Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood PRB DGR, Proserpine, 1874

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Beloved, 1865-6

“Pre-Raphaelite”? • Raphael: Italian Renaissance Painter (1483-1520) • Royal Academy in England: • S-shaped composition • Principal figure in most light • One corner shaded • Etc.

Art Rebels! • “Aggressive precision” • English (not European) themes • Medievalism • Nature • Unconventional compositional structure • “Nothing is more important about the Pre-Raphaelites than their ability to turn the group label, which had been an image in criticism of inferior art, into a self-conscious badge of rebellion” (A. Elfenbein, “Pre Raphaelites”)

Holman Hunt, The Awakening Conscience (1853-4)

Holman Hunt, The Scapegoat, 1854

John Everett Millais, Ophelia (1851)

D.G. Rossetti, Ecce Ancilla Domini! (The Annunciation) 1849-50

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Venus Verticordia, 1864-8

Robert Buchanan: “The Fleshly School of Poetry” (1871) In all Rossetti’s work, “There is the same thinness and transparence of design, the same combination of the simple and the grotesque, the same morbid deviation from healthy forms of life, the same sense of weary, wasting, yet exquisite sensuality; nothing virile, nothing tender, nothing completely sane; a superfluity of extreme sensibility, of delight in beautiful forms, hues, and tints, and a deep-seated indifference to all agitating forces and agencies, all tumultuous griefs and sorrows, all the thunderous stress of life, and all the straining storm of speculation.”

Elizabeth Siddall DGR Sketch,n.d. Suicide: 1862 Exhumed: 1869 Poems pub. 1870

DGR Beata Beatrix, 1864 From drawings of Elizabeth Siddall

Vision, Attachment, Desire, Power “Rossetti’s oeuvre is perhaps the most sustained Victorian philosophical meditation on on the operations of masculine heterosexual desire. In his poetry and painting, he attempted to thinkthrough the operations of vision, representation, loss, connection, isolation, and erotic attachment.” (K.A. Psomiades, “D.G. Rossetti,” n.p.)

DG Rossetti, Lady Lilith, 1866-8, Revised 1872-3 “… subtly of herself contemplative, Draws men to watch the bright web she can weave.”

D.G. Rossetti, from “The 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 gave 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.

Christina Rossetti, “In An Artist’s Studio” One face looks out from all his canvases, One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans: We found her hidden just behind those screens, That mirror gave back all her loveliness. A queen in opal or in ruby dress, A nameless girl in freshest summer-greens, A saint, an angel -- every canvas means The same one meaning, neither more nor less. He feeds upon her face by day and night, And she with true kind eyes looks back on him, Fair as the moon and joyful as the light: Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim; Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright; Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.

D.G. Rossetti, The Blessed Damozel, 1875-8 (Painted after the poem)

DG Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne (n.d.)

Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood