Supreme Surrender - Dante Gabriel Rossetti

To all the spirits of love that wander by
Along the love-sown fallowfield of sleep
My lady lies apparent; and the deep
Calls to the deep; and no man sees but I.
The bliss so long afar, at length so nigh,
Rests there attained. 
Methinks proud Love must weep
When Fate’s control doth from his harvest reap
The sacred hour for which the years did sigh.

Taught memory long to mock desire: and lo!
Across my breast the abandoned hair doth flow,
Where one shorn tress long stirred the longing ache:
And next the heart that trembled for its sake
Lies the queen-heart in sovereign overthrow.

Millais and Sophy Gray

Sophia (Sophy) Gray was just thirteen when she posed for this painting, which has been called one of the most remarkable realist portraits of the nineteenth century.

As well as being one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Millais married Ruskin's former wife Effie Gray, who was Sophy's older sister and there is evidence that Sophy was a 'go between' for her sister, taking messages to Millais and helped her Effie elope. 

Inevitably Millais fell in love with both sisters and began drawing Sophie when she was just 10 years old. Millais wrote 'What a delightful little shrewd damsel Sophia is. I think her extremely beautiful and that she will even improve, as yet she does not seem to have the slightest idea of it herself which makes her prettier - I am afraid that ignorance cannot last long.'

Sophy became the model for many of Millais' Pre-Raphaelite paintings. Their relationship eventually became unacceptable when she twenty four and Effie sent her sister away. The trauma of the separation led to Sophy having a nervous breakdown. It was five years before she recovered enough to meet and marry Sir James Key Caird, a wealthy businessman. It was not a happy marriage and Sophy, suffering from anorexia, committed suicide nine years later in 1882. Sir John Millais was knighted in 1885 and was the first artist to be made a Baronet. He became President of the Royal Academy in 1896 but sadly died the same year.

The Seed of David Triptych - Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Llandaff Cathedral is a few minutes drive from where I live in Cardiff, so I have finally had a closer look at Rossetti’s triptych called “The Seed of David”.  It was commissioned in 1856 as a backdrop for the altar but was moved to safe storage during the war, which was just as well as the cathedral was severely damaged by a German landmine.

The triptych is found behind wrought iron railings in a small chapel to the left as you enter the main door. There was once a stern notice forbidding photography but this has now gone and the cathedral staff were happy for me to take some pictures.

As far as I can tell the work has only left the cathedral in 2003/4, when it was the centrepiece of a touring exhibition of Rossetti’s works which were displayed in Liverpool and Amsterdam.

The centre panel is an Adoration of the Magi, with David to the left as a young boy and on the right as a king. Rossetti wrote a letter to Charles Eliot Norton  in 1858 when he was working on the triptych, saying he was planning to paint "the Nativity; for the side pieces to which I have David as Shepherd and David as King — the ancestor of Christ, embodying in his own person the shepherd and king who are seen worshipping in the Nativity".

William Morris posed for David as a young man and Jane Morris was of course Rossetti’s only choice for the model for the Virgin Mary in the central nativity panel.

Rossetti's Proserpine

Dante Gabriel Rossetti painted this version of Proserpine in 1874 when he was aged 46.  His favourite model Jane Morris posed for Proserpine, who in classical mythology was kidnapped by Pluto, the god of the underworld, who took her as a wife. The pomegranate in her hand is a symbol of her captivity.

Rossetti and Morris at Kelmscott Manor

Jane was unhappy in her marriage to Rossetti’s friend William Morris so Rossetti fantasised about her as a captive goddess.  The date of this painting is significant as it was in 1874 that Morris had enough of Rossetti’s interest in his wife.  

Kelmscott Manor is a farmhouse near the Thames that William Morris used as a summer home. He signed a joint lease with Rossetti in the summer of 1871 but sent him away from Kelmscott in the July of 1874 and never allowed him to return.

Mary Shellley’s Play Proserpine

Rossetti would have known of Mary Shellley’s play Proserpine which she wrote in 1820 while the Shelleys were living in Italy.  Here is the famous prose from Act 1:

I will away, and on the highest top

Of snowy Etna, kindle two clear flames.

Night shall not hide her from my anxious search,

No moment will I rest, or sleep, or pause

Till she returns, until I clasp again

My only loved one, my lost Proserpine

Rossetti's description of Proserpine

In 1888 Rossetti wrote  "She 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, and admitting for a moment the sight of the upper world; and she glances furtively towards it, immersed in thought. The incense-burner stands beside her as the attribute of a goddess. The ivy branch in the background may be taken as a symbol of clinging memory"

John Ruskin: Trust Thou Thy Love

TRUST thou thy Love
If she be proud, is she not sweet?
Trust thou thy Love
If she be mute
Is she not pure?
Lay thou thy soul full in her hands
Low at her feet;
Fail, Sun and Breath!
Yet, for thy peace
She shall endure.

The Formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

William Holman Hunt

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a group of young artists who, in 1847 joined together to resist what they considered to be ‘degenerate tendencies’ in the art of their time. 

Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Holman Hunt shared a studio and through Hunt, Rossetti met Millais and helped to start what they called a " Cycle-graphic Society," for artists to contribute drawings to a portfolio which was sent round for all the rest to criticise.

Reaction to fashionable teaching

This idea was doomed from the start but led to a meeting at Millais's home, where they studied engravings of the frescoes in the Campo Santo at Pisa. They agreed that artists who preceded Raphael had a feeling for ‘earnest work’ which was worth more as an inspiration than the stereotyped painting fashionable in England at the time.

Formation of the Brotherhood

The brotherhood was originally a secret society founded in 1848 by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais. Two more artists,  James Collinson and F G Stevens were admitted, as well as a sculptor, Thomas Woolson.   The main aim of their brotherhood was to reform the state of English painting.

Connection with Raphael

The way this ‘brotherhood’ became connected to the name of Raphael is therefore less about Raphael than it is the history of European art and the teaching of the day, which is summed up in the following passage by Ruskin :

"We begin, in all probability, by telling the youth of  fifteen or sixteen that Nature is full of faults, and that he is to improve her; but that Raphael is perfection, and that the more he copies Raphael the better; that after much copying of Raphael, he is to try what he can do himself in a Raphaelesque, but yet original manner: that is to say, he is to try to do something very clever, all out of his own head, but yet this clever something is to be properly subjected to Raphaelesque rules, is to have a principal light occupying one-seventh of its space, and a principal shadow occupying one-third of the same ; that no two people's heads in the picture are to be turned the same way, and that all the personages represented are to have ideal beauty of the highest order, which ideal beauty consists partly in a Greek outline of nose, partly in proportions expressible in decimal fractions between the lips and chin ; but partly also in that degree of improvement which the youth of sixteen is to bestow upon God's work in general."

Dante Gabriel Rossetti: 'La Donna Della Finestra'

Love's pallor and the semblance of deep ruth
Were never yet shown forth so perfectly
In any lady's face, chancing to see
Grief's miserable countenance uncouth,
As in thine, lady, they have sprung to soothe,
When in mine anguish thou hast lookd on me;
Until sometimes it seems as if, through thee,
My heart might almost wander from its truth.
Yet so it is, I cannot hold mine eyes
From gazing very often upon thine.
In the sore hope to shed those tears they keep;
And at such time, thou mask'st the pent tears rise
Even to the brim, till the eyes wast and pine;
Yet cannot they, while thou art present, weep.


Rossetti's model Jane Morris

First worked as a sketch in chalks in 1877, the version shown here is the oil painting completed in 1879.  The model was Jane Morris, who Rossetti had fallen in love with two years earlier.  It is claimed that Rossetti portrays Jane as 'La Donna Della Finestra' (The Woman in the Window) because she helped him overcome the death of his wife, Elizabeth Siddal – but that was fifteen years earlier in 1862.

A more likely explanation is that although they definitely had a deep emotional relationship, Jane Morris was the wife of Rossetti’s friend William Morris,  so their love allegedly was never sexual and Rossetti became totally obsessed with her. 

Inspiration for 'La Donna Della Finestra'

The idea of the woman in the window was inspired by Dante's Vita Nuova (The life of Nuova), which defined Rossetti's attitudes to love and was translated by him into English in 1850.  The woman appears at the window appears when Dante is grieving for the death of Beatrice and William Michael Rossetti wrote:

'Humanly she is the Lady at the Window; mentally she is the Lady of Pity. This interpretation of soul and body this sense of an equal and undefensible reality of the thing symbolized, and of the form which conveys the symbol this externalism and internalism are constantly to be understood as the key-note of Rossetti's aim and performance in art.”