languid, sensual empress leaning back on her “shoulder with its fleece / of locks” (3–4). Her shoulder is “shapely” and “silver” and her hair is “splendid hair that droops” (5–7). But, in Swinburnian fashion of change without progress, she is a queen “whose kingdom ebbs and shifts” (11) like the sea. Her face is also like the waves of the sea as her “brows well gathered up: / white gloss and sheen” contrast to the deeps of her “carved” lips (13–15). She is full of contradictions and opposites, pleasure and pain: “Wine and rank poison, milk and blood, / Being mixed therein” (17–18). Solomon’s color choices for his depiction of the empress in Habet! strikingly correlate with Swinburne’s descriptions of the beautiful Faustine for her blood-red robes contrast to her milky-white, almost silver, skin. Swinburne’s descriptions of Faustine drew fire from some critics who, as though they were writing a review of a painting, focused on Swinburne’s color palate. The critic Robert Buchanan claimed in his review of Poems and Ballads that Swinburne was “unclean for the mere sake of uncleanness,” and that “Mr. Swinburne’s pictures are bright and worthless.”54 Buchanan further complained, “We detect no real taste for colour; the skies are all Prussian blue, the flesh-tints all vermilion, the sunlights all gamboge.”55 And not only did Buchanan criticize Swinburne’s aesthetic, he also criticized Swinburne’s theology and morality, pointing specifically to line 19 in “Faustine” and the following stanzas as blasphemous.56 Buchanan was outraged that Swinburne portrayed God playing dice with the devil for a human soul. As the poem tells, “Satan throve” and won the soul of Faustine and “God’s part” in her was “battered out” (25–27). This image of playing dice for a soul is carried through several stanzas as though Swinburne quite relished the idea that perhaps good and evil were matters of mere chance and that free will is an illusion.57 The poem reads, the “die rang sideways as it fell,” sounding like “a man’s laughter heard in hell” (29–31). Yet this same laughter is “like a sigh,” again pointing to the oppositions of a fatalistic universe (33). Swinburne’s Faustine is a shell of a person whose soul is predestined to damnation by a fickle God in a world where evil prevails. As further evidence of God’s fickleness, while “He left her beautiful” (39), Faustine’s lovely face

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acts only as a screen for her corrupted soul. Faustine’s fate is that she can “do all things but be good / or chaste of mien; / And that you would not if you could” (45–47). Essentially, Swinburne claims that even if Faustine wanted to change, she could not. Even Christ who cast out the devils from Mary Magdalene could not help the fated Faustine. Line 53 asks a question that undermines the creative power of God: “Did Satan make you to spite God?” followed by a question of whether God made Faustine to punish mankind for its sins. Faustine’s very creation and existence is again attributed to a fatalistic notion that she was created evil with no opportunity for redemption. That she will return again and again is iterated in lines 61–64 where death does not consume her body and she will “come back face to face with us, / The same Faustine.” This theme of reincarnation is revisited later in the poem. Solomon may have been toying with the idea of reincarnation or transmigration of souls by including the young girl in his painting. She mimics the empress’s posture and facial expression; she almost seems to be taking her cue from the empress whereas the other women are caught up in the spectacle. Once the premise for Faustine’s existence is established, Swinburne discusses her life. It is from this section of the poem that Solomon drew much of his inspiration for Habet! Swinburne’s poem describes Faustine as twicecrowned with “Red gold and black imperious hair” (59) and in Solomon’s painting we see such two crowns. Swinburne claims that Faustine … loved the games men played with death, Where death must win; As though the slain man’s blood and breath Revived Faustine. (65–68)

Such scenarios, where the premise of pain and death serve as trope for desire, are reminiscent of the sadism that Swinburne and Solomon practiced. It is not surprising, then, that Solomon chose to depict his empress at the gladiatorial games just at the moment when death is imminent. As Prettejohn states, “Solomon’s Roman pictures destroy any notional boundary between public respectability and private vice.”58 This is especially applicable to Habet! where the private vice of lust and sadism is displayed in the public arena of the games. Pain will “soothe Faustine” (72) as a relief from her damned existence. But she only receives temporary relief because “Blood could not ease the bitter lust / That galled Faustine” (75–76). Blood and pain and lust and pleasure are all tied together for Faustine. Because the historical Faustine was supposedly known to have many affairs with gladiators, she would have seen her lovers fight “for” her in the arena and seen them die and kill each other. Pleasure and pain are all one to Faustine. Since Solomon situates the viewer

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“in” the arena, the viewer is part of Faustine’s cycle of pleasure and pain and is laid open to her cruel, sadistic gaze. Reviewers commented that the apathy of Solomon’s “fish-blooded monstrous non-entities”59 was incompatible with the excitement of the games, but rather than apathy, Swinburne’s Faustine appears to be a calm center of sadism for “The circus splashed and seethed and shrieked / All round Faustine” (79–80). She does not participate in the seething and shrieking; she is merely the point on which it all turns. After describing Faustine’s obsession with the games, a short interlude of questioning takes place in the poem. The central question is, “Was life worth living then? And now / Is life worth sin?” (85–86). These questions arise from Swinburne’s mention of Faustine’s death, but Swinburne pauses to again dwell on the fatalistic premise of her life: “Did fate begin / Weaving the web of days that wove / Your doom, Faustine?” (94–96). Fate, or God as a weaver, is a long standing trope in literature, but the “first” Faustine’s web of life was woven with threads “wet with wine” as in “a Bacchanal” (97, 99) The opposition between Bacchus or Dionysus, as the god of mystery, revels, unbridled passions, and transformations versus Apollo, as the god of order and reason and light, is woven into Faustine’s destiny. During ancient festivals of Dionysus, his female followers would commit sparagmos or “the ritual tearing apart of a young male sacrificial victim”—typically a goat or a bull—in commemoration of Dionysus being torn apart and then resurrected.60 Faustine’s destiny is full of these combinations of pain and pleasure and reincarnation. Though Faustine dies, she is reborn “A new Faustine” (112) under the “Red pulseless planet” (115) or Mars, the planet of the unfeeling god of war and bloodshed. Whereas the previous Faustine lusted after gladiators and their pain, this new Faustine is associated with the same-sex desire that both Solomon and Swinburne tended toward. This new Faustine is influenced by Sappho as were both Solomon and Swinburne. Swinburne writes Stray breaths of Sapphic song that blew Through Mitylene Shook the fierce quivering blood in you By night, Faustine. (117–120)

She is obsessed with “The shameless nameless love” (121) that “breaks / the soul” (123–24). Such a love is “barren” (127), the result of “sterile growths of sexless root”; it is “epicene” and is compared to the “flower of kisses without fruit” (129–31). Surrounded by snakes, the Freudian symbol of sexuality, Swinburne situates the new Faustine in “This ghastly thin-faced time of ours,” thus making her a contemporary woman (139). Faustine, devoid of

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almost all purpose, “Not godless, for you serve one God, / The Lampsacene” (145–46), is merely a sexual being.61 As such, she is mechanical rather than organic, a mere “love-machine / With clockwork joints of supple gold” (142–43). Love, or Eros, “is often called ‘the loosener of limbs’ in archaic Greek lyric”62 but because Faustine is mechanical, love is beyond the reach of the reincarnated, cyborg-esque Faustine. However, always finding meaning in the contradiction, Swinburne saw Sapphic eros as “a structure of repetition that allows the body to emerge in the reiteration of its own undoing.”63 Though Faustine’s reincarnation or repetition causes her body to become mechanical, the body is found again in the closing stanzas of the poem which return to a description of Faustine’s face. This description is prefaced with a hypothetical “what if” someone loved Faustine “with real love” (149). Real love or real eros—whether hetero or homoerotic—has the power to bring the body back to Faustine, even if she remains cruel. Her hair is “bound back” (153) and has no light,64 as in Solomon’s painting.65 She has a “hard bright chin” and “shameful scornful lips” (158–59). The closing stanza returns to Faustine’s lips as she waits to complete her current, doomed cycle. The poem ends with a question regarding the way Faustine might treat the hypothetical lover: “You’d give him—poison shall we say? / Or what, Faustine?” (163–64). Earlier in the poem, poison and wine were contrasted and the final “Or what” asks whether a newly incarnated, contemporary, Victorian Faustine could offer a lover wine instead of poison. According to the premise of her existence though, she cannot, and so the cycle will continue—change without progress.

Coda In “Faustine” and Habet!, both Swinburne and Solomon engage with fundamental questions regarding love and existence. In their own ways, they show both sides of the coin of love and lust and of hetero and homoeroticism. This is why some critics, such as Henry Morley, defended the poem and the painting because both poem and painting can be read as displaying the horrors of decadence and sensuality. Morley recognized the power of the sensuality in the figures represented, but argued that such sensuality was not attractive and thus was a clear denunciation of its own sin. And yet other reviewers, such as Robert Buchanan and John Morley, claimed that by displaying sensuality and parading it before the public eye, Swinburne and Solomon were assaulting the morality of the viewers and readers. Such a contradiction tickled Swinburne as seen earlier in his defense of his poems and was the precise response Solomon and Swinburne were perhaps aiming for in their art.

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In creating a pairing of poetry and visual art, Swinburne and Solomon in effect carefully tested the waters of the social status quo. They represented their philosophy of art and of sexuality and yet did so in an enigmatic manner so as not to alienate the public. By attacking contemporary notions of morality and sexuality and yet deferring to them and by using historical fact to comment upon the present moment, Swinburne and Solomon created for their readers a new, kaleidoscopic view of morality and reality which, despite Swinburne’s commitment to the mantra of change without progress and art for its own sake, perhaps indicated a hope that some things could change after all.

Notes 1. Max Beerbohm, “Dante Gabriel Rossetti in His Back-garden,” in The Poets’ Corner (London: Heinemann Publishing, 1904). 2. A touching story from Diana Holman Hunt describes how her grandmother always gave coins to sidewalk artists and offered them employment and food. Her motivation for this was that “Only a few have any talent, but I am haunted by the thought of my beloved Holman starving, and also, that one of these pathetic creatures might be poor Simeon Solomon, such a gifted man, about whose end all my friends are so reticent. I fear, alas, he fell on evil days.” Qtd. in Lionel Lambourne “Simeon Solomon: Artist and Myth,” in Solomon, A Family of Painters: Abraham Solomon (1823–1862), Rebecca Solomon (1832–1886), and Simeon Solomon (1840–1862), ed. Jeffery Daniels (London: Geffrye Museum and Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery, 1985), 27. 3. This group affectionately referred to Swinburne as “Carrots” on account of his red hair. 4. Walter Pater celebrated the influence of the Greco-Roman on contemporary art by writing “Hellenic breadth and generality come of a culture minute, severe, constantly renewed, rectifying and concentrating its impressions into certain pregnant types. The base of all artistic genius is the power of conceiving humanity in a new, striking, rejoicing way … of generating around itself an atmosphere with the novel power of refraction, selecting, transforming, becoming the images it transmits, according to the choice of the imaginative intellect. In exercising this power, painting and poetry have a choice of subject almost unlimited. This is because those arts can accomplish their function in the choice and development of some special situation, which lifts or glorifies a character in itself not poetical.” Walter Pater, “Winckelmann,” in Essays on Literature and Art, ed. Jennifer Uglow (London: Everyman, 1990), 33. 5. Stefano Evangelista, British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece (New York: Palgrave, 2009), 9. 6. Yopie Prins, Victorian Sappho (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 115. 7. David G. Riede, Swinburne: A Study of Romantic Mythmaking (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978), 55. 8. Walter Pater, “Conclusion to ‘The Renaissance,’” in Essays on Literature and Art, ed. Jennifer Uglow (London: Everyman, 1990), 46. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid., 47. 11. Ibid.

