He painted temptresses
and beautiful damoselles, he painted beauties that he wanted to bed.
He was inspired by
drugs and alcohol and he was mortified by criticism like a schoolboy
would be.
He would let himself
down badly by exhuming his wife corpse to retrieve a book of poetry
that he had buried with her because he was so overcome with grief.
And then he was not.
His three main muse
that he painted were from different backgrounds, one was a prostitute
another a wife and the other a wife of one of his best friends, his
forbidden love, Jane.
His father was a
political radical who had to leave his home town because of his views
and the failed uprising of his town in 1820.
He was born in London
and took up the modern practice of the time, of being enticed into
the past.
The past of Arthurian
legends and great Knights doing great deeds by saving damsels in
distress.
But he was the son of
an exile and his father wanted to return to Italy to rejoin the
revolution. He became frustrated.
He rebelled at the
Royal academy lacking the patience to study and he joined, along with
William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais The Pre Raphaelites and
they played out their Arthurian ideals. He was named after the doomed
poet Dante.
With the formation of
the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood the rules were simple.
To produce
work, through a code of honour spelt out in their manifesto.
To have
genuine ideas to express, to study nature, and to sympathise with
what was heartfelt serious and direct in past art and produce good
art and sculpture.
Before Raphael art is
self expressing they proclaimed and they wanted to return to simple
art. Flemish art would also inspire them and the fresco painters of
the medieval past showed them the way to the future. Rossetti would
cross Van Eyk with Botticelli in 'Behold the Handmaiden of the Lord'.
The paint was thinly applied and full of symbolic meaning with its
claustrophobic set up.
His ideals of women
would take him on his own journey, but his critics did not care for
the Pre Raphaelites flatness and Rossetti hated them and gave up this
style.
Not surprising when you
see 'The Childhood of the Virgin' by Rossetti, it is rife for
ridicule because it is so average.
Charles Dickens mocked
with the idea for a Pre-Gallileo society. Rossetti was paralysed by
this sort of critique. The ongoing forces of progress would not stop
and all around him the Brotherhood turned away to a purple idealism
of romantic Teutonic knights emblazoned with colourful tunics that
they reconstructed.
Yet they said they were
Pre-Raphael.
Libby Siddel would
define the look and Dante found Beatrice in her.
She worked in a hat
shop and modelled for another, for the famous depiction of Ophelia,
which was detrimental to her health.
Rossetti wanted her for
himself and while Gothic grew up all around him they withdrew into
their own style.
His intimate drawings
were like sonnets and his moralising scenes like 'Blackfriars Bridge'
were contradictory .
“I am thoroughly
indisposed to innumerate anyone's condition by means of pictures”.
Fanny Coalforth entered
his life while out walking she flicked peanuts at him and she agreed
to model for him. His work became erotic and sex became to sell.
“The mouth that had
been kissed loses not its freshness as it renews itself as does the
moon” he wrote on the back of 'Bocca Baciata' a picture he painted
based around an old Italian tale of promiscuity.
He looked to the
Renaissance for inspiration and he fed Lizzie with Opium and then
married her in 1860. Their daughter was stillborn this haunted him
for the rest of his life. He would hear ghostly footsteps from the
depths of his soul. Noises from outside the door, footsteps of his
daughter.
Lizzie was destroyed by
the tragedy and she never recovered from an overdose of Laudanum.
She
never woke up.
In the coffin Rossetti
placed the manuscript of his poems and he moved from Blackfriars to
Chelsea. He suffered from Insomnia.
He put together a menagerie with
rabbits peacocks and wombats, and other unusual creatures. They
regularly escaped. He continued to paint. Fanny became housekeeper
model. Her loose hair infatuated him, her hair symbolised looseness
and to the Victorians his work sold.
He painted 'Beata
Beatrix' showing Lizzies movement from earth to heaven as Beatrice
which he ladened with drug induced images that he was not comfortable
with.
He painted other
versions for his private patrons.
John Ruskin said the
work was as course as the prostitutes who modelled for them.
Rossetti then began to
write poetry and he wrestled with the fact that he had buried his
poems and he then took the disgraceful turn when hired people to dig
up Lizzies body and the dirty deed was badly done. He scraped his
dirty little bunch of poems clean of putrefaction and put in
disinfectant for weeks to quench the stench.
In my opinion it was
sick and unforgivable act, to do this unsettling and disrespectful
thing to someone he had loved.
He was then selfishly,
as usual, spurned on and was now inspired by Jane Morris.
now understood desire
whether it be unrequited, and his expressions opened up through his
poetry.
I have to question how
genuine were his loves and how much was just plain inspiration to
give himself fame and immortality.
James Buchanan said
there was no soul in the verse, only body. Ugly bodies of writhing
foaming impure art it was said.
The critics said it was
impure art from the well springs of impure life. They were right.
He was labelled an
adulterer and a libertine and his self worth was hit.
In the poem 'Lost Day'
he tried to sum up his paranoia and the lost souls of his mind, and
he overdosed on Laudanum.
William Morris turned a
blind eye to the help Jane gave him.
Was he mad, would we
call him a smack head today.
He was nursed back to
health by Janie Morris and William left the country after they took a
joint lease on Kelmscott manor.
It was here that they
enjoyed an idyllic summer together and he was recharged.
Jane was not daft, she
knew what her image meant to her and she posed as 'Prosperine' for
prosperity, the supermodel of her day.
She swanned around in
long velvet gowns and conjured up this sense of style that would
endure through the art of the many Rossetti'an Femme Fatale.
The 19
th
century was a time of repressed sexuality that he was able to key
into using muse to paint with titles such as 'Helen of Troy' or any
other historic deity he chose that he could fit his stunning beauties
into.
By now his art had
nothing to do with Raphael, it was Bohemian London in Style a
reinvention of the past for a modern age that now looks so old
fashioned to us in the 21st century.
Jane's children
strangely called him Uncle Dante and he moved away from Kelmscott and
into depression.
He tried to invigorate his art with dancers and
brighter callers but a darkness had entered his work, it was where
his head was at and he wanted to continue in this vein.
His many patrons, many
of whom were based in the Merseyside area where not happy with this
lack of cheerful work.
He lived for love and
at 53 he died in a quagmire of addiction.
He left behind a legacy
of nostalgia and dead end one directional work that went one way down
his own street. Some remarkable work.
But he did not provide
us with this look into the fields which is where the impressionists
took us. He had no desire to get his hands dirty, even for his filthy
desecrated poems. But he gives us a glimpse into his own uneasy
struggles and desires that were his dream like sequences.
He was too romantic by
far he must have studied Byron and myths.
Picasso said he was
influenced by Rossetti (and Cezanne!) and the Pre-Raphs.
It was like Gabriel
Dante Rossetti was painting his own epitaph for us all to see.
But was it quite warts
and all or a carefully selected section of his head played out with
style and audacity?
I keep on seeing his
work around the museums of Liverpool. There was a major exhibition of
his work in 2004, maybe? It seems so long ago now.
The Death of Beatrice was said by Paul McCartney to be his favourite painting when he exhibited there. (Or when he paid for the privilege by donation). This exhibtion was around the time of Linda's illness.
Most of his high paying
patrons were in Merseyside and because Lord Leverhume was an active collector
of his work the Lady lever art Gallery, named after his wife, houses
many works.
No matter how exotic
and sexy his paintings were.
I will never forgive
him for exhuming the body of his wife even though most of the critics seem to have done so
.
The Paris office of
Pilkingtons revealed that they had the use of 20 designs a year but
it is not clear just how many of Mucha's designs were in fact used.
