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THE CUP OF WATER

THE CUP OF WATER

The young King of a country is hunting on a day with a young Knight, his friend; when, feeling thirsty, he stops at a Forester's cottage, and the Forester's daughter brings him a cup of water to drink. Both of them are equally enamoured at once of her unequalled beauty. The King, however, has been affianced from boyhood to a Princess, worthy of all love, and whom he has always believed he loved until
undeceived by his new absorbing passion; but the Knight, resolved to sacrifice all other considerations to his love, goes again to the Forester's cottage and asks his daughter's hand. He finds that the girl has fixed her thoughts on the King, whose rank she does not know. On hearing it she tells her suitor humbly that she must die if such be her fate, but cannot love another. The Knight goes to the King to tell him all and beg his help; and the two friends then come to an explanation. Ultimately the King goes to the girl and pleads his friend's cause, not disguising his own passion, but saying that as he sacrifices himself to honour, so should she, at his prayer, accept a noble man whom he loves better than all men and whom she will love too. This she does at last; and the King makes his friend an Earl and gives him a grant of the forest and surrounding country as a marriage gift, with the annexed condition, that the Earl's
wife shall bring the King a cup of water at the same spot on every anniversary of their first meeting when he rides a-hunting with her husband. At no other time will he see her, loving her too much. He weds the Princess, and thus two years pass, the condition being always fulfilled. But before the third anniversary the lady dies in childbirth, leaving a daughter. The King's life wears on, and still he and his friend pursue their practice of hunting on that day, for sixteen years. When the anniversary comes round for the sixteenth time since the lady's death, the Earl tells his daughter, who has grown to her mother's perfect likeness (but whom the King has never
seen), to meet them on the old spot with the cup of water, as her mother first did when of the same age. The King, on seeing her, is deeply moved; but on her being presented to him by the Earl, he is about to take the cup from her hand, when he is aware of a second figure in her exact likeness, but dressed in peasant's clothes, who steps to her side as he bends from his horse to take the cup, looks in his face with solemn words of love and welcome, and kisses him on the mouth. He falls forward on his horse's neck, and is lifted up dead.

Short story by Rossetti

According to]. W. Mackail, Life of William Morris) OUP ed. 1950, i, 140, it was Rossctti and Edward Burne-Jones who first met Jane Burden. Lady Burne-Jones, in her Memorials of Edward Burne-fones, 1904. i, 168, states that Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Arthur Hughes and William Morris were all at the theatre together when the meeting took place.

Like the story did Rossetti encourage Jane to marry William, as he felt he couldn't abandon Lizzie ?

Rossetti in Loves

Henry Hall Caine, who, as a young man, was the close companion of Rossetti in his
last months, disclosed in 1928 that Rosserti, in an extremity of depression during the long night journey on their return from Cumberland, had revealed himself as a 'man who, after engaging himself to one woman in all honour and good faith, had fallen
in love with another, and then gone on to marry the first out of a mistaken sense of loyalty and a fear of giving pain' - with disastrous consequences.'

Recollections of Rorsetti, 1928, pp. 141 and 200. Caine also quotes, p. 220, Rossetti's comment on somewhat different circumstances: 'To marry one woman and then find out when it is too late, that you love another is the deepest tragedy that can enter into a man's life.' Caine's Recollections of Dante Rossetti, 1882 published four months after Rossetti's death, was silent on these matters.

Barnaby Rudge

image from Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens, illustrated either by Phiz (Hablot K. Browne) or George Cattermole.

(Wordsworth Classics edition)

William Morris read the book to Jane whilst he was courting her in Oxford

Rossetti on William

'The Bard and Petty Tradesman', from an album of 60 caricature drawings; illustrated letter from Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Jane Morris, showing the two sides of William Morris back-to-back, at left playing a harp and at right behind a desk. 1868
Pen and brown ink

Rossetti on Jane

‘You are the noblest and dearest thing the world has had to show me; and no lesser loss than the loss of you could have brought me so much bitterness, I would still have had this to endure than have missed the fullness of wonder and wondership which nothing else could have made known to me’.

Bryson, John, ed., Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Jane Morris: Their Correspondence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 34.