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12. David G. Riede, Swinburne: A Study of Romantic Mythmaking (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978), 66. 13. Ibid., 72–73. 14. Ibid., 74. 15. Algernon Charles Swinburne, “Notes on Poems and Reviews,” in Poems and Ballads, ed. Morse Peckham (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), 331. 16. Algernon Charles Swinburne, “Simeon Solomon: Notes on His ‘Vision of Love’ and Other Studies.” The Bibelot 14.9 (1908): 303. 17. David G. Riede, Swinburne: A Study of Romantic Mythmaking (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978), 72. 18. Stefano Evangelista, British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece (New York: Palgrave, 2009), 117. 19. William Michael Rossetti, “Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads,” in Swinburne: The Critical Heritage, ed. Clyde K. Hyder (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970), 62–63. 20. Ibid., 67–68. 21. Ibid., 75. 22. For instance, see Solomon’s paintings Heliogabalus, High Priest of the Sun and Emperor of Rome (1866) and Saint of the Eastern Church (1867). 23. See Solomon’s painting Sappho and Erinna in a Garden at Mytilene (1864). In addition, consider his poem complete with illustrations A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep (1871). 24. See Solomon’s paintings Bacchus (1867) and Love in Autumn (1866). 25. Algernon Charles Swinburne, “Simeon Solomon: Notes on His ‘Vision of Love’ and Other Studies.” The Bibelot 14.9 (1908): 302–03. 26. Elizabeth Prettejohn, “Solomon’s Classicism,” in Love Revealed: Simeon Solomon and the Pre-Raphaelites (New York: Merrell, 2005), 41. 27. Ibid. 28. Allen Staley, The New Painting of the 1860s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 101. 29. Garrett G. Fagan, The Lure of the Arena: Social Psychology and the Crowd at the Roman Games (New York: Cambridge, 2011), 222. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., 107. 32. Algernon Charles Swinburne, “Simeon Solomon: Notes on His ‘Vision of Love’ and Other Studies.” The Bibelot 14.9 (1908): 301. 33. Rosemary Julia Barrow, The Use of Classical Art and Literature by Victorian Painters, 1860–1912 (Lewiston: Edwin Mellon, 2007), 32. 34. Ibid., 13. 35. John Ruskin, “Pre-Raphaelitism,” in Lectures on Architecture and Painting (London: George Allen, 1902), 219. 36. Rosemary Julia Barrow, The Use of Classical Art and Literature by Victorian Painters, 1860–1912 (Lewiston: Edwin Mellon, 2007), 13. 37. Colin Cruise, Love Revealed: Simeon Solomon and the Pre-Raphaelites (New York: Merrell, 2005), 120. 38. Elizabeth Prettejohn, “‘The Monstrous Diversion of a Show of Gladiators’: Simeon Solomon’s Habet!,” in Roman Presences: Receptions of Rome in European Culture, ed. Catharine Edwards (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 161. 39. Allen Staley, The New Painting of the 1860s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 100.

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40. Rikky Rooksby, A. C. Swinburne: A Poet’s Life (Cambridge: Ashgate, 1997), 119. 41. Roberto C. Ferrari, “The Unexplored Correspondence of Simeon Solomon.” The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies 12 (Spring 2003): 23. 42. This may be a slanderous claim as more recent evidence suggests that Faustina and Marcus Aurelius were a contented and happy couple. Joyce E. Salisbury, Encyclopedia of Women in the Ancient World (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2001), 125. 43. Jerome J. McGann, Swinburne (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 205. 44. John Ruskin to Lady Trevelyan, 8 December 1865, in Volume 1 of The Swinburne Letters, ed. Cecil Y. Lang (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 141. 45. In terms of form, the poem is in iambic quatrains. The first and third lines of each quatrain are in tetrameter while the second and fourth lines of each quatrain are in dimeter with frequent spondaic substitutions. 46. Jean Overton Fuller, Swinburne: A Biography (New York: Schocken, 1971), 120. 47. Ibid., 113. 48. Ibid., 118. 49. Algernon Charles Swinburne, “Notes on Poems and Reviews,” in Poems and Ballads, ed. Morse Peckham (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), 331. 50. Swinburne quotes from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet Act 2 Scene 6 lines 9–11: “These violent delights have violent ends/And in their triumph die, like fire and powder,/Which, as they kiss, consume.” 51. Algernon Charles Swinburne, “Notes on Poems and Reviews,” in Poems and Ballads, ed. Morse Peckham (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), 330–31, 334–35. 52. Ibid., 331. 53. Parenthetical figures refer to line numbers in Swinburne, “Faustine,” (accessed at http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk/athens/). 54. Robert Buchanan, Review of Poems and Ballads, by A. C. Swinburne. Athenaeum, August 4, 1866: 137–38. Appearing in Swinburne: The Critical Heritage, ed. Clyde K. Hyder (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970), 31. 55. Ibid., 34. 56. Ibid., 33. 57. Swinburne may also have been thinking of the German legend of Faust who sold his soul to the devil in exchange for power and knowledge. 58. Elizabeth Prettejohn, “‘The Monstrous Diversion of a show of Gladiators’: Simeon Solomon’s Habet!,” 159. 59. Qtd. in Colin Cruise, Love Revealed: Simeon Solomon and the Pre-Raphaelites (New York: Merrell, 2005), 120. 60. Stephan L. Harris and Gloria Platzner, Classical Mythology: Images and Insights (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008), 1088. 61. Lampsacus was the location of the fertility deity Priapus. Algernon Charles Swinburne, “Faustine,” in Poems and Ballads, ed. Morse Peckham (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), 113. 62. Yopie Prins, Victorian Sappho (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 113. 63. Ibid. 64. Greek and Roman hairstyles and modes of dress were popular among contemporary European women. 65. The lack of lighting was commented on in reviews. Colin Cruise, Love Revealed: Simeon Solomon and the Pre-Raphaelites (New York: Merrell, 2005), 120.

9. From Poet to Painter: The Aestheticism of Swinburne and Whistler Anne Koval

Deep in the gleaming glass She sees all past things pass, And all sweet life that was lie down and lie. —A. C. Swinburne, “Before the Mirror”1 Do we not speak the same language? Are we strangers, then, or, in our Father’s house are there so many mansions that you lose your way, my brother, and cannot recognize your kin? —J. M. Whistler to A. C. Swinburne2

The artist James McNeill Whistler moved to Chelsea, London in the mid1860s, a period that linked him with the Pre-Raphaelites and the emerging Aesthetic Movement. He soon became part of the inner circle of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the second generation of Pre-Raphaelite painters and poets, including Algernon Charles Swinburne. At this time Whistler produced what is arguably his most Pre-Raphaelite painting, The Little White Girl (later renamed Symphony in White, No. 2), a work that directly connects him with Swinburne, who wrote the ekphrastic poem “Before the Mirror” in response to the painting. This combination, a bringing together of the literary with the visual, is unique in Whistler’s oeuvre and aligns him closely with the Aesthetic Movement. When Whistler later posed the question, “Do we not speak the same language?” on reading Swinburne’s harsh critique of the artist’s “Ten O’Clock Lecture” in the Fortnightly Review of June 1888, he was referring to a shared aesthetic ideology formed during their twenty year friendship.3 Despite this falling out Whistler later described Swinburne’s poem “Before

138Anne Koval the Mirror” as “a rare and graceful tribute from poet to painter—a noble recognition of work by the production of a greater one.”4 This essay explores this important allegiance—“from poet to painter”—in the relationship between Swinburne and Whistler, which intensified around 1864 when the artist began to formulate his aesthetic theories within his artistic practice. As art historian Robin Spencer argues: “there are good reasons to believe that Swinburne’s influence on Whistler’s art was both lasting and profound.”5 Here I focus on Whistler’s The Little White Girl [Plate 9.1] and Swinburne’s poetic response to the painting, linking it to work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in particular his painting Lilith [Plate 9.2], to the Aesthetic Movement and the doctrine of “Art for art’s sake.” Furthermore, I suggest a connection between all these works that represent doubling or the mirror to the photographic work of Lady Hawarden, another contemporary, who is only now being rediscovered for her significant contribution to this genre. Swinburne, as one of the key proponents of this new aestheticism in Britain, began an extended essay on William Blake published in 1868. His interest in Blake may have developed through Rossetti who was a great admirer of the poet-painter. In Swinburne’s study he aligns Blake’s work with that of Théophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire, and further connects him to the non-didactic ideologies of Edgar Allan Poe.6 Baudelaire was an important influence on both Swinburne and Whistler. As a critic he had written on Whistler’s etchings and he knew the artist personally.7 In March 1863 Swinburne had accompanied Whistler to Paris when the artist submitted his earlier work The White Girl to the Salon jury of that year. Through Whistler Swinburne was introduced to the artist Édouard Manet and possibly to Baudelaire, whose collection of poetry, Les Fleurs du Mals, Swinburne was to review favorably that autumn.8 Notably, Whistler’s painting The White Girl and Manet’s Dejeuner sur l’herbe were both rejected from the Salon that year and entered at the Salon des Refusés where they both became a succès de scandale. Swinburne, as a key player within the Aesthetic Movement, was associated with the “School of Fleshly Poetry” that evolved in this period. In Swinburne’s first collection of poetry, Laus Veneris and other Poems and Ballads (1866), later published as Poems and Ballads, he wrote a lengthy dedication to the artist Edward Burne-Jones, and much of his poetry is driven by common themes and sensibilities, most overtly in the poem “Laus Veneris” based on an early water-color by Burne Jones. According to his early biographer Julia Cartwright, Burne-Jones then incorporated some of the details from Swinburne’s poem into his later oil version of Laus Veneris begun in 1873.9 This is an earlier example of poet and painter working intertextually to

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Plate 9.1:  James McNeill Whistler, The Little White Girl, 1864, color litho book plate. Private Collection ©The Advertising Archives/Bridgeman Images.

