Sunday, August 10, 2014
Monday, August 4, 2014
Dante Gabriel Rossetti Rosa Triplex: A triple portrait of May Morris
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882)
Rosa Triplex: A triple portrait of May Morris
signed and dated 'D G Rossetti 1874' (lower right) and inscribed 'ROSA TRIPLEX' (on a scroll, lower centre)
pencil, watercolour and bodycolour with gum arabic on paper
30½ x 34 ¾ in. (77.5 x 88.3 cm.).
£902,500
($1,531,543)
Estimate
£700,000 - £1,000,000
($1,189,300 - $1,699,000)
Purchased from the artist by Frederick W. Craven for £196 or £236 (W.M. Rossetti gives both figures).
Pre-Lot Text
VIRGINIA SURTEES: GUARDIAN OF THE PRE-RAPHAELITE FLAME
(LOTS 17-50)
A guardian of the Pre-Raphaelite flame for more than five decades, Virginia Surtees has enjoyed a long and productive career, as scholar, author, collector, mentor and an inspiration to others. Her two-volume catalogue raisonné of the works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Oxford, 1971) was a landmark study, published at a time when Victorian art was deeply unfashionable. She travelled the country in search of her quarry, and corresponded widely with museums, libraries and private collectors. I first met her fifty years ago when, as a young curator, I showed her the Rossetti drawings at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. Beautiful, elegant and cosmopolitan, she was quite unlike the normal run of earnest researchers and we became firm friends.
Her Rossetti catalogue was followed by the great Rossetti exhibition of 1973 at the Royal Academy, for which she was the guest curator. This helped to turn the tide of anti-Pre-Raphaelite sentiment and made the artist-poet something of a cult figure, especially to the young. Since those pioneering days, Virginia Surtees has continued to research and write about Pre-Raphaelite art, editing John Ruskin’s letters to various female correspondents as well as the diaries of George Price Boyce (1980) and Ford Madox Brown (1981), and cataloguing Rossetti’s portraits of his wife Elizabeth Siddal (1991). She has also written a notable series of biographies of influential but little studied women of the period, among them Charlotte Canning (1975), Louisa, Lady Ashburton (1984) and Jane Welsh Carlyle (1990).
Over the years of her early scholarship, when prices for Pre-Raphaelite art were depressed, Virginia Surtees was able to put together a collection that was remarkable for its range and quality. It is especially strong in the early work of Rossetti, but it includes many other figures of the Pre-Raphaelite circle, as the catalogue of the Christie’s sale amply demonstrates. There are star works like Rosa Triplex (lot 17), the beautiful triple portrait of May Morris, but also many unusual and intriguing works by lesser names. Among these is a group of spirited watercolours by Hercules Brabazon Brabazon (lots 37-45), who first came to prominence in 1892 when he was over seventy. These came originally from the collection of Sir William Eden, an eccentric, art-minded baronet, famous for his law-suit with Whistler, who was incidentally a neighbour of the Surtees family in Durham.
Born Virginia Bell, the daughter of an American diplomat and an English mother, Virginia Surtees, like her sister Evangeline Bruce (wife of Sir David Bruce, American Ambassador to Britain), moved in high diplomatic circles for much of her early life. She is descended on her mother’s side from the well-known Surtees family of County Durham, and counts among her forbears the celebrated Durham historian and antiquarian Robert Surtees of Mainsforth Hall (1779-1834). She has remained proud of her north-country ancestry from which she has taken her present name. Accustomed as she has been to the great world and the friend of many people prominent in public life, her ruling passions have been in the arts, as writer and collector. It was her friend and mentor Sir Sydney Cockerell, secretary to William Morris in youth and subsequently director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, who had known many of the latter-day Pre-Raphaelites, who urged her to undertake the Rossetti catalogue. Once launched she never looked back. She discovered in her research that she had a personal connection to the Rossetti story, for her great-grandmother the actress Ruth Herbert had modelled for him, one of those Pre-Raphaelite ‘stunners’ to whom he was so partial. Many of the artist’s studies of Ruth ended up in the collection of her great-granddaughter, who wrote a charming memoir of her.
Those of us who enjoyed her hospitality in the elegant London flats she occupied will never forget the thrilling effect of the works of art she had gathered round her and the library of books that supported her scholarship, not to speak of her characterful bull-dogs. She has been the most generous and entertaining of hostesses with a sardonic view of contemporary life, and a fund of stories told with rare verve and wit. As many of her guests included like-minded spirits addicted to Pre-Raphaelite art, her dinner parties provoked lively debate, scholarly interchange and good fellowship in equal measure. Her letters, written in a bold and spidery hand, or hammered out on a typewriter with a mind of its own, are masterpieces of the art and deserve to be published. They record her passions and prejudices with a pungency, insight and humour all her own, serious and funny at the same time. She has given freely of her knowledge to those requesting it, but woe betide those not known to her who address her either as ‘Ms Surtees’ or as ‘Virginia’; their letters never get answered.
It is characteristic of Virginia Surtees that, having given up a spacious apartment, she has now distributed her pictures and books to deserving institutions, to her friends and to the sale-room. The Ashmolean Museum has been the recipient of a cache of important Rossetti drawings, including many of the studies of Ruth Herbert, and a wide range of other museums have benefitted from her largesse. Her personal and literary papers have already been deposited at the Durham County Record Office, and many of her books have gone to Durham University. The distribution of her pictures and books has been done with great care and thought, and in that spirit of generosity which has marked all the phases of her life and career.
Richard Ormond
Lot Notes
The picture is dated 1874, eight years before Rossetti's death at the age of fifty-four, and at first sight it might seem a curious throwback to the Aestheticism he had explored so compellingly in the 1860s. However, since it was conceived in 1867, seven years before it was started and ten before it received the finishing touches, it would be more accurate to see it as a survivor from this phase of his development, firmly rooted in the past while the main thrust of his work had pursued a different course.
