The Rossettis: In Conversation

INTRODUCTION

"You Say Rossettianism, I Say Pre-Raphaelitism, Let's call the whole thing off!"

SUSIE BECKHAM, CO-EDITOR

The Rossettis has been marketed as an exhibition that “follows the romance and radicalism of the Rossetti generation, through and beyond the Pre-Raphaelite years.”[1] Nonetheless, as a visitor to Tate’s dedicated webpage for the show, you will currently find that the majority of the recommended online material here have titles like “How to Paint a Flower like a Pre-Raphaelite”, “Think you know the Pre-Raphaelites?”, “Draw Like a Pre-Raphaelite”, and “Who are the Pre-Raphaelites?”. Rather than trying to establish an identity for Dante Gabriel Rossetti outside of Pre-Raphaelitism – and be under no misconception, it is this artist-poet who forms the focus of the show, despite minor gestures towards Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddall – the show appears content to embrace the association. 

This is not particularly surprising. For many people, Rossetti’s pictures are synonymous with the Pre-Raphaelite label. In the case of the majority of the artist’s most familiar works – such as those chosen to adorn the covers of exhibition catalogues and coffee-table books, like Lady Lilith (altered 1872–73), Proserpine (1874), and Astarte Syriaca (1877) – they were completed long after the disbandment of the PRB and, on the surface, appear far removed from the aesthetics and ethos that defined the group’s formation. Elizabeth Prettejohn has proposed that one reason for the continued application of the label in relation to this body of work is “simply convenience”, since “the more informal later grouping never adopted a name or slogan.”[2] However, another “less innocuous” explanation for this phenomenon is that “Modern publishers trade on the pictures’ eroticism, but they disguise it as art history under the respectable term, Pre-Raphaelitism.”[3] Perhaps for this very reason, some scholars are inclined to try and narrow the definition of the Pre-Raphaelite label. Indeed, this formed a topic of debate at the concluding panel of the exhibition’s associated conference, ‘Rossettis: In Relation’ (15–16 June 2023), where some attendees argued for Rossetti’s more appropriate overall classification as an Aesthetic artist and others petitioned for the removal of the Pre-Raphaelite moniker from anyone outside the original Brotherhood (farewell Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris, and John William Waterhouse).[4] This brings us to a central set of questions. Should we stop calling Rossetti’s paintings of pouting, red-haired, long-necked women Pre-Raphaelite? Should we only refer to him as a Pre-Raphaelite artist with regards to works completed during his membership of the PRB? Should we cease to call him a Pre-Raphaelite artist at all, and instead place him in a stylistic category of his own, named Rossettianism?

In the course of my undergraduate dissertation, written many years ago, I attempted to provide a solution to these questions. Inspired by a deep love of the realism, detail and symbolism found in the Pre-Raphaelites’ earliest paintings and drawings, combined with a somewhat naive placement of trust in William Holman Hunt’s accounting of the movement and what constituted Pre-Raphaelitism, I took great issue with Rossetti’s continued identification amongst their ranks. I was happy to acknowledge that he was an integral member of PRB and that his paintings of The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1848–9) and Ecce Ancilla Domini! (The Annunciation) (1849–50) could be identified as Pre-Raphaelite but was adamant that once he began his intense studies of sensual beauty – signalled by the completion of works like Bocca Baciata (1859) – the moniker should be withdrawn. I felt supported in this distinction by John Everett Millais’s own analysis of his former Brother’s work, as recorded by his son in the posthumous text The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais (1899): 

Aged twenty-one, who was I to discount the great Millais’s testimony as to this etymological misjudgement! Rossetti himself rejected his categorisation as a Pre-Raphaelite. He was supposedly once asked at a party “if he were the ‘Preraphaelite Rossetti’”, to which he replied: ‘Madam, I am not an “ite” of any kind; I am only a painter.’”[6] Nonetheless, despite personal interventions such as this, Rossetti’s legacy as a Pre-Raphaelite artist and leader amongst the movement’s original and later developments has endured. It had been my youthful intention to correct this record, reestablishing the “true” meaning of Pre-Raphaelitism in order to demonstrate Rossetti’s departure from these principles, thus unlinking his most famous post-PRB images from the Pre-Raphaelite label. Beyond the obvious impossibility of completing this task within the limits of an undergraduate dissertation, this was the wrong approach for a number of reasons. I shall limit myself to two essential factors.

