When considering an artist’s life, sometimes the volume of
their creative output can be overwhelming.
Even for a painter like Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who notoriously had
difficulty in finishing works and died at a relatively early age, seeing
everything spread out before you can be dazzling. I adore the Rossetti Archive site because it
enables you to flick around his works:
one moment you by his side as he sketches in 1850, the next moment
viewing a work from the last months of his life. It also offers hints of interpretation as to
a development of ‘muse’, a possible hidden trail to the secrets of the
painter/poet’s mind. That is what this post is about.
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| The Girlhood of Mary Virgin |
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| Astarte Syriaca |
No-one would argue that the vision of a young man and one of
an older man are necessarily different.
The young man may be filled with bravado, optimism, untried confidence,
the older man may have experienced loss, had dreams shattered, had time wear him
down. Conversely, the older self may
have had confidence built on experience, wisdom built on years of success, and
the younger one may be a scatter-shot idiot.
Placing a piece like The Girlhood
of Mary Virgin from 1848 next to Astarte
Syriaica of almost 30 years later I think you can tell it’s by the same
painter but the difference in feeling is marked, painfully so. Rossetti is just beginning in one image and
drawing to a close in the other and I would like to propose that you can read
the most about his state of mind not in the figures, but in the backgrounds.
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| The First Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice |
Taking something like Mary
Virgin or The First Anniversary of
the Death of Beatrice, it is possible to see both inside and outside the
room. The moments exist within a
framework of a world, a greater context.
The reality of them will be part of the whole picture of life. Their actions may impact on people in the
street outside, in the world in which our protagonists dwell.
The young Rossetti’s muse is a scatter-shot affair. All seems colourful, even where the muse of
the piece is the shade of white. All is
instilled with sunshine and light that naturally speak of a world outside that
contains his vision. Elizabeth Siddal,
his muse, is firmly within that vision, sometimes dominates it, but she exists
for him within the world, she is part of his everything.
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| Elizabeth Siddal |
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| Algernon Swinburne |
The only time during this early period where the focus is
very exact is in portraits. His
green-backgrounded, single figure works of the 1850s are about that person and
need no other decoration. I would even
suggest this suited his rather ‘lazy’, for want of a better word, work ethic of
these years. Rossetti was to busy
hurling himself into the world (and the beds of other people’s girlfriends) to
spend a lot of time living in separation of it, focusing on one muse, one
detail.
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| Fair Rosamund |
A change came with Bocca
Baciata. The boxed-in female
portraits of the second phase of his life don’t tend to reference an outside
world exactly but do have a rich interior.
It’s as if his focus has drawn in a little, to the beauty of woman, of
place, of home. Fair Rosamund is a
good example of the boxed-in woman. She
is leaning on the outer side of her box, separating her from the viewer and the
interior of her room is rich and decorative.
It would be easy to argue that the women are just another object d’art
in the room. Possibly all that hurling
around and blissful uncertainty of youth had shown Rossetti that things when
not held tightly can be lost. He had
relieved at least one of his friends of a potential wife and had almost lost Elizabeth . It could be argued that the second phase of
muses were kept safely in a beautiful cage where they could not be released,
could not be stolen and could come to no harm.
While there are windows for us to view them, there are no doors for them
to leave. What Rossetti missed was that
he was still out in the world and his actions, his neglect, would rob him of his
pretty caged pets.
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| Sibylla Palmifera |
I don’t think it is a coincidence that the focus changed
again after Elizabeth ’s
death in 1862. For all intents and
purposes he continued to paint pretty meaningless women, but the wall had
dropped away. We draw back and see more
of them in such pieces as Sibylla
Palmifera and Lady Lilith. Alexa Wilding
personifies this shift, portraying a richly decorated woman in a richly
decorated room, viewing us passively. Her
passive, unfocused gaze is typical and negates any threat we may feel from
inhabiting the same space as her. Is she
vacuous? Does Rossetti intend us to
suspect that she has no more brains than the vases or the furniture? Is she merely a decorative piece, or is the silence companionable, comforting? He may
be entering a prison but look at the decoration, the security of the
walls. We are no longer outside looking at
the bird in the cage, we are safely inside with her.
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| The Blue Dress |
It would be tempting to say that is all the shifts he made,
but I feel there is a final one. Jane
Morris dominates the role of muse from around 1868, and it could be said that
in the first works, such as The Blue
Dress, she is just a beautiful woman in a beautiful room. Subtly however, I feel there is a shift
towards a focus solely on her.
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| Reverie |
Looking at Reverie
in 1868, the background begins not to matter.
It could be argued that it is a portrait so the person is the whole
matter, but very few, if any of Rossetti’s major works involving Jane are straight portraits, so in theory there should be a ‘setting’. His focus however narrows in, the rooms becoming devoid of interest, the only thing that matters is her.
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| Mnemosyne |
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| A Vision of Fiammetta |
Is it his overwhelming passion that makes him blind to all
but her? Was it his eyesight that
stripped his vision down to the essentials?
Looking at the work he did around Alexa in these later years there is
still the old staging, but in many if not most images of Jane she dominates to
the point of entirety. Comparing
something like A Vision of Fiammetta
to Pandora or Mnemosyne you can see how the woman is just part of the scenery in
one but the whole of his universe in the other.
I often feel with his images involving Jane that there is no compromise
which may be why people either love or hate them. It is perhaps a more honest representation of
his artistic spark at the moment to have the woman as his whole, his reason to
paint, his all-encompassing reason to be.
If you don’t feel the same, the images can alienate, but if you can
glimpse, even in a small way how this woman can captivate, the images make
sense.
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| The Bower Meadow |
Obviously my arguments aren’t foolproof. Rossetti pulled his muses to and fro
artistically speaking. Elizabeth was locked in the box in Regina Cordium and Fanny was the focus
in Woman with a Fan but it is during
the transition phases where he tries to bring the old love through to his next
vision and often the images jar a little or at least are obvious in their
shift. The Bower Meadow of 1872 gives you all the open air that his
contemporary works lacked, but a pandering to commercial tastes could explain
that, or even moments of reflection on what used to excite, what used to
inspire. Who doesn’t like to indulge
in pleasures from times past: a book you liked as a child, a food that reminds
you of a past love, a past place? There
is a comfort in the old safe places and increasingly as that dark, silent focus
fixed on Jane, Alexa appears in images of decorative damsels. Are they a grasp at a less confined scope or
simply a commercial play? We see
Rossetti’s fixation on Jane after the initial flurry of passion as unhealthy,
morbid and consuming (in all senses of the word), was he aware of that too?
So many questions, and no answers that explain him. Maybe that is why Rossetti continues to
fascinate as an artist and as a man.
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