Certainly it adheres closely to the Aesthetic agenda. There is no narrative subject, or even that oppressive sense of mood that characterises many paintings of the 1870s. Essentially the picture is a sophisticated arrangement of forms and colours, in which the same model appears three times, wearing the same dress and only slightly different silver jewellery. It is hard to resist the parallel with music that was so central to the Aesthetic ideal and to which Walter Pater gave definitive expression at just about the time the picture was painted. What could be more 'musical' than the way the colour of the dresses is offset by the green foliage while finding echoes in the pink dog-roses that powder it? Or the complex interplay of the hands, twisting and turning like a melodic theme? Rossetti's friend Whistler might have called the picture a 'symphony' or 'harmony' in crimson and green. Another friend, A.C. Swinburne, might have said of it what he said of an Albert Moore: 'Its meaning is beauty and its reason for being is to be.'
The picture was executed mainly during Rossetti's second and longer stay at Kelmscott Manor. In May 1871 he and William Morris had taken a joint tenancy of the sleepy old Cotswold house not far from Lechlade on the upper Thames. Each saw it as a country retreat, but for Rossetti it offered opportunities to pursue his affair with Morris's wife Jane, the muse whose features and personality did so much to define his later work. He and his followers, Morris and Burne-Jones, had 'discovered' Jane, an ostler's daughter, when they were painting the famous murals in the Oxford Union in the autumn of 1857, and she had married Morris in April 1859. But it had never been a love match on her part, and by the mid-1860s, with Rossetti's wife, Lizzie Siddal, now dead, the stage was set for a renewal of the intimacy engendered when she had sat to him in Oxford.
They were together at Kelmscott from July to September 1871, while the architect Philip Webb carried out alterations to Rossetti's London house in Cheyne Walk. Rossetti then returned to London, where on 2 June 1872 a devastating crisis occurred. Robert Buchanan's attack on him in a scurrilous pamphlet, The Fleshly School of Poetry, acting on a constitution already weakened by insomnia, the chloral he took to relieve it and the frustration of his love for Jane, brought about a nervous collapse followed by a suicide attempt six days later. By 20 June he was on his way to Scotland where his patron William Graham had put a house at his disposal, but only Kelmscott offered the peace he craved. He returned there on 24 September and was to remain for the best part of the next two years. For much of this time he was accompanied by Jane and her two young daughters, Jenny and May; and it was May who inspired Rosa Triplex in its final form.
The sombre mood that Rossetti evoked in so many of his paintings of the 1870s was coloured on several levels by Jane Morris. If her brooding looks perfectly suited these conceptions, the fraught nature of their relationship lent them resonance and depth. One that particularly obsessed him, Proserpine, seems to offer a direct comment on their predicament, while the gloomiest of all, Astarte Syriaca, in which the goddess of love appears at her most baleful and threatening, was painted during a particularly depressing stay at Bognor in the winter of 1875-6. In fact it was this experience that finally convinced Jane that the affair must end. Rossetti's melancholia and the drastic remedy of chloral had long cast a heavy shadow over their liaison. After Bognor, she gently but firmly withdrew, although they remained on affectionate terms until his death six years later.
The chemistry that produced Rosa Triplex could hardly have been more different. Rossetti was not only a widower but childless, Lizzie Siddal's baby having been still-born. Yet one side of him yearned for children, and over the years he had grown close to the Morris girls, Jenny born in 1861 and May a year later. He had even seen them as surrogate daughters. 'I ought to have had a little girl older than she is,' he had remarked wistfully of Jenny in the late 1860s, and he would make a semi-serious attempt to adopt May.
A touching letter he sent to them in April 1868 suggests what an indulgent father he would have been. 'Here come two little dormice to live with you,' he wrote, 'I know you will take great care of them and always give them everything they are fond of - that is, nuts, apples and hard biscuits. If you love them very much I dare say they will get much bigger and fatter and remind you of Papa and me.'
But it was Kelmscott that unleashed the full flow of his feeling. The girls, he told his mother on 17 July 1871, were 'dear little things - perfectly natural and intelligent, and able to amuse themselves all day long without needing to be thought about by their elders.' As a preoccupied artist himself, he particularly prized this independence; the children were the 'most darling little self-amusing machines that ever existed,' he told another correspondent, William Bell Scott, the same day. And then there was their beauty, particularly that of May, aged nine when he arrived at Kelmscott. She was, he told Scott 'quite a beauty the more one knows her and will be a lovely woman. She is very clever too, I think, and has a real turn for drawing.' To his mother he observed that she was 'destined to be a great beauty beyond question.'
During his initial sojourn at Kelmscott, Rossetti made chalk drawings of the girls (fig. 1), attractive studies that reflect his response to their intelligence and beauty. And at some point during his second stay he evidently realised that May, now a year older and approaching puberty, was the model he needed to complete Rosa Triplex. The design had been evolved in 1867, when three drawings seem to have been made. The most developed, a study in red chalk (fig. 2), certainly bears this date, and since the other two, a pen-and-ink sketch (fig. 3) and another chalk drawing (Surtees 238B) are rougher and less finished, it would seem that they are earlier rather than later. The composition as seen in the Tate version is similar to that of the watercolour, although there are significant variations and the youthfulness and innocence of the watercolour are lacking. This has much to do with the use of different models. We do not know who posed for the two outer figures, but the girl in the middle is a likeness of Alexa Wilding, who not only embodied cool sophistication but in 1867 was fifteen years older than May Morris would be in 1874. Born in 1846 or 1847, she had met Rossetti in 1865 and begun to model for him the following year. The chalk version of Rosa Triplex, which Rossetti usually referred to as 'The Triple Rose' or even 'the 3 Roses',' represented one of her earliest appearances in his work, to which she was to contribute almost as much as Jane Morris in the 1870s.