140Anne Koval develop their ideas, an aspect that Swinburne would also be exploring in his writing on Rossetti and Whistler. As Francophiles both Whistler and Swinburne spoke and wrote fluent French, with the poet affectionately addressing the artist as cher père, and signing his letters ton fils, despite only three years difference in age. Swinburne, on viewing Whistler’s The Little White Girl in the spring of 1865, composed his poem “Before the Mirror” and sent the verses to the artist.10 In the accompanying letter Swinburne suggested they could be “serviceable as an Academy-Catalogue motto.” Whistler was evidently pleased and arranged to have the poem printed on gold paper and attached to the gilded frame designed for the painting, and added several of the verses to the Royal Academy catalogue.11 The frame has a strong link to the Pre-Raphaelite convention of placing their paintings in a specifically designed frame to enhance the aesthetic quality of the work. Whistler commissioned and designed decorated frames for a number of his paintings of this period. The original gilt frame for The Little White Girl is very similar to Purple and Rose: The Lange Lijzen of the Six Marks of 1864. Both frames have roundels at the corners and mid-section. Art historian Ira Horowitz has identified the embossed motif as Chinese characters that link to the Six Marks—the potter’s marks—found on Chinese porcelain.12 With The Little White Girl the motif is possibly a Chinese family crest depicting passionflowers or plum blossoms, linked with the symbolism of love.13 What distinguishes this frame from other decorated frames Whistler used is the addition of Swinburne’s verses pasted onto the lower side portions of the frame. Here Whistler is closest to the Pre-Raphaelite practice of including text with imagery, usually on the frame, allowing for another narrative reading to emerge. Rossetti was also practicing this convention, often printing his verses on gold paper, as seen in his early The Girlhood of Mary Virgin, and the practice became characteristic of his frames through the 1860s. Horowitz makes a direct connection between the decorative roundels on Rossetti’s frames with Whistler’s adaption of this practice.14 By the 1870s Whistler moved towards a more simplified reeded molding design for many of his frames and never again attaches verses to his frames. Rossetti had also begun to influence Whistler’s Orientalist phase of painting women in domestic spaces dressed in kimonos with Japanese screens, fans and porcelain china.15 These rich compositions correspond with Rossetti’s hermetic series of paintings of sensual women such as Bocca Baciata, Fazio’s Mistress, Lady Lilith, Monna Vanna, and The Beloved. Within their work they share an exoticism with an emphasis on beauty for its own sake, with no moral overtones or Victorian sentiment. Rossetti’s Lady Lilith can be visually linked to Whistler’s The Little White Girl. Rossetti began the painting in 1864

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around the time that Whistler was already at work on his own composition. Both models, Fanny Cornforth and Joanna Hiffernan are what the PRB circle called “Stunners,” a type characterized as having richly colored hair, pale skin, long necks, generous lips and a sensuous languor about them. What connects these two images is that both works include motifs of the flower and the mirror, as well as, a beautiful young woman as the subject.

Plate 9.2:  Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Lady Lilith, 1868, oil on canvas. Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, USA. Samuel and Mary R. Bancroft Memorial/Bridgeman Images.

142Anne Koval Although Rossetti’s painting makes reference to the legendary Lilith, it is not to illustrate but rather enhance her nature as an alluring femme fatale. Rossetti wrote that the picture “represents a Modern Lilith combing out her abundant golden hair and gazing on herself in the glass with that complete self-absorption by whose fascination such natures draw others within their circle.”16 Although Rossetti called his work a “Modern Lilith,” alongside the Whistler, his work seems strangely antiquated. Whistler’s own model and mistress, Joanna Hiffernan, wears a white muslin morning dress and appears as a fashionable young woman within her aesthetically decorated home with her Japanese fan and China vases.17 She appears to be gazing at the Chinese porcelain vase on the mantelpiece.18 Whistler’s decision to place a wedding ring on her ring finger furthers this sense of domesticity.19 By contrast Rossetti’s model and mistress, Fanny Cornforth, is dressed in an ambiguously fashioned gown that falls seductively from her shoulders suggesting a more erotic and less domestic scene.20 Her loose hair is resplendent as she combs it and gazes into a hand-held mirror. The composition, as with many Rossetti works of this period, is collapsed within a shallow space and the only sense of depth can be seen in the reflected surface of the mirror on the table. Whistler’s painting, by contrast, suggests a contemporary drawing room (Whistler’s dining room) with its white mantelpiece and mirror reflecting the young woman. While both paintings suggest the interiority of woman, Whistler’s The Little White Girl lends itself more to this interpretation. She is self-reflective, whereas, Rossetti’s Lilith appears to be a reflection in the eye of her beholder. This aspect is reinforced by Rossetti’s sonnet “Lilith” that was later renamed “Body’s Beauty,” written to accompany the painting: “And, subtly of herself contemplative, / Draws men to watch the bright web she can weave.”21 Swinburne in his review “Notes On Some Pictures of 1868” wrote on both the poem and the painting, describing Lady Lilith thus: “[T]he sleepy splendor of the picture is a fit raiment for the idea incarnate of faultless fleshly beauty and peril of pleasure unavoidable.” In the review Swinburne recalls what he describes as “the most perfect and exquisite book of modern times” —Théophile Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin—then continues his description of Lady Lilith: She is indifferent, equable, magnetic; she charms and draws down the souls of men by pure force of absorption, in no wise willful or malignant; outside herself she cannot live, she cannot even see: and because of this she attracts and subdues all men at once in body and in spirit.22

What proves interesting is the intertextual relationship that develops in the evolution of Rossetti’s image, his poem “Lilith” and Swinburne’s own

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interpretation in his “Notes.” In Swinburne’s review he writes on another painting by Rossetti, Sibylla Palmifera, begun in 1866. Swinburne positions this second work by Rossetti as the polar opposite, writing: “a head of serene and spiritual beauty, severe and tender.”23 Rossetti may have already been developing this polarity between the representations of Lilith and Sibylla, but Swinburne’s review defines more clearly the dichotomy of fleshly versus spiritual and may have contributed to Rossetti’s renaming the Lilith poem “Body’s Beauty,” and to the writing of “Soul’s Beauty,” published later in The House of Life in 1881 as a sequential sonnet. This symbiotic interaction between poet-critic and painter-poet links directly to the premise of the Aesthetic Movement and also came to characterize Whistler’s relationship with Swinburne. One of the mutual interests shared by Whistler and Swinburne was in the writing of Charles Baudelaire and Edgar Allen Poe. Swinburne may have originally been drawn to Poe through Baudelaire’s writing. Baudelaire had discovered the American writer in 1849 and contributed to his posthumous fame in France, along with Stéphane Mallarmé who translated Poe’s poetry, and described him as “a genius who has exercised in France an influence equal to that of our most venerated masters.”24 Although Swinburne may have known Poe’s work through the writing and translation of Baudelaire and Mallarmé, it was Whistler who shared his passion for Poe’s fascinating essay, “The Philosophy of Composition.”25 First published in 1846, for Graham’s Magazine, Poe’s analysis of his poem “The Raven” appealed to both Whistler and Swinburne for its systematic rather than romantic approach. One of Poe’s key arguments is the importance of beauty over moral truth as an aim for poetry: “Now I designate Beauty as the province of the poem, merely because it is an obvious rule of Art that effects should be made to spring from direct causes.”26 Another aspect of Poe reflected in Swinburne’s poetic reading of Whistler’s The Little White Girl, is Poe’s interest in melancholic beauty: Regarding, then, Beauty as my province, my next question referred to the tone of its highest manifestation—and all experience has shown that this tone is one of sadness. Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears. Melancholy is thus the most legitimate of all the poetical tones.27

The mood or tone of the poem “Before the Mirror” is particularly melancholic, more so, than the painting itself. Swinburne wrote to Whistler of the poem he had composed: Gabriel [Rossetti] praises them highly, and I think myself the idea is pretty: I know it was entirely and only suggested to me by the picture, where I found at

144Anne Koval once the metaphor of the rose and the notion of sad and glad mystery in the face languidly contemplative of its own phantom and all other things seen by their phantoms.28

Swinburne’s metaphor of the rose acts something like a refrain, recalling Poe’s formulaic analysis of the refrain in his “Philosophy of Composition”: As commonly used, the refrain, or burden, not only is limited to lyric verse, but depends for its impression upon the force of monotone—both in sound and thought. The pleasure is deduced solely from the sense of identity—of repetition. I resolved to diversify, and so vastly heighten, the effect, by adhering, in general, to the monotone of sound, while I continually varied that of thought: that is to say, I determined to produce continuously novel effects, by the variation of the application of the refrain—the refrain itself remaining, for the most part, unvaried.29

In Swinburne’s first line of his first verse this sentiment is echoed: “White rose in red rose-garden.” A repetition of the color also repeats, as in the second verse: “My hand, a fallen rose, / Lies snow-white on white snows, and takes no care.” This fascination with color is found in much of Swinburne’s writing and in his 1868 review he included a sensitive analysis of Whistler’s use of color in his Six Projects series: Music or verse might strike some string accordant in sound to such painting, but a mere version, such as this, is as a psalm of Tate’s to a psalm of David’s. In all of these the main strings touched are certain varying chords of blue and white, not without interludes of the brightest and tender tones of floral purple or red.30

Whistler was at this time developing his system of color repetition in relation to his study of Japanese prints. Writing to his friend, the French artist Henri Fantin-Latour, he explained: with the canvas as given, the colors should be so to speak embroidered on it—in other words the same color reappearing continually here and there like the same thread in an embroidery—and so on with the others—more or less according to their importance—the whole forming in this way an harmonious pattern—Look how the Japanese understood this!—They never search for contrast, but on the contrary for repetition.31

In the same 1868 review Swinburne spoke of Whistler’s contemporary Albert Moore: “His painting is to artists what the verse of Théophile Gautier is to the poets, the faultless and secure expression of an exclusive worship of all things formally beautiful.”32 Swinburne is closest to Baudelaire and his theory of Correspondences, or synaesthesia, where one sense corresponds to another.

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The correlation that Swinburne was establishing between music and color was one Whistler was evolving in his own painting, where his theory began to integrate more with his practice. Within a year Whistler had begun to use musical titles with keynotes of color, and renamed his earlier work, including The Little White Girl, as Symphony in White, no. 2.33 Already in 1863 the French critics had compared his earlier painting The White Girl with Gautier’s ideologies of “Art for art’s sake” and with his poem “Symphonie en blanc majeur” with its repetition of white as a keynote color. Indeed the French critic Paul Mantz described the work as a “Symphonie en blanc” due to its allusions to Gautier.34 Gautier’s work also fascinated Swinburne, whose writing echoed many of the same interests. His Mlle. de Maupin with its subtitle “A Double Love” was well known to Swinburne and would have appealed to his ambivalent sexuality and his interest in the theme of the double.35 This theme is played out in Whistler’s The Little White Girl, where the woman is reflected back in the mirror, and appealed to Swinburne in writing “Before the Mirror” in response. Swinburne sees in Whistler’s painting “glad mystery in the face languidly contemplative of its own phantom and all things seen by their phantoms.”36 This recognition of the otherworldly was an echo of Rossetti’s and Whistler’s own interests in spiritualism, which included séances and spiritual practices, an impulse often read into their work.37 The critic Mantz described The Little White Girl as a “white apparition” and the critic Fernand Desnoyers referred to the painting as: “the portrait of a spirit, a medium.”38 More recently art historian Michael Fried in his book Manet’s Modernism has discussed the concept of an apparition within Whistler’s work: The criticism is less unjust than it may appear: there is a sense in which Whistler throughout his career was drawn by an ideal of painting as absence or, to take up Mantz’s inspired noun, as pure appartition—an ideal that also led him in several canvases of the 1860s, Harmony in Green and Rose: The Music Room (1860), Symphony in White No. 2: The Little White Girl (1864), and The Artist in His Studio, (1865–66), to evoke virtuality or apparitionality through the motif of an image in a mirror.39

Fried, in recalling Whistler’s considered use of the mirror, suggests the immateriality of “mere apparitions (i.e. reflections)” enhances its viewing, placing it on “a more rarified footing.”40 In Swinburne’s own response to The Little White Girl, he utilizes the mirror imagery to create a voice for the woman being reflected. This is found in the middle section of the three-part poem, each composed of three stanzas. The first section sets up the metaphor of the rose; a more conventional rendering of the woman’s femininity. But it is in the second section where