Firstly, as noted by Millais, one of the central tenets of the PRB’s mission is the truthful study of nature. Combined with Ruskin’s pamphlet written in support of the group in 1851, where he celebrated the PRB for finally carrying out his “advice to the young artists of England” to “go to nature in all singleness of heart . . . rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing,” we might consider Rossetti’s idealised (and increasingly stylised) image of feminine beauty to be incompatible with an ethos such as this.[7] However, as observed by several contemporary critics in the late 1860s and 1870s, the Pre-Raphaelites’ fidelity to nature was also thought to include their efforts to capture romantic and spiritual truthfulness. In this vein, Rossetti’s oeuvre might be said to exemplify this element of the Pre-Raphaelite mission. 

The second essential error relates to linguistics. When we attempt to course-correct the present day meaning of a word in order to return it to its original and/or historical meaning, we commit an etymological fallacy; we ignore the evolution of language. Rather than rejecting the popular understanding of the Pre-Raphaelite label with its firm associations with Rossettian imagery, would the more engaging task for us as scholars instead be to analyse how, when, and why this idea became so prominent in the popular consciousness? These questions, like the contributions included in this Conversation Piece, allude to the further directions in which Pre-Raphaelite and Rossetti scholarship can develop. With contributions from past and current History of Art doctoral students from the University of York, the following short essays illustrate the department’s reputation as a centre for the study and expansion of this field of scholarship.

What do we do with a picture like Ligeia?

DR MELISSA GUSTIN

I came out of the Cézanne show at Tate Modern—a monographic exhibition about an artist in whom I had little interest—wholly convinced of the painterly power of his apples and jugs. As a Victorianist, I came out of The Rossettis annoyed. Visiting an exhibition like The Rossettis as a lurker in Pre-Raphaelite studies is frustrating, a frustration that stems from being back on the same old sex, drugs, and rigamarole of biography and scholarly baby steps. 

Given the constraints of a conversation piece, I’m going to focus on what I’ve been calling the Hair Fetish Room (properly, ‘Poetic Portraits’). This is the room the punters have come for, with thick-necked beauties baring one tasteful breast to be analogised to a piece of fruit. In the immortal words of David Mitchell about the Desperate Romantics adaptation, these are tits masquerading as breasts—and there’s nothing wrong with that.[1] However, the Hair Fetish Room also bares, like Venus Verticordia’s apple, the original sin of Pre-Raphaelite studies: The Model Fetish. Hardly a label goes by that we aren’t told who modelled for which body part, whose sensuality stands in for which mistress, temptress, or vampiress, who allegorises which nuance of Gabriel’s middle-class fascination with working-class women. What about this is new scholarship, or at least a newly opened window into the humid masturbatorium of Rossetti’s femmes fatales? 

ROSSETTI'S REFLECTION:
The Tractarian Rossettis

ROBYN VALENTINE

Lady Bath had further impact on the Rossetti family, supplying Frances and Christina with an opportunity to work alongside the contentious figure of Rev. William Bennett. Bennett’s ritualistic services at St. Barnabas, Pimlico, resulted in the “no popery” riots of 1850 and his resignation from his post.[6] In 1851, Lady Bath appointed Bennett to the Living of Frome-Selwood in Somerset, where, from 1853 to 1854, Frances and Christina ran a day school under Bennett.[7] The choice to work alongside such a controversial Tractarian figure was of no surprise considering the religious communities that the Rossetti family previously participated in. From 1843, the Rossetti family regularly attended services at Christ Church, Albany Street: a prominent centre for the Tractarian movement in London, under the guidance of Rev. William Dodsworth, before his secession to Roman Catholicism in 1851.[8] During the 1850s, Gabriel, Christina, Maria, and Frances also attended ritualistic services at St. Andrew’s, Wells Street, alongside fellow artists John Everett Millais, and Charles Allston Collins.[9] The Rossetti women— Frances, Christina, and Maria—were particularly ardent in their religious practice and were the most frequent attendees at the aforementioned churches, though they were often accompanied by Gabriel.

A belief in Tractarian ideals was a contentious stance to take and was particularly difficult when trying to gain support and patronage as a young painter. In The Girlhood of Mary Virgin, Gabriel utilised religious symbolism in, as Alastair Grieve argues, the “same specific way as the Ecclesiologists used them in their church furnishing.”[10] The lily for example—in both The Girlhood of Mary Virgin and Ecce Ancilla Domini—serves as a symbol of the Virgin’s purity and innocence. The use of symbols to signify the divine was a notion closely linked to Tractarianism, with the Tractarians taking this concept from the teachings of the Church Fathers. The writing of the Church Fathers was seen as distinctly Catholic, with Protestants often discounting their teachings. The Church Fathers tended to allegorize both scripture and nature, giving sacramental meaning to symbols in order to remind followers of the omnipresence of God.[11] The use of such symbolism by the Tractarians and their followers was consequently regarded as an implication of Catholicism. Gabriel’s use of religious symbolism in this way—such as in the use of the lily—therefore adds a Catholic undertone to the works. When Gabriel exhibited Ecce Ancilla Domini! in 1850, the frame included the Latin title. Gabriel displayed an awareness of the damage that the use of Latin could cause for his reputation when, in 1853, he chose to change the title to The Annunciation “to guard. . . against the imputation of Popery.”[12] Likewise, his brother William Michael was also keen on protecting the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood from accusations of being Tractarians, explicitly stating:

It was the Rossetti sisters that remained the most publicly devout to the Tractarian faith. Maria became an Associate Sister in the Anglican order of The Society of All Saints, later becoming a fully professed sister before her death in 1876. While a copy of Maria’s A Shadow of Dante is included in the exhibition, her other works are not. Likewise, it is disheartening to discover that Christina’s own drawings are not included in the exhibition. Illustrations by Gabriel in response to Christina’s poetry are present, but otherwise Christina’s work is mainly embodied through text. Christina remained devout to Tractarianism throughout her life, so it is disappointing that her personal copy of Keble’s Christian Year—accompanied by her own sketches—is not present in the exhibition.[14] Christina’s simplistic drawings mainly appear near the title of Keble’s poems, often illustrating a few specific lines or stanzas rather than the whole poem. The majority of the illustrated figures are female. This is suggestive of Christina’s intimate and devotional engagement with the poems, where she was subjectively reading and responding to the poems from her own personal gendered perspective. In Christina’s visual reflections on Keble’s poetry, we can conceive the development of her own religious iconography. Christina’s response to Keble’s ‘Fifth Sunday After Epiphany’ features a crucified satanic figure towering over three women. Christina appears to be illustrating the lines: “Sin only hides the genial ray, / And round the Cross, makes night of day.”[15] Thus, the serpent-like figure acts as an embodiment of sin, blocking the cross—and God—from humankind. Christina’s own poetry also ruminates on the theme of sin, with her poem ‘The World’ (1862) featuring a satanic figure with “subtle serpents sliding in her hair”—imagery included in her illustration of “Fifth Sunday After Epiphany.”[16]

The inclusion of Christina’s sketches would have helped mitigate the difficulties of the amalgamation of text and image within an exhibition, a jarring juxtaposition that results in Christina appearing an auxiliary character in deference to Gabriel and Elizabeth Siddall. Gabriel and Siddall are primarily featured in the exhibition as visual artists, whilst Christina is categorised as solely a poet, despite her undertaking drawing lessons under Ford Madox Brown and having a multitude of surviving sketches. The exhibition seemingly pigeonholes the Rossetti family into distinct categories of artist, poet, and—in regard to William Michael—art critic. While Gabriel’s poetry is explored to a certain extent, Siddall’s poetry is underrepresented, with only a few lines included in the exhibition. The exhibition, therefore, presents Gabriel as a ‘jack of all trades,’ while Siddall and Christina’s creative outputs are reduced to a single category. Similarly, an exploration of Tractarianism in the exhibition would allow for a more detailed examination of the lives and work of the female members of the Rossetti family—in particular, Frances and Maria, who are almost non-existent in the show. The Tractarian faith was closely entwined with the lives of Frances, Maria, and Christina, and therefore it is necessary to consider this context when exploring their outputs. Furthermore, the exhibition presents the Rossettis as being ‘radical’ but fails to explore their radical involvement in the controversial religious network that followed the Tractarians. The devotion that the Rossetti women gave to Tractarianism, in a time in which such beliefs were largely controversial, is an important contribution to why the Rossettis were profoundly radical.     

Sound and Space: La Ghirlandata 

DR MARTE STINIS

One of Dante Gabriel’s most prominent musical images in the exhibition, also featured on the cover of the exhibition catalogue, is La Ghirlandata (1873). This oil painting depicts a woman in a luxurious green dress surrounded by dense foliage. Cradled in her lap is a peculiar three-tiered harp, decorated and topped with two ornamental bronze birds and a wreath of light-pink honeysuckle flowers. As the woman plays her instrument, two girls, likely angels, listen from the top corners of the painting. William Michael saw it as a companion piece to Veronica Veronese (1872), where another musician dressed in green strums her violin.[1] Stringed instruments, such as the harp and violin, feature more broadly in Dante Gabriel’s oeuvre, including a Japanese koto in The Blue Bower (1865) and A Sea-Spell (1877), and a hollowed out folk instrument, likely an Indian sarinda, in Ligeia Siren (1873), also featured in the exhibition.[2] An interdisciplinary investigation into these works reveal several dimensions of music-painting overlap that Dante Gabriel was interested in, including the interrelationships between colour and musical tones, temporality and spatiality between art forms, and the physicality of instruments and their performers.[3] The exhibition The Rossettis tends to focus on the reputation of the models, especially Alexa Wilding, in Dante Gabriel’s musical pictures. Yet one detail often remains overlooked: the peculiar physiognomy of the musicians and their instruments. 