The drawing was sold to William Graham in February 1868, and before it left his studio Rossetti had it photographed. He would occasionally send the resulting prints to friends; Barbara Bodichon and the novelist George Eliot both received them in February 1870. Meanwhile he cherished the idea of producing a watercolour version. The rough pen sketch (fig. 2) bears an inscription in which he reminds himself to 'paint large and make water colour.' An Aesthetic effect was also in view, although different from the one eventually adopted. The picture, the inscription continues, was to show the figures wearing 'black and red necklaces' and 'white frilled dressing gowns'.
By the autumn of 1871 Rossetti had even found a patron prepared to commission the picture. Frederick Craven, a Manchester calico printer, had bought from him consistently during the 1860s. Always short of money, Rossetti appreciated the fact that he was 'a very good paymaster and not a haggler at all.' At the same time he was well aware of his limitations, describing him caustically to Madox Brown as 'a grave and (let us say in a whisper) rather stupid enthusiast of the inarticulate business type, with a mystic reverence for the English watercolour school.' Craven did not only buy watercolours but most of his pictures were in this medium, whether by English artists of an older generation or the Pre-Raphaelites. His Rossettis were no exception, and it was entirely characteristic that he should commission a watercolour version of The Triple Rose.
Artist and patron were corresponding on the subject in November 1871 but the scheme then lapsed, no doubt due to the traumatic upheavals in Rossetti's life during the following year. Nor did he embark on the watercolour as soon as he returned to Kelmscott in September 1872, although it did not take him long to think of using May again as a model. By October he had conceived the startling idea of repainting the head in his picture Lady Lilith from her; she may, as he put it, have had 'the right complexion', but to use such a young model for an image of carnal sensuality was bizarre. Wisdom eventually prevailed and Alex Wilding assumed the Lillith role, but about the same time May was sitting for a picture called Heart's Ease and another chalk drawing. Rossetti had lost none of his admiration for her looks. She was, he told Charles Augustus Howell when announcing the completion of Heart's Ease, 'the most lovely girl in the world.'
In fact it was not until the end of 1873 that Rossetti began gathering reference material with a view to embarking on Craven's watercolour. On the last day of the year he wrote to his assistant H.T. Dunn, asking him to send one of the photographs of Graham's drawing, together with 'the cartoon and drawing of Triple Rose'. It has been suggested that the cartoon was the second chalk drawing made in 1867 (Surtees 238B), although this cannot be proved. Still more puzzling is Rossetti's reference to a 'watercolour' by Dunn from which he 'traced' his picture in February 1874. Here a possible candidate is a chalk drawing of doubtful authorship in the Birmingham Art Gallery (no. 40'12), although this would mean that the word 'watercolour' was a slip of the pen. Whatever the case, by 19 February the new picture was well under way and he had 'painted the three heads straight off from little May successfully.' He had, he told Dunn, been greatly inconvenienced by finding that he did not have any of the Whatman's white imperial paper he usually used for watercolours. Fortunately he discovered 'just one of those stained chalk papers which was white,' and used this instead.
The development of the design from chalk drawing to finished watercolour involved many changes. Not only was a different model used and, due to her youthfulness, a new sense of innocence evoked. By using one model rather than two (i.e. Alexa Wilding and the unknown girl who sat for the other two figures in the drawing), Rossetti gives the watercolour a homogeneity which is lacking in the drawn version.
Then there is the way May is dressed. Gone is the generalised garb worn by the girls in the drawing, apparel that could well have been created 'out of the artist's head', to be replaced by what Rossetti called a 'crimsony red silk dress' from the large stock of models' costumes he had in his studio. Nothing could be further from the 'white dressing gowns' he had once envisaged, while the silver jewellery had also come far from the 'black and red necklaces' noted on the early sketch (fig. 3). Here again he could draw on a large collection among his studio props, eclectic in terms of ethnic origin but universally picturesque.
No picture, in fact, illustrates this better than Rosa Triplex. The necklace worn by the central figure, consisting of filigree comma -shapes hanging from a panzer chain, probably came from the Ottoman region, being of a type worn from the Balkans to the Southern Caucasus, including Syria. The central heart-shaped pendant may, however, be of Rossetti's own invention. The girl on the left wears an Ottoman style filigree bracelet, with a distinctive rectangular clasp peculiar to the North Balkans, while her necklace is of a similar form and possibly origin. As for the adornments of the girl on the right, it is generally agreed that her seven-string necklace is Indian in origin. Her bracelet is formed from a large hooped earring worn in several areas of North Africa, and a pendant is attached with stylised Arabian 'hands of Fatima'. Such exotic jewellery had been popularized in England by extensive displays at the 1851 and 1862 exhibitions, followed by further annual shows at South Kensington in the 1870s. What is now the Victoria and Albert Museum acquired 1,100 pieces in 1872, and examples were available at Liberty's (opened in 1875) and other retail outlets. Or perhaps Rossetti had picked his up at one of the antique and bric-á-brac shops he haunted so zealously.
Jewellery is conspicuous by its absence in the Graham drawing, and its introduction in the watercolour ensures a more complex and intricate composition. A similar role is performed by the roses which break up the uniformly dark background in the drawing. But the greatest compositional refinement is the repositioning of the right hand of the left-hand figure. In the drawing it lies inertly on the parapet, having nothing to do and lacking any expressive purpose. By raising it to fondle the sitter's necklace, Rossetti not only gives it an aim but greatly enhances the interplay of hands so vital in the picture's decorative impact.
Rossetti left Kelmscott hurriedly in mid-July 1874 after an embarrassing quarrel with some local anglers. He was still working on Rosa Triplex, but when his neighbour G.P. Boyce, hearing he was back in town, called on him on 25 July, he found him 'finishing this 'beautiful drawing.' On 13 August Rossetti acknowledged receipt of a cheque for £196 - 5 shillings from Craven, 'concluding payment for ''The Triple Rose'',' and the following December, writing to his friend Thomas Hake, he referred to the picture as 'completed'. Yet it evidently still lacked the dog-roses in the background. These were added in the autumn of 1877 when Rossetti was staying at Hunter's Forestall, near Margate, in yet another melancholy attempt to conquer his addiction to chloral.