146Anne Koval the poem shifts to the woman speaking her thoughts: “I watch my face, and wonder”41 followed in the next stanza: She knows not loves that kissed her She knows not where. Art thou the ghost, my sister, White sister there, Am I the ghost, who knows? My hand, a fallen rose, Lies snow-white on white snows, and takes no care.42

This interior monologue is intriguing and moves the reader to consider the woman’s thoughts. Although her reflection does not answer her, there is a moment for pause, a set of interrelated spaces between the narrator, the protagonist, her thoughts, her reflection, and the reader. There is a pervading sense of longing, perhaps for a past self, or a self that could have been, and throughout the poem a melancholic sensibility. The last section of the poem reiterates this quality, “Sad, but not bent with sadness”43 and the haunting line “Dead mouths of many dreams that sing and sigh.”44 Here Swinburne’s verse shifts into to a more Pre-Raphaelite mode, reminiscent of Rossetti or Burne-Jones. Had Swinburne not heeded Rossetti’s advice, and explored the room beyond, the poem might have been shaped quite differently, with the doubling effect of mirror and picture frame and the space of the viewer. The complexity of the mirror is particularly rich when examining Whistler’s The Little White Girl and its potential connection with photography, often described in the Victorian period as a “Magic Mirror.” Andrea Henderson writes: “Not only do mirrors figure prominently in photography of the 1850s and ’60s but the mirror image is also frequently treated as a metaphor for photography itself.”45 She explains: When Victorians called the camera a “magic mirror” they not only commented on its mimetic accuracy but also spoke to its power to make the once-familiar mirror image strangely unfamiliar, the site of defining oppositions, inversions and “realistic” apparitions.46

This apparitional quality of a reflected vision is played out in several Victorian photographers’ work including Rossetti’s collaboration with the photographer William Downey. In the early summer of 1863 Rossetti commissioned from Downey a series of photographs in his back garden at 16 Cheyne Walk, as a collaboration between photographer, artist and model, who is shown leaning her head against a cheval glass. Rossetti may have used this photograph as a preliminary study for his painting Lady Lilith begun the following year. The final composition is somewhat different though, and the

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photograph may have more of an affinity with the composition of Whistler’s The Little White Girl. It is very likely that Whistler knew of the photograph, as did Swinburne, who may have been present at the photographic sessions.47 Whistler, as a regular at Rossetti’s house, shared an interest in the novelty of photography.48 His composition is much more indebted to the Downey photograph than Rossetti’s painting, which employs the convention of his model peering into a mirror rather than reflected obliquely. The multiple perspectives that the mirror creates allows for a complex spatial play. According to art historian Michael Bartram, “[T]he mirror also blurred the borderline between nature and art, another key move in the symbolist aesthetics of the later nineteenth century.”49 In his interpretation of Swinburne’s verses, Jerome McGann explores the motif of the mirror as a device for multiplicity, explaining: “The mirror set in the mirror of art multiplies relationships indefinitely.”50 Frances Dickey in her close analysis of Swinburne’s poem “Before the Mirror” sees the mirror as an interspatial object: “A mirror creates space that is neither on nor behind its surface, but rather exists in between itself and the objects it reflects.”51 Dickey develops this concept of “in-between-space,” or what Swinburne called “interspace” as the interiority existing between reflecting surfaces, either inside or outside of the poem/painting. She elucidates: “More specifically, Whistler’s painting and Swinburne’s ekphrasis build on Rossetti’s sumptuous, flattened paintings to propose that a portrait’s meaning resides not on, but between surfaces.”52 This interpretation brings to mind McGann’s interest in the multiples within Swinburne’s verse: “Here one cannot distinguish object from reflection, dream from reality.”53 What Swinburne seems to recognize is Whistler’s modernity, recast, in the way he situates the painting’s meaning outside of conventional interpretation. Swinburne uses the term “interspace” in his Ballad of Death poem of this period: “Ah! The flowers cleave apart / And their sweet fills the tender interspace.”54 Although he is referring metaphorically to the space between a woman’s breasts, “interspace” sounds surprisingly modern. Dickey’s perceptive analysis makes a strong argument for this interspatial reading: Instead of locating the girl’s meaning on the surface of her body or on the canvas, Swinburne imagines a kind of interiority that exists in between reflecting surfaces, such as between the girl and her image in the mirror (in Whistler’s painting) and between the viewer and the girl in the picture (in the poem itself).55

Swinburne had originally intended to write about the space of the room reflected in Whistler’s painting but was advised otherwise by Rossetti. Writing about those phantom qualities of the painting in a letter to Whistler he remarked: “I wanted to work this out more fully and clearly, and insert the

148Anne Koval reflection of the picture and the room; but Gabriel says it is full long for its purpose already, and there is nothing I can supplant.”56 This addresses a curious absence within the poem. Had Swinburne included “the reflection of the picture and the room,” the more formulaic structure of mirror, its reflected frames and the painting within the painting would have further developed the interspace within the poem. But Swinburne, still under the influence of Rossetti, does not extend the poem as originally intended, despite his interest in the complex spatial properties of Whistler’s painting. These doubling and reflective qualities within Whistler’s painting and Swinburne’s poem are aspects of the image/text that are its most Modernist characteristic.57 Not only does the image present alternate viewpoints, Swinburne’s verse also presents alternative perspectives; with both allowing for multiple meanings or narratives. This construction accords with Charles Taylor’s modernist conception of the self: “not so much in the work as in a space the work sets up; not in the words or images or objects evoked, but between them. Instead of an epiphany of being, we have something like an epiphany of inter-spaces.”58 This conceptualization of the interspace and the modern lens of photography seen through the mirror are also evident in the work of the amateur photographer, Clementina, Lady Hawarden. Her unique photographs of her daughters posed within their home often show a doubling, both in her use of the mirror and its reflective surfaces and in the intentional doubling of the sisters. There is a sense of the intangible interspace of Swinburne’s poetry that intervenes between figure, object, reflection and viewer that is further complicated by the technology of the camera as a reproductive or doubling technology in and of itself. Hawarden was a close family friend of Whistler’s brother-in-law, the printmaker Francis Seymour Haden, who was also the Hawarden family physician. Virginia Dodier has established how Haden, in fact, used several of Hawarden’s photographs as compositional material for his own etchings. The Hawarden family also collected some of Haden’s prints.59 It is very plausible that Whistler may have known the work of Hawarden and was influenced by the mirror imagery that she frequently used in her photographs. Although Hawarden died in 1865, her work was known through exhibitions of the Photographic Society in the 1863 and 1864, where she won silver medals and her photographs were much admired by Oscar Rejlander and Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll). Dodgson, who frequently visited the Photographic Society exhibitions, wrote in his diary on June 23, 1864: “The best of the life-ones were Lady Hawarden’s.”60 Dodgson also owned a collection of five photographs by Hawarden, purchased in that same year.61

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It is curious to think of Lewis Carroll writing Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There, published in 1871 as a sequel to Alice in Wonderland, after looking at Hawarden’s photographs.62 The notion of the “Magic Mirror” is made literal through Alice’s fantastical adventures. In Alice’s transition of passing from one world to another through a looking glass there is a suggestion of the rite of passage as she moves from girlhood to adulthood.63 In Hawarden’s imagery this reading is implicit as she presents her daughters posing and dressing up, in the transitional stage to womanhood, what Griselda Pollock in “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity” describes as “critical turning-points of the feminine.”64 This subject of girl or woman before the mirror, as shown in the work of Whistler, Swinburne, Rossetti and Hawarden is metaphorically rich and telling of this Victorian obsession with female sexuality. Returning to the close allegiance between Whistler and Swinburne, what proves most striking is how they worked within a certain modernist ideology. Both poet and painter shift the gaze from the sitter as object to a new subjectivity that can be located both inside and outside the frame. Similar to Manet’s Olympia, based on a poem by Zacharie Astruc, this interaction between image and text can be connected to shifts in thinking about the complexity of subjectivity and the modernity of the women represented.65 In 1867 Emile Zola wrote a pamphlet on Manet’s work and was one of the first critics to use a formalist vocabulary to describe Olympia. This is a persuasive link to Swinburne’s writing on Whistler and to their mutual interest in the formulaic analysis presented by Poe. The avant-garde ideology of France was not far from the avant-garde in England with Whistler and Swinburne in the forefront. More engaging is that Manet may have looked at the complex spatial structure within Whistler’s The Little White Girl and possibly Swinburne’s poem as a way into his Bar at the Folies Bèrger of 1882. This complex play of reflected surfaces and spatial ambiguity, as shown in these works, contributes to the larger evolving narrative of Modernism.

Notes 1. Algernon Charles Swinburne, “Before the Mirror,” “(Verses written under a Picture) Inscribed to J. A. Whistler,” in The Complete Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne, vol. 1, ed. Edmund Gosse and Thomas James Wise (New York: Russell & Russell, 1968), 261, lines 47–49. Originally published in Laus Veneris, and other Poems and Ballads, 1866. 2. James McNeill Whistler letter to Algernon Charles Swinburne, reprinted in Whistler, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1924), 260. 3. Whistler performed the “Ten O’Clock Lecture” before an audience at 10 pm Prince’s Hall, Piccadilly, 20 February 1885. By 1888 the lecture was printed into a pamphlet

150Anne Koval and he asked a reluctant Swinburne to review it for the Fortnightly Review. The review was partially reprinted in Whistler, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, 250–58. 4. Whistler, letter to the Morning Post, August 6, 1902, reprinted in Elizabeth Robins Pennell and Joseph Pennell, The Life of James McNeill Whistler, vol. 2 (London: William Heinemann, 1908), 280. 5. Robin Spencer, James McNeill Whistler (London: Tate Publishing, 2003), 61. 6. Edgar Allan Poe in his essay “The Poetic Principle,” 1848, writes on what he calls the “heresy of The Didactic,” reprinted in ed. Eric Warner and Graham Hough, Strangeness and Beauty: An Anthology of Aesthetic Criticism, 1840–1910 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 150. 7. Charles Baudelaire, “Painters and Etchers,” Le Boulevard, 14 September 1862 in Charles Baudelaire, Art in Paris 1845–1862: Salons and Other Exhibitions, trans. Jonathan Mayne (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 220. 8. See Swinburne’s review “Charles Baudelaire: Les Fleurs du Mals.” The Spectator 1784 (September 6, 1862): 998–1000. 9. Julia Mary Cartwright, The Life and Work of Sir Edward Burne-Jones (London: The Art Journal, 1894), 28. 10. Swinburne to Whistler, Letter dated Sunday [April 2, 1865], The Swinburne Letters, 1854–1869, vol. 1, ed. Cecil Y. Lang (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 119. Manuscript letter in Glasgow University Library, MS Whistler, S265. 11. Artists often included extracts of poetry in their RA entries but this was unusual for Whistler who often shunned these literary associations. A photograph of The Little White Girl in original gilt frame with Swinburne’s verses attached, reproduced in Pennell, The Life of James McNeill Whistler, 1911, opposite page 124. 12. Ira M. Horowitz, “Whistler’s Frames.” Art Journal 39 (1979–80): 124. 13. Horowitz, 125. 14. Ibid. 15. Whistler’s Japonisme work includes La Princesse du pays de la porcelain, Purple and Rose: The Lange Leizen of the Six Marks, Variations in Flesh Color and Green: The Balcony, as well as the Six Projects series. 16. Elizabeth Prettejohn, Rossetti and His Circle (London: Tate Gallery Publishing, 1997), 30. 17. For more on this see Patricia de Montfort, “White Muslin: Joanna Hiffernan and the 1860s,” in Whistler, Women and Fashion, ed. Margaret F. MacDonald (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003), 76–91. 18. In another painting of this period, Purple and Rose: The Lange Leizen of the Six Marks, the same model poses wearing a Chinese robe and is shown painting a vase similar to the one on the mantle in The Little White Girl. The smaller red jar is in both of the paintings. Could one painting be suggestive of the Occidental origin of the porcelain and its makers and the other its collector or an aesthetic admirer. Both paintings show tall Chinese vases with the Lange Lijzen figures and could also work as a pairing. 19. Joanna Hiffernan was Whistler’s mistress from 1860 until 1866 and some art historians speculate that the wedding ring may have been Whistler’s attempt to show his family the significance of Jo in his life. 20. Note that Rossetti later repainted this painting and the head was modeled after Alexa Wilding as documented by Virginia Surtees, The Paintings and Drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882), vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 116.