Dante Gabriel’s musicians, most of them women, strum, cradle, and hold instruments that are visually captivating but are often, upon closer inspection, unplayable.[4] The harp in La Ghirlandata is a three-tiered type, the strings painted so close together that they appear to overlap, rendering the instrument useless. In fact, the musician’s hair, trailing down her shoulder, is intertwined and interwoven with the strings themselves. The metaphorical relationship between musical string and strand of hair Dante Gabriel explores here has been recognised as a recurring motif and is used in La Ghirlandata to create a physiognomic relationship between human body and musical instrument.[5] Yet this ‘symbolic physiognomy’, as Alan Davison has called it, is disrupted by Dante Gabriel’s odd choice of hand placement. Indeed, in many of his works, including Veronica Veronese and A Sea-Spell, the hand placement in relation to the instrument seems to be more of an aesthetic choice rather than a realistic one. In La Ghirlandata, the musician seems to hover her fingers over the strands rather than plucking them, and in Veronica Veronese the violin hangs against a wall and the musician simply rests her hand against the strings with the bow not even in use. 

What emerges out of this is that Dante Gabriel clearly had an interest in the link between physical action and musical sound, an interest which was outstripped by his attraction to the visuality and physicality of his painted subjects. La Ghirlandata serves as a reminder that Dante Gabriel was drawn to the potential of music in its overlap with both poetry and painting. Music and sound remind us of the physicality of their medium, something we should take into account when thinking about paintings made with music, or even song or poetry, in mind.

Rossetti’s outré Magdalene

NICHOLAS DUNN-MCAFEE

It is tempting to reach for the descriptor “camp” here—particularly given Susan Sontag’s formulation of camp as a “certain mode of aestheticism … the way of Camp, is not in terms of beauty, but in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylisation”.[1] Outré, however, with its sense of being “beyond the bounds of what is usual or considered correct and proper; unusual, peculiar; eccentric, unorthodox; extreme”, more accurately captures the aesthetic positions and strange undercurrents of the drawing.[2]

Take, for example, the narrative and setting. Rossetti’s drawing is enmeshed in the long history of casting Mary as the unnamed “sinful woman” in Luke 7:36–50 who anoints Jesus’s feet at Simon the Pharisee’s house following the latter’s failure of hospitality. And yet Rossetti’s drawing, idiosyncratically, seems to transport the biblical narrative to quattrocento Florence. The external walls—rendered in a straight course that creates a strong, sharp line that darts from foreground to background—have more than a passing resemblance to the highly finished ashlar masonry that was used widely during the Italian Renaissance. More specifically the intricate bird pattern on the male lover’s cloak is, Alastair Grieve suggests, taken directly from a quattrocento North Italian outfit recorded in Camille Bonnard’s Costumes Historiques (1830).[3] The external walls—rendered in a straight course that creates a strong, sharp line that darts from foreground to background—have more than a passing resemblance to the highly finished ashlar masonry of the Italian Renaissance and underscore the effect.[4] Both details are, in short, outré in their specificity, and already part of a somewhat peculiar tradition—despite Luke presenting the woman as nameless and without identifying features beyond sin—that insists on locating Mary in this particular scene.[5] These elements are more than a simple case of artistic anachronism. It is the eccentricity of the double movement—the act of placing Mary in the scene and on a precise threshold and then the decision to transport the action to the Italian Renaissance—that makes this so outré.

The title hints at its unconventional nature. It spatially and temporally locates Mary outside of the structural elements of Luke: the house (in practice) and the concept of hospitality (in theory). While Luke 7:37 contains a gesture to the nameless woman moving into the scene, shifting from a public to private sphere, it is Rossetti who configures Mary on the threshold of those spheres: rising from the street yet not inside the house. Rossetti’s Mary is saturated with liminality.  This is doubly true when we consider her metaphysical status. Despite her resolution—the fixed gaze, upheld head, calm demeanour, and determined stride interrupted by the bodies of the female friend and male lover—she is yet to be absolved of her sins. We know it will happen, and our appreciation of the importance of this pre-narrative image relies on us recognising the narrative it precedes, but her absolution is like the central narrative of Luke in this scene—yet to be. That boundary between sin and salvation, like the open doorway or portico itself, is about to show itself to be porous and to be a boundary that can be exceeded or overcome in the outré scene.