Craven had parted with Rosa Triplex by 1883, when its next owner, C.W. Mills, lent it to the Rossetti memorial exhibition at the Royal Academy. By 1897, when another Rossetti exhibition took place at the New Gallery, it belonged to W. Graham Robertson, a wealthy young man with a passionate interest in art and the stage, probably best known to posterity for forming an unrivalled collection of the work of William Blake. Although Robertson knew many of Rossetti's circle, notably Burne-Jones, he never met the great man himself. He was, however, devoted, to his art and memory, also owning the primary version of Proserpine (Tate Britain) and writing about him with great perception in a chapter entitled 'The Spell of Rossetti' in his reminiscences, Time Was (1931). Robertson died in 1948, and the following year Rosa Triplex appeared at his sale in these Rooms, where it was bought by the Leger Galleries from which Virginia Surtees acquired it two years later. The picture has therefore only had four owners, three of them with credentials second to none as Rossetti enthusiasts and keen collectors of his work. No better provenance could be desired or imagined.
We are grateful to Nick Barnard, Curator, South Asian jewellery, Victorian and Albert Museum, and Jane Perry, visiting scholar at the Victoria and Albert Museum and author of Traditional Jewellery in Nineteenth-Century Europe (2013), for their help in identifying the jewellery worn in the picture.
http://www.christies.com/
Rosa Triplex: A triple portrait of May Morris
signed and dated 'D G Rossetti 1874' (lower right) and inscribed 'ROSA TRIPLEX' (on a scroll, lower centre)
pencil, watercolour and bodycolour with gum arabic on paper
30½ x 34 ¾ in. (77.5 x 88.3 cm.).
£902,500
($1,531,543)
Estimate
£700,000 - £1,000,000
($1,189,300 - $1,699,000)
Purchased from the artist by Frederick W. Craven for £196 or £236 (W.M. Rossetti gives both figures).
Pre-Lot Text
VIRGINIA SURTEES: GUARDIAN OF THE PRE-RAPHAELITE FLAME
(LOTS 17-50)
A guardian of the Pre-Raphaelite flame for more than five decades, Virginia Surtees has enjoyed a long and productive career, as scholar, author, collector, mentor and an inspiration to others. Her two-volume catalogue raisonné of the works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Oxford, 1971) was a landmark study, published at a time when Victorian art was deeply unfashionable. She travelled the country in search of her quarry, and corresponded widely with museums, libraries and private collectors. I first met her fifty years ago when, as a young curator, I showed her the Rossetti drawings at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. Beautiful, elegant and cosmopolitan, she was quite unlike the normal run of earnest researchers and we became firm friends.
Her Rossetti catalogue was followed by the great Rossetti exhibition of 1973 at the Royal Academy, for which she was the guest curator. This helped to turn the tide of anti-Pre-Raphaelite sentiment and made the artist-poet something of a cult figure, especially to the young. Since those pioneering days, Virginia Surtees has continued to research and write about Pre-Raphaelite art, editing John Ruskin’s letters to various female correspondents as well as the diaries of George Price Boyce (1980) and Ford Madox Brown (1981), and cataloguing Rossetti’s portraits of his wife Elizabeth Siddal (1991). She has also written a notable series of biographies of influential but little studied women of the period, among them Charlotte Canning (1975), Louisa, Lady Ashburton (1984) and Jane Welsh Carlyle (1990).
Over the years of her early scholarship, when prices for Pre-Raphaelite art were depressed, Virginia Surtees was able to put together a collection that was remarkable for its range and quality. It is especially strong in the early work of Rossetti, but it includes many other figures of the Pre-Raphaelite circle, as the catalogue of the Christie’s sale amply demonstrates. There are star works like Rosa Triplex (lot 17), the beautiful triple portrait of May Morris, but also many unusual and intriguing works by lesser names. Among these is a group of spirited watercolours by Hercules Brabazon Brabazon (lots 37-45), who first came to prominence in 1892 when he was over seventy. These came originally from the collection of Sir William Eden, an eccentric, art-minded baronet, famous for his law-suit with Whistler, who was incidentally a neighbour of the Surtees family in Durham.
Born Virginia Bell, the daughter of an American diplomat and an English mother, Virginia Surtees, like her sister Evangeline Bruce (wife of Sir David Bruce, American Ambassador to Britain), moved in high diplomatic circles for much of her early life. She is descended on her mother’s side from the well-known Surtees family of County Durham, and counts among her forbears the celebrated Durham historian and antiquarian Robert Surtees of Mainsforth Hall (1779-1834). She has remained proud of her north-country ancestry from which she has taken her present name. Accustomed as she has been to the great world and the friend of many people prominent in public life, her ruling passions have been in the arts, as writer and collector. It was her friend and mentor Sir Sydney Cockerell, secretary to William Morris in youth and subsequently director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, who had known many of the latter-day Pre-Raphaelites, who urged her to undertake the Rossetti catalogue. Once launched she never looked back. She discovered in her research that she had a personal connection to the Rossetti story, for her great-grandmother the actress Ruth Herbert had modelled for him, one of those Pre-Raphaelite ‘stunners’ to whom he was so partial. Many of the artist’s studies of Ruth ended up in the collection of her great-granddaughter, who wrote a charming memoir of her.