[Study of Jane Morris for the Virgin in 'The Seed of David']

May Morris signature scratched on glass on an inside door of The Red House

Dante Gabriel Rossetti - The Salutation of Beatrice 1869

http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/paintings/dante-gabriel-rossetti-the-salutation-of-beatrice-5563211-details.aspx?intObjectID=5563211

May 2012
Price Realized
£2,169,250
($3,384,030)

Proserpine close up

Afar away the light that brings cold cheer
Unto this wall, - one instant and no more
Admitted at my distant palace-door
Afar the flowers of Enna from this drear
Dire fruit, which, tasted once, must thrall me here.
Afar those skies from this Tartarean grey
That chills me: and afar how far away,
The nights that shall become the days that were.

Afar from mine own self I seem, and wing
Strange ways in thought, and listenfor a sign:
And still some heart unto some soul doth pine,
O, Whose sounds mine inner sense in fain to bring,
Continually together murmuring) —
'Woe me for thee, unhappy Proserpine'.
— D. G. Rossetti

In a letter to Henry T. Dunn, the artist's studio assistant) dated 17 February, 1880, Rossetti wrote:

I have had already to sacrifice to him [William Graham] (and it came very conveniently) the Proserpine you commenced and I carried on, to meet a debt which he proved (to my surprise) off] 00 to be met by chalk work, and which had got quite overlooked for years. This Proserpine I must finish, and would finish at some time the replica I now propose for him, if I know when you could set about the commencement [Letters IV, 1713]

Dante Gabriel Rossetti became, of his generation, one of the finest exponents in the medium of coloured chalks. From his 'Medieval' watercolours of the 1850s to his symbolic female figure subjects in oil, his technical prowess reached its apex toward the end of his life in his series of highly finished pastel drawings, He had started to make images in chalk in the mid 1860s under the guidance of Frederick Sandys.39 Three versions of Proserpine exist in oil: the primary version dated 1877 (Paul Getty Jnr),40 the second dated 1874 (Tate Gallery) and the final version of 1882 (Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery). The present work is the only recorded full-scale version of Rossetti's Proserpine composition in chalks made by the artist himself.

Of all Rossetti's depictions of Jane Morris, Proserpine perhaps most strongly conveys Rossetti's infatuation with her archetypal 'Pre-Raphaelite' looks; rich, raven hair and long, elegant neck, and his ideals of spiritual love, nurtured by his constant reading of Dante. Unable to decide as a young man whether to concentrate on painting or poetry, his work is infused with his poetic imagination and an individual interpretation of literary sources. His accompanying sonnet to this work is a poem of longing: "And still some heart unto some soul doth pine," carrying an inescapable allusion to his yearning to seduce Jane from her unhappy marriage with William Morris. Proserpine had been imprisoned in Pluto's underground realm for tasting the forbidden pomegranate. Jane, trapped by convention, was tasting another variety of illicit fruit.

On Prosepine, Rossetti wrote:

She is represented in a gloomy corridor of her palace, with the fatal ftuit 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.

The working methods of both Rossetti's and Burne-Jones's studios, as of those of the old masters, were such that it was common practice that the studio assistants were employed to block in the under-drawing for finished works. The Master then drew or painted the finished work over the studio assistant's cartoon. The following of this practise in relationship to the present work is borne out both by the letter quoted above (Doughty and Wahl, 1967) and the evidence of a condition report provided by June Wallis, where it is stated that the drawing in pastel was executed over a graphite under-drawing. The report goes on to state the fact that both the primary support and the surface of the work are in very good condition, with evidence of only minor restoration in the upper parts of the work and around the edges. This, for the most part, relates to the area where the original sheets of paper were joined together, which was Rossetti's normal practice.

The replica (wholly by Rossetti's studio assistant, Henry Treffrey Dunn) referred to in Rossetti's letter to H. T. Dunn of 17 February, 1880 is now in a private collection in Scotland.

Related Materials

• Longing and Connection in D.G. Rossetti's Prosperpine
• Proserpine and Jane Morris: Women Trapped in Unhappy Relationships

Love

Andrew's music room

La Ghirlandata, Prosperine (Persephone), study for The Blessed Damozel

The Face

Astarte Syriaca

http://victorian.lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/victorianweb/painting/dgr/paintings/simmons4.html

The Poetry of Drawing