There is, of course, one strikingly outré element I have yet to address directly: the deer in the immediate foreground. Positioned with its back to the fulcrum of the narrative—Mary’s movement across the literal and metaphorical threshold—unbothered by the significance of Christ (above) or Mary (behind). This is an original element introduced by Rossetti; while casting Mary as the ‘sinful woman’ of the story has a pictorial tradition to it, the deer is an art-historical oddity. Indeed, it feels like one the most outré aspects of the picture precisely because it sits both inside and outside the scene—occupying the same kind of liminality that the figure of Mary represents in this moment. The deer is, unlike the donkey and chickens, not integrated with or enmeshed in the scene: it is within the picture and yet outside of the narrative. In a small way, this distance from the rest of the picture brings about a kind of reading that might illuminate the metaphorical narrative at work. Unmoved by the party, the deer begins to feel like a kind of cipher or surrogate for Mary’s new life, far removed from the earthly pleasures of the scene.

The throngs of revelrous bodies, too, have a defamiliarising peculiarity to them under close inspection. The pair that blocks Mary’s path has an uncanny doubleness—note the round jutting chins, garlands, unsightly tin lips, the disproportionately small clenched teeth on both, and that both gaze at Mary in unison. This double is doubled again with the couple behind Mary who share those same attributes but also have a facial smoothness and doubled grimace-like expressions—outré flourishes hidden in plain sight by Rossetti. The pair of pairs serve, in short, to throw into relief the singularity of Mary who looks so unlike any other figure in the scene. Her body signals none of the repentance and humility that structure the biblical narrative; her act of tearing off the garland with both hands and her oversized forearms, for instance, should be read as a kind of strength and power from faith.

The image of Christ in the top right of the picture looms over this all. As Jerome McGann carefully parses: the image can be seen triply as a “form … at the level of the picture plane itself”, “more realistically, as a head in a window”, and “as if it were hung there like a picture”.[6] This is the most outré aspect of the drawing and the detail with which to draw this thought to a close. The position that Rossetti wishes the viewer to take is entirely unclear: none of these three readings can be improper or incorrect because that would require the picture to delineate the “right” reading here. The multivalent representation of Christ is striking in its peculiarity and in doing so encapsulates Rossetti’s programmatic approach: it is entirely in keeping with the outré world of the drawing.

CONCLUSION

ELIZA GOODPASTURE, CO-EDITOR

When Tate first began advertising The Rossettis, it was marketed as a “relational” exhibition. The novelty of the exhibition, which supposedly set it apart from all previous looks at Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites, was the way in which it foregrounded a group rather than an individual. The conference hosted by Tate and the Paul Mellon Centre on the occasion of the exhibition, which has already been mentioned throughout this conversation piece, was titled “Rossettis: In Relation.” The Call for Papers claims that the concept of the exhibition “suggests a different model for thinking about how artists’ careers and lives are shaped – not as the singular and self-contained subjects often presented by a monographic approach – but one that is relational, collaborative and part of familial and professional networks.” This is a vastly exciting and disruptive claim which points to a new methodology for scholarship and curating.

Yet the exhibition has proved to be a very traditional retrospective of a single artist, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The promise of an innovative “relational methodology” seems to have been a hollow one. Not only was the exhibition dominated almost entirely by the work of one artist, it was hardly reappraised in the context of his relationships–his relationship with Elizabeth Siddall, whose work is featured, is presented as a traditional artist-muse dynamic. Other members of the wider Rossetti family are mentioned biographically, but their work is not included. The artist Lucy Madox Brown Rossetti, for example, was just the subject of an exhibition in 2021 at the Watts Gallery & Artists’ Village, yet Tate only mentions her as a wife and mother. 

The challenges of rethinking such a deeply ingrained exhibition structure as the monograph are significant, but the opportunities that follow such a rethink are boundless. Continuing to build narratives of art history around “great” names, mostly the names of men, is profoundly limiting. The essays included in this conversation piece, as well as many of the papers and conversations held at the aforementioned conference, have begun to dismantle or question this hegemony. Each of the authors featured here have pointed out context or interpretation that is missing from Tate’s exhibition. The tapestry of deeper analysis they have woven through their relational thinking points to the potential of this kind of methodology to truly broaden our understanding of the Rossettis in future scholarship.