Those of us who enjoyed her hospitality in the elegant London flats she occupied will never forget the thrilling effect of the works of art she had gathered round her and the library of books that supported her scholarship, not to speak of her characterful bull-dogs. She has been the most generous and entertaining of hostesses with a sardonic view of contemporary life, and a fund of stories told with rare verve and wit. As many of her guests included like-minded spirits addicted to Pre-Raphaelite art, her dinner parties provoked lively debate, scholarly interchange and good fellowship in equal measure. Her letters, written in a bold and spidery hand, or hammered out on a typewriter with a mind of its own, are masterpieces of the art and deserve to be published. They record her passions and prejudices with a pungency, insight and humour all her own, serious and funny at the same time. She has given freely of her knowledge to those requesting it, but woe betide those not known to her who address her either as ‘Ms Surtees’ or as ‘Virginia’; their letters never get answered.
It is characteristic of Virginia Surtees that, having given up a spacious apartment, she has now distributed her pictures and books to deserving institutions, to her friends and to the sale-room. The Ashmolean Museum has been the recipient of a cache of important Rossetti drawings, including many of the studies of Ruth Herbert, and a wide range of other museums have benefitted from her largesse. Her personal and literary papers have already been deposited at the Durham County Record Office, and many of her books have gone to Durham University. The distribution of her pictures and books has been done with great care and thought, and in that spirit of generosity which has marked all the phases of her life and career.
Richard Ormond
Lot Notes
The picture is dated 1874, eight years before Rossetti's death at the age of fifty-four, and at first sight it might seem a curious throwback to the Aestheticism he had explored so compellingly in the 1860s. However, since it was conceived in 1867, seven years before it was started and ten before it received the finishing touches, it would be more accurate to see it as a survivor from this phase of his development, firmly rooted in the past while the main thrust of his work had pursued a different course.
Certainly it adheres closely to the Aesthetic agenda. There is no narrative subject, or even that oppressive sense of mood that characterises many paintings of the 1870s. Essentially the picture is a sophisticated arrangement of forms and colours, in which the same model appears three times, wearing the same dress and only slightly different silver jewellery. It is hard to resist the parallel with music that was so central to the Aesthetic ideal and to which Walter Pater gave definitive expression at just about the time the picture was painted. What could be more 'musical' than the way the colour of the dresses is offset by the green foliage while finding echoes in the pink dog-roses that powder it? Or the complex interplay of the hands, twisting and turning like a melodic theme? Rossetti's friend Whistler might have called the picture a 'symphony' or 'harmony' in crimson and green. Another friend, A.C. Swinburne, might have said of it what he said of an Albert Moore: 'Its meaning is beauty and its reason for being is to be.'
The picture was executed mainly during Rossetti's second and longer stay at Kelmscott Manor. In May 1871 he and William Morris had taken a joint tenancy of the sleepy old Cotswold house not far from Lechlade on the upper Thames. Each saw it as a country retreat, but for Rossetti it offered opportunities to pursue his affair with Morris's wife Jane, the muse whose features and personality did so much to define his later work. He and his followers, Morris and Burne-Jones, had 'discovered' Jane, an ostler's daughter, when they were painting the famous murals in the Oxford Union in the autumn of 1857, and she had married Morris in April 1859. But it had never been a love match on her part, and by the mid-1860s, with Rossetti's wife, Lizzie Siddal, now dead, the stage was set for a renewal of the intimacy engendered when she had sat to him in Oxford.
They were together at Kelmscott from July to September 1871, while the architect Philip Webb carried out alterations to Rossetti's London house in Cheyne Walk. Rossetti then returned to London, where on 2 June 1872 a devastating crisis occurred. Robert Buchanan's attack on him in a scurrilous pamphlet, The Fleshly School of Poetry, acting on a constitution already weakened by insomnia, the chloral he took to relieve it and the frustration of his love for Jane, brought about a nervous collapse followed by a suicide attempt six days later. By 20 June he was on his way to Scotland where his patron William Graham had put a house at his disposal, but only Kelmscott offered the peace he craved. He returned there on 24 September and was to remain for the best part of the next two years. For much of this time he was accompanied by Jane and her two young daughters, Jenny and May; and it was May who inspired Rosa Triplex in its final form.
The sombre mood that Rossetti evoked in so many of his paintings of the 1870s was coloured on several levels by Jane Morris. If her brooding looks perfectly suited these conceptions, the fraught nature of their relationship lent them resonance and depth. One that particularly obsessed him, Proserpine, seems to offer a direct comment on their predicament, while the gloomiest of all, Astarte Syriaca, in which the goddess of love appears at her most baleful and threatening, was painted during a particularly depressing stay at Bognor in the winter of 1875-6. In fact it was this experience that finally convinced Jane that the affair must end. Rossetti's melancholia and the drastic remedy of chloral had long cast a heavy shadow over their liaison. After Bognor, she gently but firmly withdrew, although they remained on affectionate terms until his death six years later.
The chemistry that produced Rosa Triplex could hardly have been more different. Rossetti was not only a widower but childless, Lizzie Siddal's baby having been still-born. Yet one side of him yearned for children, and over the years he had grown close to the Morris girls, Jenny born in 1861 and May a year later. He had even seen them as surrogate daughters. 'I ought to have had a little girl older than she is,' he had remarked wistfully of Jenny in the late 1860s, and he would make a semi-serious attempt to adopt May.
A touching letter he sent to them in April 1868 suggests what an indulgent father he would have been. 'Here come two little dormice to live with you,' he wrote, 'I know you will take great care of them and always give them everything they are fond of - that is, nuts, apples and hard biscuits. If you love them very much I dare say they will get much bigger and fatter and remind you of Papa and me.'
But it was Kelmscott that unleashed the full flow of his feeling. The girls, he told his mother on 17 July 1871, were 'dear little things - perfectly natural and intelligent, and able to amuse themselves all day long without needing to be thought about by their elders.' As a preoccupied artist himself, he particularly prized this independence; the children were the 'most darling little self-amusing machines that ever existed,' he told another correspondent, William Bell Scott, the same day. And then there was their beauty, particularly that of May, aged nine when he arrived at Kelmscott. She was, he told Scott 'quite a beauty the more one knows her and will be a lovely woman. She is very clever too, I think, and has a real turn for drawing.' To his mother he observed that she was 'destined to be a great beauty beyond question.'