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21. “Body’s Beauty,” published in The House of Life in 1881, evolved from “Lilith” in “Sonnets for Pictures” from Poems, 1870. 22. Originally the second part of “Notes on the Royal Academy Exhibition, 1868,” was published as a pamphlet by John Camden Hotten that Swinburne had reprinted as “Notes on Some Pictures of 1868,” from A. C. Swinburne, Essays and Studies (London: Chatto and Windus, 1875), 376. 23. Swinburne, Essays and Studies, 376. 24. Eric Warner and Graham Hough, eds., Strangeness and Beauty: An Anthology of Aesthetic Criticism, 1840–1910 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 147. 25. Malcolm Salaman, The Great Painter-Etchers from Rembrandt to Whistler (London: Studio Edition, 1914), 39, states the following on Whistler: “Then he went on talk of Poe’s scientific analysis of his own poem ‘The Raven,’ which, Whistler said, was to him one of the most fascinating things in literature. For in this he found, consciously applied to the composition of his poem, his own principle of focusing the pictorial interest, and then deliberately building up to it with careful selection of essential detail, so the complete work of art should be determined from the first.” 26. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition,” reprinted in Eric Warner and Graham Hough, eds., Strangeness and Beauty: An Anthology of Aesthetic Criticism, 1840–1910 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 164. 27. Poe “The Philosophy of Composition,” 164. 28. C. A. Swinburne, “Letter to J. M. Whistler.” Sunday [2 April 1865], reprinted in The Swinburne Letters, vol. 1, edited by Cecil Y. Lang, 74 A. 118–20. Glasgow University Library. MS Whistler S265. 29. Poe, 164. 30. Swinburne, “Notes on Some Pictures of 1868,” Essays and Studies, 360. 31. J. M. Whistler to Fantin-Latour, 30 September 1868, reprinted and translated in Nigel Thorp, ed., Whistler on Art: James McNeill Whistler Selected Letters and Writing 1849–1903 (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1994), 33–35. 32. C. A. Swinburne, Essays and Studies (London: Chatto and Windus, 1875), 360. 33. By 1872 Whistler had begun to name his new and earlier work with musical titles such as Symphony in White, no. 3. Other titles included Arrangements, Notes, Harmonies and Nocturnes. 34. Paul Mantz, “Salon of 1863.” Gazette de Beaux-Arts 1, xv (July 1863): 60–61. 35. Swinburne included the poem “Memorial Verses on the Death of Théophile Gautier,” in his second edition of Poems and Ballads. 36. Swinburne “Letter to J.M. Whistler”. Sunday [2 April 1865], reprinted in The Swinburne Letters, vol. 1, ed. Cecil Y. Lang, 74 A, 120. 37. Luke Ionides wrote: “We often had table-turning at Jimmy’s, but no very important results. He had an idea that Jo was a bit of a medium,” from Ionides, Memories (London: Dog Rose Press, 1996), 12. Also in Alan Cole’s Diary: “March 12 1876.— Dined with Jimmy. Miss Franklin there. Great conversation on Spiritualism, in which J. [Whistler] believes. We tried to get raps—but were unsuccessful, except in getting noises from sticky fingers on the table.” from Elizabeth and Joseph Pennell, The Life of James McNeill Whistler, vol. 1 (London: William Heinemann, 1908), 189. 38. Quoted from Suzanne Singletary, “Manet and Whistler: Baudelarian Voyage,” Perspectives on Manet, ed. Therese Dolan, 58. Desnoyers Fernand. “Salon des refusés: la peinture en 1863,” (Paris: A. Dutil, 1863), 27.

152Anne Koval 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

Michael Fried, Manet’s Modernism, 230. Fried, 230. Swinburne, The Complete Works, 261, line 24. Swinburne, The Complete Works, 261, lines 29–35. Swinburne, The Complete Works, 261, line 38. Swinburne, The Complete Works, 261, line 41. Andrea Henderson, “Magic Mirrors: Formalist Realism in Victorian Physics and Photography.” Representations 117 (Winter 2012): 132. 46. Henderson, “Magic Mirrors,” 133. 47. A group portrait by Downey shows Swinburne with the two Rossetti brothers and Cornforth in the back garden, from June 1863, National Portrait Gallery, London. 48. For Whistler’s interest in photography see Nigel Thorpe, “Studies in Black and White: Whistler’s Photographs in Glasgow University Library,” in James McNeill Whistler: A Reexamination, ed. Ruth Fine (Washington: Studies in the History of Art, National Gallery of Art, 1987), 85–100. 49. Michael Bartram, The Pre-Raphaelite Camera (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1985), 144. 50. Jerome J. McGann, Swinburne: An Experiment in Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 176. 51. Frances Dickey, The Modern Portrait Poem from Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Ezra Pound (Charlottesville Virginia and London: University of Virginia Press, 2012), 18. 52. Dickey, The Modern Portrait Poem from Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Ezra Pound, 37. 53. McGann, Swinburne, 177. 54. Swinburne, The Complete Works, 145, lines 87–88. 55. Dickey, The Modern Portrait Poem from Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Ezra Pound, 18. 56. A. C. Swinburne to J. M. Whistler, Sunday [April 2, 1865], from The Swinburne Letters, 120. 57. Dickey explores the link between Pound, Whistler, Rossetti and Swinburne, in her chapter “Ezra Pound, Portraiture and Originality,” The Modern Portrait Poem, 48–75. 58. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity, 476. 59. See Virginia Dodier, “Haden, Photography and Salmon Fishing.” Print Quarterly 3.1 (March 1986), 40. 60. Quoted from Virginia Dodier, Clementina, Lady Hawarden: Studies from Life 1857– 1864 (New York: Aperture, 1999), 11. 61. Dodgson owned five photographs by Hawarden now housed in Helmet Gernsheim Collection at the Ransom Centre, University of Texas. 62. I am thinking particularly of John Tenniel’s illustration Alice Entering the Looking Glass in Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There, 1871. 63. Carol Mavor explores Hawarden’s photographs of her daughters as a transition from girlhood into womanhood. See Mavor, Becoming: The Photographs of Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). 64. Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), 81. 65. Manet included lines from Astruc’s poem Olympia in the 1865 Salon catalogue. This painting is often used as the marking point for Modernism, particularly for its treatment of painterly surface. Clement Greenberg in his essay “Modernist Painting” (1961) elucidates on this using Manet’s work as a departure point: “Manet’s became the first Modernist pictures by virtue of the frankness with which they declared the flat surfaces on which they were painted.”



Conclusion: Pre-Raphaelite Paintings of Classical Texts Sophia Andres

As the writers in this collection have demonstrated, through the intersection of poetry and painting, the Pre-Raphaelites worked to extend the boundary of each, bringing new dimensions to their conception of representative form, and creating and embracing intertextual possibility.1 In this way the subjects of Pre-Raphaelite paintings, as we have seen, acquired a voice and quite often a subjectivity that was seemingly denied them by the perceived spatial stillness of visual art. The accompanying verbal texts conversely, acquired visual depth, color and enhanced vibrancy. Moving beyond the confines of the printed page, these poetic characters inhabited the world of Victorian art galleries and private viewings, where readers visiting exhibits could actually see them and experience them through the intense emotions that paintings often evoke. Thus as readers of poetry became viewers of paintings, these intertextual constructions of word and image became indelibly embedded in the minds of the spectators. Yet the transcending of verbal and visual boundaries was not merely confined to the aesthetic realm, but extended to the social sphere as well. Through pictorial reconfigurations, poetry obtained an accessible and perhaps more realistic foundation for spectators, involving them in the process of reading actual, not just poetic, sociopolitical concerns. On the other hand, poetic redactions of Pre-Raphaelite representations of gender, perhaps more so than their visual counterparts, raised questions over circumscribed conventional gender roles (no longer relevant to contemporary needs), offered alternatives and possibilities (at the time unavailable in the readers’ actual lives), and created the desire for change. This volume contains an overview of the possibilities of the interrelationship between painting and poetry, but it is only the beginning of a broad

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spectrum of facets of this intersection that have yet to be explored. As the authors of this collection have demonstrated, the significance of paintings is limited without an understanding of the poems which inspired or accompanied them. Forgotten poems often shed light onto famous paintings. A painting like Holman Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience (1853–54), for instance, elicited numerous reviews, some of them altogether misinterpreting the meaning of the painting. Early reviewers complained that the painting was difficult to understand.2 The Athenaeum, for instance, remarked that “innocent and unenlightened spectators suppose it to represent a quarrel between a brother and sister.”3 Yet Hunt’s inclusion of poetry within the image offers valuable signifiers to assist viewers in their interpretation of the painting. The score on the piano is a setting of “Oft in the Stilly Night” by the celebrated Irish poet Thomas Moore, and the sheet music on the floor is Edward Lear’s setting of “Tears, Idle Tears” from Tennyson’s The Princess.4 In “Reading the Awakening Conscience Rightly,” Kate Flint discusses John Ruskin’s lengthy and detailed interpretation of the painting, which relies heavily on the visual signs in the image while overlooking the significance of the songs/poems Hunt included in the painting. Flint demonstrates the significance of these poems to our understanding of the painting, in that they extend the present moment of the image into the past of the subject, which in turn determines how we see her future.5 Both poems extend the boundaries of the painting by evoking the woman’s memories of an innocent past and becoming instrumental in her epiphany, her awakening conscience, and her determination to change her destiny. Likewise our comprehension of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Found (1854– 81) is greatly enhanced through a consideration of the sonnet he wrote for the painting, in addition to his long poem “Jenny,” often identified as the verbal equivalent of Found. Taking into account these poems in our interpretation of Found, Alicia Faxon suggests, we may conclude that Rossetti “was quite aware that for every fallen woman there must be a fallen man.”6 Rossetti’s identification with the plight of the fallen woman is incisively apparent in an often-quoted statement he made in a letter to Ford Madox Brown in 1873, where he compares himself to a prostitute: “I have often said that to be an artist is just the same thing as to be a whore, as far as dependence on the whims and fancies of individuals is concerned.”7 As we have seen, rather than emphasizing the complementary relation between the visual and the verbal, Enrique Olivares and Daniel Brown call attention to the tension between them, to focus rather on the unresolved, problematic and ideological contradictions inherent in Rossetti’s visual and verbal portraits. Invariably whether we choose to be viewers of Rossetti’s