During his initial sojourn at Kelmscott, Rossetti made chalk drawings of the girls (fig. 1), attractive studies that reflect his response to their intelligence and beauty. And at some point during his second stay he evidently realised that May, now a year older and approaching puberty, was the model he needed to complete Rosa Triplex. The design had been evolved in 1867, when three drawings seem to have been made. The most developed, a study in red chalk (fig. 2), certainly bears this date, and since the other two, a pen-and-ink sketch (fig. 3) and another chalk drawing (Surtees 238B) are rougher and less finished, it would seem that they are earlier rather than later. The composition as seen in the Tate version is similar to that of the watercolour, although there are significant variations and the youthfulness and innocence of the watercolour are lacking. This has much to do with the use of different models. We do not know who posed for the two outer figures, but the girl in the middle is a likeness of Alexa Wilding, who not only embodied cool sophistication but in 1867 was fifteen years older than May Morris would be in 1874. Born in 1846 or 1847, she had met Rossetti in 1865 and begun to model for him the following year. The chalk version of Rosa Triplex, which Rossetti usually referred to as 'The Triple Rose' or even 'the 3 Roses',' represented one of her earliest appearances in his work, to which she was to contribute almost as much as Jane Morris in the 1870s.
The drawing was sold to William Graham in February 1868, and before it left his studio Rossetti had it photographed. He would occasionally send the resulting prints to friends; Barbara Bodichon and the novelist George Eliot both received them in February 1870. Meanwhile he cherished the idea of producing a watercolour version. The rough pen sketch (fig. 2) bears an inscription in which he reminds himself to 'paint large and make water colour.' An Aesthetic effect was also in view, although different from the one eventually adopted. The picture, the inscription continues, was to show the figures wearing 'black and red necklaces' and 'white frilled dressing gowns'.
By the autumn of 1871 Rossetti had even found a patron prepared to commission the picture. Frederick Craven, a Manchester calico printer, had bought from him consistently during the 1860s. Always short of money, Rossetti appreciated the fact that he was 'a very good paymaster and not a haggler at all.' At the same time he was well aware of his limitations, describing him caustically to Madox Brown as 'a grave and (let us say in a whisper) rather stupid enthusiast of the inarticulate business type, with a mystic reverence for the English watercolour school.' Craven did not only buy watercolours but most of his pictures were in this medium, whether by English artists of an older generation or the Pre-Raphaelites. His Rossettis were no exception, and it was entirely characteristic that he should commission a watercolour version of The Triple Rose.
Artist and patron were corresponding on the subject in November 1871 but the scheme then lapsed, no doubt due to the traumatic upheavals in Rossetti's life during the following year. Nor did he embark on the watercolour as soon as he returned to Kelmscott in September 1872, although it did not take him long to think of using May again as a model. By October he had conceived the startling idea of repainting the head in his picture Lady Lilith from her; she may, as he put it, have had 'the right complexion', but to use such a young model for an image of carnal sensuality was bizarre. Wisdom eventually prevailed and Alex Wilding assumed the Lillith role, but about the same time May was sitting for a picture called Heart's Ease and another chalk drawing. Rossetti had lost none of his admiration for her looks. She was, he told Charles Augustus Howell when announcing the completion of Heart's Ease, 'the most lovely girl in the world.'
In fact it was not until the end of 1873 that Rossetti began gathering reference material with a view to embarking on Craven's watercolour. On the last day of the year he wrote to his assistant H.T. Dunn, asking him to send one of the photographs of Graham's drawing, together with 'the cartoon and drawing of Triple Rose'. It has been suggested that the cartoon was the second chalk drawing made in 1867 (Surtees 238B), although this cannot be proved. Still more puzzling is Rossetti's reference to a 'watercolour' by Dunn from which he 'traced' his picture in February 1874. Here a possible candidate is a chalk drawing of doubtful authorship in the Birmingham Art Gallery (no. 40'12), although this would mean that the word 'watercolour' was a slip of the pen. Whatever the case, by 19 February the new picture was well under way and he had 'painted the three heads straight off from little May successfully.' He had, he told Dunn, been greatly inconvenienced by finding that he did not have any of the Whatman's white imperial paper he usually used for watercolours. Fortunately he discovered 'just one of those stained chalk papers which was white,' and used this instead.
The development of the design from chalk drawing to finished watercolour involved many changes. Not only was a different model used and, due to her youthfulness, a new sense of innocence evoked. By using one model rather than two (i.e. Alexa Wilding and the unknown girl who sat for the other two figures in the drawing), Rossetti gives the watercolour a homogeneity which is lacking in the drawn version.
Then there is the way May is dressed. Gone is the generalised garb worn by the girls in the drawing, apparel that could well have been created 'out of the artist's head', to be replaced by what Rossetti called a 'crimsony red silk dress' from the large stock of models' costumes he had in his studio. Nothing could be further from the 'white dressing gowns' he had once envisaged, while the silver jewellery had also come far from the 'black and red necklaces' noted on the early sketch (fig. 3). Here again he could draw on a large collection among his studio props, eclectic in terms of ethnic origin but universally picturesque.
No picture, in fact, illustrates this better than Rosa Triplex. The necklace worn by the central figure, consisting of filigree comma -shapes hanging from a panzer chain, probably came from the Ottoman region, being of a type worn from the Balkans to the Southern Caucasus, including Syria. The central heart-shaped pendant may, however, be of Rossetti's own invention. The girl on the left wears an Ottoman style filigree bracelet, with a distinctive rectangular clasp peculiar to the North Balkans, while her necklace is of a similar form and possibly origin. As for the adornments of the girl on the right, it is generally agreed that her seven-string necklace is Indian in origin. Her bracelet is formed from a large hooped earring worn in several areas of North Africa, and a pendant is attached with stylised Arabian 'hands of Fatima'. Such exotic jewellery had been popularized in England by extensive displays at the 1851 and 1862 exhibitions, followed by further annual shows at South Kensington in the 1870s. What is now the Victoria and Albert Museum acquired 1,100 pieces in 1872, and examples were available at Liberty's (opened in 1875) and other retail outlets. Or perhaps Rossetti had picked his up at one of the antique and bric-á-brac shops he haunted so zealously.
Jewellery is conspicuous by its absence in the Graham drawing, and its introduction in the watercolour ensures a more complex and intricate composition. A similar role is performed by the roses which break up the uniformly dark background in the drawing. But the greatest compositional refinement is the repositioning of the right hand of the left-hand figure. In the drawing it lies inertly on the parapet, having nothing to do and lacking any expressive purpose. By raising it to fondle the sitter's necklace, Rossetti not only gives it an aim but greatly enhances the interplay of hands so vital in the picture's decorative impact.
Rossetti left Kelmscott hurriedly in mid-July 1874 after an embarrassing quarrel with some local anglers. He was still working on Rosa Triplex, but when his neighbour G.P. Boyce, hearing he was back in town, called on him on 25 July, he found him 'finishing this 'beautiful drawing.' On 13 August Rossetti acknowledged receipt of a cheque for £196 - 5 shillings from Craven, 'concluding payment for ''The Triple Rose'',' and the following December, writing to his friend Thomas Hake, he referred to the picture as 'completed'. Yet it evidently still lacked the dog-roses in the background. These were added in the autumn of 1877 when Rossetti was staying at Hunter's Forestall, near Margate, in yet another melancholy attempt to conquer his addiction to chloral.
Craven had parted with Rosa Triplex by 1883, when its next owner, C.W. Mills, lent it to the Rossetti memorial exhibition at the Royal Academy. By 1897, when another Rossetti exhibition took place at the New Gallery, it belonged to W. Graham Robertson, a wealthy young man with a passionate interest in art and the stage, probably best known to posterity for forming an unrivalled collection of the work of William Blake. Although Robertson knew many of Rossetti's circle, notably Burne-Jones, he never met the great man himself. He was, however, devoted, to his art and memory, also owning the primary version of Proserpine (Tate Britain) and writing about him with great perception in a chapter entitled 'The Spell of Rossetti' in his reminiscences, Time Was (1931). Robertson died in 1948, and the following year Rosa Triplex appeared at his sale in these Rooms, where it was bought by the Leger Galleries from which Virginia Surtees acquired it two years later. The picture has therefore only had four owners, three of them with credentials second to none as Rossetti enthusiasts and keen collectors of his work. No better provenance could be desired or imagined.
We are grateful to Nick Barnard, Curator, South Asian jewellery, Victorian and Albert Museum, and Jane Perry, visiting scholar at the Victoria and Albert Museum and author of Traditional Jewellery in Nineteenth-Century Europe (2013), for their help in identifying the jewellery worn in the picture.
http://www.christies.com/
Thursday, July 31, 2014
Study for 'La Belle Iseult'
William Morris (1834-1896)
Study for 'La Belle Iseult'
pencil, pen and brown ink and wash on paper
22 ¾ x 9 1/8 in. (57.8 x 23.3 cm.)
This is a study for Morris’s painting La Belle Iseult of 1858 (fig. 1). The picture is his only completed easel painting and the most important product of the period in the late 1850s when he was struggling to become a painter under the heady, autocratic influence of D.G. Rossetti. The attempt caused him nothing but frustration and disappointment. His true talent lay in handicraft, and would only find fulfillment with the furnishing of Red House, built for him by Philip Webb at Upton in Kent in 1859, and the launching of the firm of ‘fine art workmen’, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co., in 1861.
Morris’s painting has sometimes been entitled Queen Guenevere, but this is wrong. The ‘bracket’ curled up on the bed identifies the subject as another Arthurian heroine, La Belle Iseult, whose fraught relationship with Sir Tristram looms so large in medieval secular literature and was treated at length by Malory in the Morte d’Arthur. The story seems to have had some special significance for Morris; it inspired no fewer than three other compositions that he worked on at this time, including his contribution to the famous murals that Rossetti and his followers painted in the Oxford Union in 1857-8.
The model for La Belle Iseult was Jane Burden, the ostler’s daughter whom the artists ‘discovered’ in Oxford, who married Morris in April 1859, and whom Rossetti, her lover, immortalised, ensuring her status as the supreme Pre-Raphaelite ‘stunner’. It is unlikely, however, that Jane sat for our drawing, which was probably drawn from a professional model or, more likely still, a lay-figure. The design of the dress differs in the painting and drawing, as does the position of the model’s hands. In the painting they have a slightly ‘aimless’ quality; and in the painting Morris attempts to rectify this by giving them something to ‘do’, namely hold the two ends of a belt which is being fastened. Yet even in the finished work we sense that this detail was never fully resolved.
The drawing has belonged to two distinguished Pre-Raphaelite scholars. Its previous owner was Janet Camp Troxell of New Haven, Connecticut, who began publishing books and articles on the Rossettis in the 1930s and formed what has been described as ‘the outstanding private Pre-Raphaelite collection in the United States and with few rivals anywhere else’. Virginia Surtees acquired it when the Troxell Collection was dispersed by Agnew’s.
£16,250
($27,576)
Estimate
£5,000 - £8,000
($8,495 - $13,592)
Christie's recently
Tuesday, July 29, 2014
Monday, July 28, 2014
Saturday, July 26, 2014
The Letters of William Morris to his Family and Friends
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Letters-William-Morris-Family-Friends/dp/B003A3YIP2/ref=sr_1_7?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1350127868&sr=1-7
Friday, July 25, 2014
Thursday, July 24, 2014
Wednesday, July 23, 2014
Monday, July 21, 2014
Saturday, July 19, 2014
Mural Design - The Wedding Procession of Sir Degrevaunt By Sir Edward Burne-Jones 1860
This study, squared for transfer, is for one of three mural paintings (wedding procession, ceremony and feast) illustrating the romance of Sir Degrevaunt, executed by Burne-Jones in the drawing-room at Red House in the summer of 1860, soon after William and Jane Morris moved in. The Morrises were depicted as Degrevaunt and his bride. The paintings, part of an incomplete series, are still in situ. The story had been published in the Camden Society's volume of Thornton Romances in 1844, and was a favourite with Morris and Burne-Jones.