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pictorial portraits or readers of his verbal ones, we become entangled in the patriarchal gender politics of Victorian society. Thus Rossetti’s translations of the verbal into the visual or of painting into poetry are governed by the laws of gender rather than genre, in turn shaped by contemporary sociopolitical movements and ideological conflicts. Rossetti also leads us to vast areas of inquiry of classical texts as, for instance, Ovid, Dante and Shakespeare, rich sources of inspiration not only for his own paintings and sonnets but also for the paintings of other Pre-Raphaelite as well as classical-subject painters of this period. In “A Dramatis personae of the soul: Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Proserpine,” Laurence Roussillon-Constanty demonstrates the means by which Rossetti’s Proserpine (1874) surpasses the text and image divide by producing a multiplicity of voices. It is important to observe that Rossetti also moves beyond the Ovidian myth of Demeter and Persephone, delving into Proserpine’s psychology, breaking the silence imposed on her by Ovid and other classical renditions of the myth, to grant her a voice. In a letter to W. A. Turner, Rossetti describes the subject of the painting: The figure represents Proserpine as the Empress of Hades … She is represented in a gloomy corridor of his palace, with the fatal fruit in her hand. As she passes, a gleam strikes on the wall behind her from some inlet suddenly opened, and admitting for a moment the light of the upper world; and she glances furtively towards it, immersed in thought.8

Thus Rossetti dramatizes and individualizes a scene which does not exist in Ovid’s text. On the frame of the painting, Rossetti inscribed the English version of his sonnet “Proserpina”: Afar away the light that brings cold cheer Unto this wall,—one instant and no more Admitted at my distant palace-door. Afar the flowers of Enna from this drear, Dire fruit, which, tasted once, must thrall me here. Afar those skies from this Tartarean grey That chills me: and afar, how far away, The nights that shall be from the days that were. Afar from mine own self I seem, and wing Strange ways in thought, and listen for a sign: And still some heart unto some soul doth pine, (Whose sounds mine inner sense is fain to bring, Continually together murmuring,) “Woe’s me for thee, unhappy Proserpine!”9

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Unlike most of Rossetti’s sonnets, which represent the subject’s experience from the viewer’s perspective, this sonnet captures the subject’s own voice and poignantly expresses her sorrow. In the process, Rossetti transforms a mythological stereotype into a victimized woman whose plight was overlooked by Ovid and those following similar classical versions of this myth. Unlike Rossetti, who voices Persephone’s plight and guides viewers to empathize with victimized women, other contemporary painters such as Frederic Leighton and Evelyn de Morgan do not guide the spectators’ interpretation, simply relying on their knowledge of the myth. In The Return of Persephone (1891), Leighton casts Persephone in the cultural construct of the helpless woman who is enabled by a man’s assistance or rescue. The reunion of mother and daughter is possible through virile, self-assured Hermes’ assistance, who brings pale and almost lifeless Persephone to her mother. Thus Leighton’s painting casts a rejoicing tone to a harrowing experience. Unlike Leighton and Rossetti, Evelyn de Morgan’s Demeter Mourning for Persephone (1906) represents another poignant facet of the myth, the mother’s sorrow at the loss of her daughter. As Serena Trowbridge has shown in “Gender and Space in Paintings of ‘The Eve of St Agnes,’” there is a clear gender divide between the paintings by male painters and those by women artists. Yet representations of Ovidian myths in paintings by male and female Pre-Raphaelite and classical-subject painters are problematized by Rossetti’s sonnets, which at times blur the demarcation lines between feminist and androcentric interpretations of classical myths. Rossetti’s Pandora (1869) is yet another case in point. In this painting Rossetti seems to blend Christian and pagan mythology, for the light around Pandora’s hair, along with her vulnerable and wistful gaze, cast her into a martyr-like figure rather than as the alleged mythical transgressor. Like the painting which merges the victimized Christian martyr and the victimizing pagan goddess, the questions raised, but not answered, in the sonnet Rossetti wrote for the painting, at once destabilize the mythological meaning of the painting that incriminates Pandora and highlight conflicting qualities, thus underscoring the mythological as well as the contemporary era’s contradictory attitudes toward women: What of the end Pandora? Was it thine The deed that set these fiery pinions free? Ah! Wherefore did the Olympian consistory In its own likeness make thee half divine? Was it that Juno’s brow might stand a sign For ever? and the mien of Pallas be, A deadly thing? and that all men might see In Venus’ eyes the gaze of Proserpine!

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What of the end? These beat their wings at will The ill-born things, the good things turned ill,— Powers of the impassioned hours prohibited. Aye, hug the casket now! Whither they go Thou mayst not dare to think: nor canst thou know If Hope still pent there be alive or dead.10

As in the case of several of the sonnets Rossetti wrote to accompany his paintings, the woman represented in the painting, in this case Pandora, remains silent even in the verbal rendition. The reader of the sonnet has replaced the spectator who gazes at Pandora but knows nothing about her thoughts concealed behind her wistful gaze. Yet the series of questions invites the reader to see Pandora beyond the stereotypical constraints that cast her as the source of evil, prompted by her supposedly thoughtless feminine curiosity. Casting Pandora as the victim of absolute authority, “the Olympian consistory,” Rossetti revises a mythological representation of a human impulse into an individual woman trapped in an oppressive society that continues to exploit her victimization. No such ambiguity or complexity of this myth exists in, for instance, Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s Pandora (1881), whose stereotypical mythological version is underscored in his painting identifying her not only with the box of all evils but with another evil woman, the Sphinx. As these examples demonstrate, Rossetti’s sonnets complicate and problematize representations of classical myths, in contrast to the mythological paintings of his contemporaries, which quite often endorse past and by extension contemporary gender stereotypes. This is yet another multifaceted subject for further exploration. In “Portrait of the Artist as an Italian Poet: Rossetti’s Dante,” Martina John has examined Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s reinterpretation of Dante’s poetic works through visual means. Much work has been done on this relationship but much more is yet to be accomplished in Pre-Raphaelite paintings inspired by Dante. What governs interpretations such as Simeon Solomon’s Dante’s First Meeting with Beatrice (1859–63), an episode in the Vita Nuova, in contrast to Rossetti’s Beatrice Meeting Dante at a Marriage Feast Denies him her Salutation (1855) also inspired by Vita Nuova? How do Rossetti’s representations of Beatrice, most often a remote figure in watercolors or paintings, differ from that of Marie Spartali Stillman’s portrait of a contemplative Beatrice (1896), captured at a moment when she stops her reading to gaze out of her window? Rossetti’s triptych vibrant watercolor Paolo and Francesca da Rimini (1855) exudes vitality: from the left image representing the lovers kissing to the right one where the two lovers are whirling in the second circle of hell reserved for the lustful, yet remain embraced and inseparable and seemingly contented in spite of the pain which they endure. Inscribed on each

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panel is a quotation from Dante’s Inferno, V: “Alas, by what sweet thoughts, what fond desire, Must they at length to that ill pass have reach’d!”11 Inspired by the same canto, George Frederick Watts’s Paolo and Francesca (1872– 74) seem completely lifeless and ghostly, “visibly deathlike, more obviously shades in hell, with sunken eyes, worn out from the wind that allows no rest.”12 What sort of contemporary anxieties are simultaneously revealed and concealed through these representations of the medieval? Pre-Raphaelite representations inspired by Dante present yet another challenging field of study to be pursued. The Pre-Raphaelite Shakespeare is also another rich field of inquiry. Inspired by Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, Hunt’s Claudio and Isabella (1850–53), for instance, received negative reviews by critics abiding by traditional gender constructs. “Why should all the forms be so odd, quaint, and repulsive?” the critic of the Eclectic Review asks in his review of this painting. The review continues: “was it needful that Isabella should be commonplace in countenance, and uncouth in general appearance? … [W]as it imperatively necessary … that Claudio should be high shouldered, wooden in frame, and his countenance revoltingly ugly?”13 The Athenaeum had also focused on the lack of idealization in this painting, attacking Claudio as “a vulgar lout” and arguing that “Isabella … never could have inspired the passion of Angelo. If Mr. Hunt will not give us beauty, at least let him refrain from idealizing vulgarity.”14 Such reviews reveal Victorian anxieties over the subversion of traditional gender constructs to the extent that they overlook the psychological complexity, as, in this case, of the moral dilemmas the paintings depict. The aforementioned critic, for instance, disregards Isabella’s anguish over the decision she must make: she can either compromise her virtue and release her brother from prison or refuse and thus let him be executed. The following lines from Shakespeare’s play were inscribed on the frame of the painting: “Claudio. Death is a fearful thing. Isabella. And shamed life is hateful.” Though the painting seems an explicit quotation from the play, Hunt complicates the viewer’s interpretation through his symbolic realism, casting Isabella in the sunlight and Claudio in the shadow, the red ribbon on the lute alluding to Claudio’s passion, the apple blossom on the floor signifying Isabella’s chastity, threatened by her brother’s willingness to sacrifice it to save his own life.15 Unlike the stereotypical, self-effacing and self-abnegating Victorian Angel in the House, Isabella asserts her subjectivity by refusing to compromise her own values to save her brother’s life. Her gaze is neither stereotypically erotic nor manipulating but reproachful and compassionate. She is Claudio’s superior, but she neither gloats nor luxuriates in her superiority; instead she is saddened by their tormenting predicament.

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Inspired by the same Shakespearean play and Tennyson’s eponymous poem, John Everett Millais’s spectacular Mariana (1850–51), it could be argued, casts Shakespeare’s “Mariana in the Moated Grange” in a conventionally feminine predicament, that of the jilted lover who relentlessly awaits her lover, pining his absence and wishing for her death. But the painting captures Mariana in the most original, unprecedented pose, wearily stretching over her embroidery and at the same time unwittingly exhibiting her feminine sexuality, which the tightly fitted, striking blue dress and the belt around her hips reveal. The picture captures a sense of spontaneity and transience, but the meaning or resolution of the scene remains ambiguous and inconclusive. Marie Spartali Stillman’s Mariana (1867–69), on the other hand, is in striking opposition to Millais’s. Her wistful gaze, by her open window, signals the possibility for self-renewal and liberation, denied to either Millais’s or Rossetti’s Mariana (1870), both claustrophobically enclosed within the domestic sphere. Likewise, Julia Margaret Cameron’s Mariana (1874–75) is self-possessed and seems rather irritated by the long wait, somewhat determined to disengage herself from the long ordeal. Unlike Millais’s Ophelia (1851–52), depicting her drowning or Arthur Hughes’s (1852), representing her moments before her suicide, Cameron’s Ophelia (1867) looks neither insane nor desperate but rather self-assured. Like women writers of the time, women Pre-Raphaelite artists undermined literary stereotypes and through their works expressed possibilities for women rather than the restrictions their male counterparts often preferred to depict. Intensely aware of the superiority of poetry to any other art in the contemporary hierarchy of the arts, the Pre-Raphaelites wedded it to their art from the beginning to the very end of the movement. As the contributors to this collection have often remarked, Pre-Raphaelite paintings inspired by poems or poems inspired by paintings cannot be fully comprehended without taking into consideration both arts. This collection has initiated research in a field mostly overlooked by scholars today. From the beginning of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood days, to the second movement, the era of aestheticism, the Pre-Raphaelites fueled with vitality the connections between poetry and painting and underscored the significant role one plays in understanding and appreciating the other. By endowing poems with a visual form, Pre-Raphaelites gave a voice to the subjects of their paintings and assisted their viewers in their interpretation. By translating poems into paintings, Pre-Raphaelite artists also transformed readers of poetry into viewers of paintings. Thus abstract poetry acquired a substantial form and from the reader’s wild imaginings was transfigured into substantial, tangible, vibrant reality. Through their intersection, poetry and

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Pre-Raphaelite paintings extended their own boundaries, added dimensions to each other, and created possibilities that each art lacked. In poetry the Pre-Raphaelites also sought a timeless quality for their paintings. Ruskin astutely observed that connection when the defined the meaning of the term Pre-Raphaelitism. Responding to contemporary critics who denounced the Pre-Raphaelites’ imitation of the style of a bygone era, Ruskin defined Pre-Raphaelitism beyond its association with the past to encompass the present and the future. “These young artists,” he contended, “unfortunately, or rather unwisely,” have chosen their name: unfortunately, because the principles on which its members are working are neither pre-nor post-Raphaelite, but everlasting. They are endeavouring to paint, with the highest possible degree of completion, what they see in nature, without reference to conventionally established rules; but by no means to imitate the style of any past epoch.16

Like Ruskin, while acknowledging the roots of the Pre-Raphaelitism in the past, modern art historians have emphasized its future orientation. Elizabeth Prettejohn, for instance, sees Pre-Raphaelite art as the first avant-garde movement in British painting; the essence of an avant-garde movement, she points out, is paradoxical, for although it adopts archaic techniques, it proposes “a break with past precedent and an orientation towards the future.”17 The Pre-Raphaelite movement then was neither an “antiquarian” nor a “historicist revival” but a “modern movement.”18 Tim Barringer also emphasizes the modern aspect of Pre-Raphaelitism, locating its “dynamic energy” in the tension the paintings emanate between “past and present, historicism and modernity, symbolism and realism.”19 This tension is also intensely experienced in the coalescence of poetry and painting that the Pre-Raphaelites achieved. Fusing poetry and painting, Pre-Raphaelite paintings encompassed the past, present and future and thus still remain today indeterminate, ever-elusive and fascinating.

Notes 1. The section that follows reframes and elaborates some arguments from Sophia Andres, The Pre-Raphaelite Art of the Victorian Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005). 2. Judith Bronkhurst, William Holman Hunt: A Catalogue Raisonné, 2 vols. (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2006), 1: 168, n. 57. 3. Athenaeum, “Anonymous Fine Arts: Royal Academy” (Light of the World. Awakening Conscience, 1854), 561. 4. Bronkhurst, William Holman Hunt: A Catalogue Raisonné, 1: 166.

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5. Kate Flint, “Reading the Awakening Conscience Rightly,” in Pre-Raphaelites Re-Viewed, ed. Marcia Pointon (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1989), 49–50. 6. Alicia Craig Faxon, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (New York: Abbeville Press, 1989), 67. 7. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, quoted in Alicia Craig Faxon Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 64. 8. William Sharp, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (London: Macmillan, 1882), 236. 9. Dante Gabriel Rossetti “Rossetti Archive Textual Transcription.” The Rossetti Archive, accessed April 20, 2017, http://www.rossettiarchive.org/docs/2-1881.sigy4a. delms.rad.html. 10. Ibid. 11. Colin Harrison and Christopher Newell, eds., The Pre-Raphaelites in Italy (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford, 2010), 53. 12. Mark Bills and Barbara Bryant, eds., G.F. Watts, Victorian Visionary (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), 199. 13. Eclectic Review, “The English Pre-Raphaelites” (January 11, 1856), 8. 14. Athenaeum, “Anonymous Fine Arts: Royal Academy” (May 7, 1853), 567. 15. Judith Bronkhurst quoted by Leslie Parris, The Pre-Raphaelites (London: Tate Gallery, 1984), 103–4. 16. John Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin, eds. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols. (London: George Allen, 1903–1912), 12: 321. 17. Elizabeth Prettejohn, The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 200), 64. 18. Prettejohn, The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites, 18, 19. 19. Tim Barringer, Reading the Pre-Raphaelites (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2012), 21.

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Index

A “acts of attention,” 83 aestheticism, 1, 5, 137 “acts of attention” and, 83 Hellenic, 11 of Swinburne, 122–124, 138–139 Alberti, Leon Battista, 68 Alice in Wonderland, 149 Allingham, William, 7, 70 Alma-Tadema, Lawrence, 121, 157 Anders-streben, 45 androgyny, 9 April Love, 5 Archer, James, 5 Ariosto, Ludovico, 86 Armstrong, Nancy, 91, 92 Art and Poetry, Being Thoughts Towards Nature, Conducted Principally by Artists, 1–2, 12 “Art Catholic,” 82 Astruc, Zacharie, 149 Atalanta, 127 Athenaeum, The, 48, 114, 154, 158 Awakening Conscience, The, 154

B Bacchus, 10 Ballad of Death, 147 Bar at the Folies Bèrger, 149

Barlow, Paul, 22 Bartram, Michael, 96–97, 147 basso continuo, 52 Baudelaire, Charles, 127, 138, 143–145 Beata Beatrix, 97–98 Beatrice Meeting Dante at a Marriage Feast Denies him her Salutation, 157 Beerbohm, Max, 121 “Before the Mirror,” 137–138, 145, 147 Beguiling of Merlin, The, 9 Beloved, The, 140 Blake, William, 61, 138 Blessed Damozel, The, 5, 48, 51 Blue Silk Dress, The, 94 Bocca Baciata, 140 Bonifazio’s Mistress, 68 Boos, Florence, 113 British aestheticism, 1, 5 Brooks, Chris, 9 Brown, Daniel, 154 Brown, Ford Madox, 98, 154 Browning, Elizabeth, 52 Browning, Robert, 52, 56 Buchanan, Robert, 115, 129, 132 Bullen, J. B., 36 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 121 Burne-Jones, Edward, 9–10, 107, 121, 146 relationship with Zambaco, 107–111 Swinburne and, 138 see also Pygmalion and the Image

176Index

C Cameron, Julia Margaret, 17–18, 159 Canterbury Tales, 107 Carroll, Lewis, 148–149 Cartwright, Julia, 138 Cassavetti, Euphrosyne, 107 Catholic Church, 17, 36 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 107 Cheeke, Stephen, 79 Cherry, Deborah, 24 Christ, 36, 37, 82 Christ in the House of his Parents, 37 classicism of Solomon, 124–127 Claudio and Isabella, 158 Clément, Bruno, 51 Concert champêtre, 83–84 Contrasts, 36 Corbett, David Peters, 3 Cornforth, Fanny, 141 Correspondences, 144 Cruise, Colin, 10

D Damon and Aglae, 127 “Dance of Nymphs, A,” 84–85 Dante (Alighieri), 7–8, 59, 155 Divine Comedy, 8, 52–56, 59–60 featured in art of Rossetti, 69–70, 157–158 as Romantic outsider in artistic isolation, 66–68 see also Vita Nuova “Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in his back garden,” 121 Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Game That Must Be Lost, 83 Dante’s Dream, 8, 62–68, 70 Dante’s First Meeting with Beatrice, 157 David, Jacques-Louis, 2 Da Vinci, Leonardo, 78–82 Day-Dream, The, 97 De Girolami Cheney, Liana, 110 Dejeuner sur l’herbe, 138 de Lorris, Guillaume, 117 Demeter Mourning for Persephone, 156

de Meun, Jean, 117 de Morgan, Evelyn, 156 De Pictura, 68 Desnoyers, Fernand, 145 Dickey, Frances, 147 Dijkstra, Bram, 97 Divine Comedy, 8, 52–56, 59–60, 62 subjective dimension of, 70 Dodgson, Charles, 148 Dodier, Virginia, 148 domesticity, hybrid, 37–40 Downey, William, 146 dramatis personae, 56 Dürer, Albrecht, 69

E Earthly Paradise, The, 107–109, 112– 114, 116 Ecce Ancilla Domini!, 5 Eclectic Review, 158 Edinburgh Review, The, 110 ekphrastic poetry, 77 “End of a Month, The,” 127 Evangelista, Stefano, 123 “Eve of St. Agnes, The” (Keats), 3–6 Hughes and, 5, 17, 20–21, 25 Hunt and, 17, 21–22 Millais and, 5, 17, 19–20, 26 popularity with painters, 17 Siddal and, 5–6, 17, 22, 24–27 text of, 17–19 Eve of St Agnes, The (Hughes), 5, 17, 20–21 Eve of St Agnes, The (Millais), 5, 17, 19–20, 26–27 Eve of St Agnes, The (Siddal), 5, 17, 22, 24–27 Every-Day Book, The, 22

F Fantin-Latour, Henri, 144 “Faustine,” 11, 122, 127–132 Faxon, Alicia Craig, 92, 96–97, 154 Fazio’s Mistress, 140 Fiction in the Age of Photography, 91

177

Index First Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice, The (Dante Drawing an Angel), 66–67 self-reflexivity in, 68–69 Flight of Madeline and Porphyro during the Drunkenness Attending the Revelry, The, 3, 5, 17 Flint, Kate, 154 Flogging Block, The, 127 Ford, Colin, 94, 96–97, 102 “For Our Lady of the Rocks,” 78–81 Fortnightly Review, 137 Found, 154 Fra Angelico Painting, 68 Framing the Victorians, 91 “Francesca da Rimini,” 8 Francis I, 78 Fra Pace, 68 Freedberg, David, 114 Fried, Michael, 145

G

Hawarden, Lady, 11, 148–149 Heart Desires, The, 114 Hellenic Aestheticism, 11 Helsinger, Elizabeth, 12, 83, 84 Henderson, Andrea, 146 heterogeneity, 30 Hiffernan, Joanna, 141–142 Holman Hunt, William, 2–6, 20, 38, 121, 154 Claudio and Isabella, 158 “Eve of St. Agnes, The” and, 17, 21–22, 27 Rossetti and, 77–78 Holy Spirit, the, 39 homosexuality, 9, 122, 127 Hone, William, 22 Horowitz, Ira, 140 House of Life, The, 56, 88, 97, 102, 143 How They Met Themselves, 98 Hughes, Arthur, 5, 17, 20–21, 25, 159 hybrid domesticity in Lady of Shalott, 37–40

Garden of Prosperine, The, 48 Gautier, Théophile, 138, 142, 144, 145 General Instruction of the Roman Missal, The, 36 Germ, The, 1–2, 12, 78, 81, 84–85, 88 Giorgione Painting, 68 Girlhood of Mary Virgin, The, 3, 40, 78, 140 Godhead Fires, The, 108, 115–118 Goldberg, Gail Lynn, 81 Gordon, Mary, 128 Gothic Revival, 36 Graham, William, 62 Graham’s Magazine, 143 Greco-Roman culture, 121–123 Green-Lewis, Jennifer, 91–92

I

H

K

Habet!, 11, 122, 124–127, 130, 132 Haden, Francis Seymour, 148 Hake, Thomas Gordon, 56 Hand Refrains, The, 108–115 Harrison, Antony, 27

Keats, John, 3, 5–6, 17–18, 20, 22–24 see also “Eve of St. Agnes, The” (Keats) Kern, Stephen, 111 “King Arthur and the Weeping Queens,” 7

Illustrated London News, 9 “In an Artist’s Studio,” 97 “in-between-space,” 147 Inferno, 158 Ingres, 86 Isabella, 3 “Isabella, or the Pot of Basil,” 3

J Jeffers, Thomas J., 37–38 John, Martina, 157 Joshua, Essaka, 112

178Index King Cophetua, 116 “King Cophetua and The Beggar Maid,” 4 Kirchhoff, Frederick, 113–114

L La Donna della Finestra, 8, 53–54, 60, 64–66 self-reflexivity in, 68, 70 Lady Lilith, 11, 138, 140–143, 146 “Lady of Shalott, The,” 3, 4, 6 popularity of, 29 Siddal and, 30–32 text of, 29–30 Lady of Shalott, The (Siddal), 30–32 collapsing Medievalism in, 32–36 hybrid domesticity in, 37–40 Landow, George, 27 La Pia de’ Tolomei, 70 Laus Veneris and other Poems and Ballads, 9, 138 La voix verticale (The vertical voice), 51 Lear, Edward, 154 Le Chant d’Amour, 9 Lectures on Art, 93 Leighton, Frederic, 156 Lesbia Brandon, 127 Les Fleurs du Mal, 127, 138 Little White Girl, The, 11, 138–149 “Lord, May I Come?”, 24–25 Love Among the Ruins, 116 Love Leading the Pilgrim, 117

M Mademoiselle de Maupin, 142, 145 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 143 Mallock, W. H., 112 Malory, Thomas, 7, 33 Mancoff, Debra M., 92, 96–97 Manet, Édouard, 138, 149 Manet’s Modernism, 145 Mantegna, Andrea, 84–85 Mantz, Paul, 145 Mariana (Cameron), 159

Mariana (Millais), 5, 159 Mariana (Rossetti), 159 Mariana (Stillman), 159 Marsh, Jan, 26 “Mary’s Girlhood,” 3 Massey, Doreen, 30 Masson, David, 3 McGann, Jerome, 61, 83, 147 Measure for Measure, 158 Medievalism, collapsing, 32–36 Meeting of Lancelot and Guinevere, The, 5 Memling, Hans, 8, 69, 81–83 Meredith, George, 127 Metamorphoses, 46, 108 middle-class constructs of domesticity, 39–40 Millais, John Everett, 3, 17, 22, 26–27, 59 Christ in the House of his Parents, 37 Mariana, 5, 159 Ophelia, 159 Miller, Jane M., 113 mise en abyme, 50, 68 mise-en-scène, 88 Mitchell, W. J. T., 8, 77 Modernism, 149, 160 Modern Painters, 2 Monna Vanna, 140 Moon and Sleep or Night Looking upon Sleep her Beloved Child, The, 10 Moore, Albert, 144 Moore, Thomas, 154 Morley, Henry, 132 Morley, John, 132 Morris, Jane, 7–9, 45, 55, 64, 70 actual appearance of, 92, 94, 96, 102 chalk portrait of, 98 Rossetti’s depictions of, 96–97 “Sonnet X,” 91–93, 97–102 Morris, William, 10, 107, 121 see also Pygmalion and the Image Morte d’Arthur, 33 Moxon, Edward, 3–4, 7, 26, 29, 70 Mrs. Morris in a Blue Dress, 98 Mrs. William Morris, 94 Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine, 8, 82–83

179

Index

N New Life, The, 8, 52–54 Normand, Ernest, 115 Notes on Architecture and Art, 126 Novak, Daniel, 91, 93, 94, 101

O Olivares, Enrique, 154 Olympia, 149 Ophelia (Cameron), 159 Ophelia (Millais), 159 Orientalist painting, 140–142 Orlando, 86 Østermark-Johansen, Lene, 115 Our Lady of the Rocks, 82 Ovid, 46, 111–112, 115, 117, 155–156 Oxford English Dictionary, 30

P “Palace of Art, The,” 4 Pandora (Alma-Tadema), 157 Pandora (Rossetti), 94, 95, 156–157 Paolo and Francesca da Rimini (Rossetti), 157 Paolo and Francesca da Rimini (Watts), 158 Parnassus, 84–85 Parsons, John Robert, 94, 101 Pater, Walter, 45, 122–123, 127 Pearce, Lynn, 5 “Philosophy of Composition,” 144 photography, 11 as “magic mirror,” 146–147 as “raw material,” 94 realism standard set by, 92–93, 101 Rossetti and, 91–102 Picture Theory, 77 Plasa, Carl, 34 Poe, Edgar Allen, 143–144, 149 Poems, 4, 70 Poems and Ballads, 123, 127–129, 138 Poetry (Solomon), 10

Poetry in the Pre-Raphaelite Arts: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris, 12 Portrait, The, 94 “Portrait, The,” 9, 91 “Portrait of the Artist as an Italian Poet: Rossetti’s Dante,” 157 Potwin, L. S., 33 Poulson, Christine, 5 Poynter, Edward John, 121 Pre-Raphaelite art emergence of, 1 fundamental principles of, 1–13 as fusion of poetry with painting, 2–5, 153–160 Shakespeare and, 155, 158–159 significance of Keats to, 18 women and, 6, 9–10, 12, 27, 159 Pre-Raphaelite Body, The, 36 Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 1, 77, 126 Pre-Raphaelite Illustrators, The, 4 Pre-Raphaelitism: Poetry and Painting, 13 Prettejohn, Elizabeth, 5, 9, 18–19, 160 Princess, The, 154 “Proserpina,” 155 prosopopeia, 51 Prosperine, 7, 45–52, 155 Divine Comedy and, 52–56 prosopopeia in, 51 Pugin, Augustus, 36 Purple and Rose: The Lange Lijzen of the Six Marks, 140 Pygmalion (Scott), 115 Pygmalion and Galatea, 115 Pygmalion and the Image, 10, 107–109 The Godhead Fires, 108, 115–118 The Hand Refrains, 108–115 Pygmalion and the Image (Tenniel), 115 Pygmalion of the Pre-Raphaelite Painters, The, 110 “Pygmalion the Sculptor,” 115

R Raphael, 86 “Reading the Awakening Conscience Rightly,” 154

180Index realism, 92–93 Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 91 Rejlander, Oscar, 148 Renaissance, The, 84 Return of Persephone, The, 156 Reverie, 94, 96 Riede, David, 123 Roger Delivering Angelica, 86–89 Roman de la Rose, 117 Roseleaf, The, 94, 96 Rossetti, Christina, 26, 27, 40 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 1, 3, 5–9, 11, 24, 27, 38, 40, 127, 146, 154–158 “Art Catholic,” 82 artistic intention vs. subjective interpretation and, 85–86 Dante reinterpreted by, 69–70, 157–158 Dante’s artistic isolation and, 66–68 Dante’s Dream, 8, 62–68 Divine Comedy and, 52–56 double works of art, 7, 45, 60 “For Our Lady of the Rocks,” 78–81 Hunt and, 77–78 Lady Lilith, 11, 138, 140–143, 146 Pandora, 94–95, 156–157 photography and, 91–102, 146–147 prosopopeia used by, 51 Prosperine, 7, 45–53, 155 self-reflexivity in Vita Nuovaadaptations of, 68–70 “Sonnet X,” 91–93, 97–102 translation of Vita Nuova, 59–66 view of self as a poet who painted, 59 Rossetti, Gabriel Charles Dante, 67 Rossetti, Maria, 26 Rossetti, William Michael, 4, 18, 78, 123–124 Rossetti Archive, 97–98 Roussillon-Constanty, Laurence, 155 Ruskin, John, 2–3, 12, 30, 93, 121, 160 Notes on Architecture and Art, 126

S Salon des Refusés, 138 Salutation of Beatrice, The, 8, 60–66

Sappho and Erinna in the Garden at Mytilene, 10 “School of Fleshly Poetry,” 138 Scott, Walter, 24 Scott, William Bell, 115 self-reflexivity in art about art, 68–70 sexuality, 127 Hellenic ideas of, 122 Lady of Shalott and, 6, 38, 40 St. Agnes and, 22 Swinburne and Solomon’s addressing of, 132–133 vs. romantic love, 33 Shakespeare, William, 155, 158–159 Shaw, W. David, 24 Shefer, Elaine, 37 Sibylla Palmifera, 143 Siddal, Elizabeth, 5–6, 70 collapsing Medievalism in Lady of Shalott by, 32–36 Eve of St. Agnes, 17, 22, 24–27 hybrid domesticity in Lady of Shalott by, 37–40 Lady of Shalott, The, 30–32, 32–36 spatiality represented by, 30, 34 Sir Lancelot’s Vision of Sanc Graal, 5 Six Projects, 144 Smith, Lindsay, 1, 13 Solomon, Simeon, 10–11, 121–122, 130, 132, 157 classicism of, 124–127 Sonnet, The, 61 “Sonnets for Pictures,” 1, 8, 48, 77, 79–89 “Sonnet X: The Portrait,” 91–93, 97–102 Soul Attains, The, 108, 114–116 spatiality, 30, 34 Spectator, The, 127 Spencer, Robin, 138 Spender, Stephen, 3 St. Agnes, 17–19, 26 see also “Eve of St. Agnes, The” (Keats) “St. Cecilia,” 4, 7 St Agnes (Cameron), 18 “St Agnes’ Eve” (Tennyson), 17–18, 22–24 Stein, Richard L., 83 Stillinger, Jack, 21

181

Index Stillman, Marie Spartali, 157, 159 Stockstill, Ellen J., 34, 38 Suriano, Gregory, 4 Swinburne, Algernon, 5, 10–11, 48, 54, 121–122 aestheticism of, 122–124 “Before the Mirror,” 137–138, 145, 147 “Faustine,” 11, 122, 127–132 as Francophile, 140 on Habet!, 126–127 as key player in the Aesthetic Movement, 138–139 Whistler and, 137–138, 143–149 symbolic realism, 9 Symphony in White, no. 2, 145

T tabula rasa, 123–124 Tenniel, John, 110, 115 Tennyson, Alfred, 3–6, 70, 154, 159 Rossetti and, 7 Siddal and, 30–32 “St. Agnes’ Eve,” 17, 18, 22–24 see also “Lady of Shalott, The” terza rima, 54 “Thorn, The,” 52 Thoughts Towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art, 1 Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There, 149 Tintoretto, Domenico, 2 Tosh, John, 39 trompe l’oeil, 50 “truth to nature,” 9 Turner, W. A., 155

U Upstone, Robert, 111

V Vernet, Horace, 2 Victorian home life, 39–40

“Virgin and Child, A,” 81 Virgin of the Rocks, The, 8, 79, 80 Vita Nuova, 8, 59–60, 157 Rossetti’s translation of, 59–66 self-reflexivity in Rossetti’s adaptations of, 68–70 subjective dimension of, 70 voyeuristic desire, 22

W Waterhouse, John William, 3, 6, 38 Watts, George Frederick, 116, 158 Whistler, James McNeill, 5, 11, 137 apparition within work of, 145 as Francophile, 140 Little White Girl, The, 11, 138–149 Orientalist painting by, 140–142 photography and, 147 Six Projects, 144 Swinburne and, 137–138, 143–149 Whiteley, Jon, 20 Wife of Pygmalion, The, 116 Wordsworth, William, 52 “Worn Out,” 24 Wright, Thomas, 17

Z Zambaco, Maria, 107–111 Zola, Emile, 149