Friday, July 18, 2014
William Morris and the River Thames blog post
http://fatherthames1.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/william-morris-and-river-thames.html
Thursday, July 17, 2014
The Annunciation - Study for the Virgin, Woman holding a Flower By Sir Edward Burne-Jones
This may be an early drawing of Jane Morris. It is now thought to be a study for the Virgin in the Annunciation
http://www.preraphaelites.org/the-collection/1927P586/the-annunciation-study-for-the-virgin-woman-holding-a-flower/
Wednesday, July 16, 2014
May Morris & the Women's Guild of Arts
http://janmarsh.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/may-morris-womens-guild-of-arts.html
Tuesday, July 15, 2014
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Monday, July 14, 2014
Friday, June 20, 2014
Thursday, May 29, 2014
Jane Morris: a Centenary Exhibition
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Jane Morris: A Centenary Exhibition
Exhibition Dates: July To October | Included In Price Of Admission To The Manor
exhibition, on loan from the National Portrait Gallery, will mark the centenary of Jane Morris’s death in 1914. The exhibition is a unique opportunity to view original photographs of Jane and her circle in the setting of the country home she loved, Kelmscott Manor.
Jane Morris rose from humble beginnings as the daughter of an Oxford stableman to be the wife of William Morris (1834-96)—writer, designer, craftsman and social thinker. She is, however, perhaps most famous as the muse of Pre-Raphaelite artist and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82).
This exhibition presents Jane in the context of her closest family and friends including Edward Burne-Jones (‘Ned’) and his wife Georgiana (‘Georgie’), the architect and designer Philip Webb, artist Marie Stillman and poet Charles Algernon Swinburne. Jane’s lovers, Rossetti and Wilfred Scawen Bunt, are also represented.
Jane felt a deep love for Kelmscott Manor, writing to Philip Webb that it was ‘all delightful and home-like to me and I love it.’ She spent much time at the Manor from 1871, when the Morrises became its lease-holders, and following her husband’s death in 1896 she spent every summer there. She was able to purchase the manor outright in 1913. The exhibition includes rarely seen photographs of Jane taken at the Manor during the years of her widowhood.
- See more at: http://www.sal.org.uk/kelmscott-manor/things-to-do/whats-on/#sthash.birwng7M.dpuf
Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Mariana
Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Mariana
Mariana is one of my favorite paintings. I can’t put my finger on it, but the real-life painting is mesmerizing. The story goes as follows…
At the request of his patron William Graham, Rossetti transformed the composition of his portrait of Jane Morris (‘The Blue Silk Dress’) into a subject picture. By adding a page-boy (modelled by Graham’s son), the figure turns into Mariana, from Shakespeare’s ‘Measure for Measure’, deserted by her betrothed.
This subject involves a woman neglected or unsatisfied by her husband (or in this case fiancé). It thus seems specially suited to Rossetti’s series of paintings of Jane Morris.
http://
Sunday, May 25, 2014
The farmer, the artist, the Princess and the Tsar
Miss Mary Frances Vivian Lobb in her younger days.
http://www.llgc.org.uk/blog/?p=8273
Thursday, May 8, 2014
Away from Home
Doctor has told me to stay here in Suffolk for another month. Internet is very limited here.
Friday, May 2, 2014
Sunday, April 27, 2014
Thursday, April 24, 2014
Dante Gabriel Rossetti Dantis Amor 1860
Summary
This painted panel decorated one of three cupboard doors that formed the upper part of a large settle belonging to William Morris (1834-96). The subject of all three panels was Beatrice Portinari, for whom the medieval Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) nurtured an enduring but unrequited love, as recounted in the Vita Nuova. Rossetti was fascinated by Dante's story -which he translated for his own publication, The Early Italian Poets (1864) - and saw in it a parallel with his own love for Lizzie Siddal.
Dantis Amor (Dante's Love) is the central panel, symbolising Beatrice's death, which occurred between the events depicted in the other two panels, The Salutation of Beatrice in Florence and The Salutation in the Garden of Eden (both in the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa).
The settle was apparently painted dark red, which would have provided a rich setting for Rossetti's boldly schematic designs. Rossetti presented the two Salutation panels to Morris as a wedding present. The earthly Beatrice in the first panel was modelled on Morris's new wife Jane Burden, with whom Rossetti was also smitten. The heavenly Beatrice in Dantis Amor, however, is modelled on Lizzie Siddal. In this respect, the picture prefigures Rossetti's later visionary representation of Lizzie in Beata Beatrix (Tate N01279).
The picture is intended to depict Beatrice's death and subsequent union with Christ. The scene is divided diagonally, with the haloed figure of Christ looking down from the top left towards Beatrice, enclosed in a crescent moon and surrounded by stars. The central angel holds a sundial, as yet unfinished, but which, in the preparatory drawing (Birmingham City Art Gallery), indicates the number nine, the hour of Beatrice's death. In the drawing Rossetti also inscribed along the line of the diagonal the concluding words of Dante's Divine Comedy: 'L'AMOR QUE MVOVE IL SOLE E L'ALTRE STELLE' [the love which moves the sun and the other stars] (Paradiso xxxiii, l.145). The composition is thus intended to represent not only the death of Beatrice and her transition from earth to heaven, but the wider notion that love is the generating force of the universe.
Despite the realistic representation of the figures, the patterned background is unusually stylised, and it has been suggested that another artist may have intervened in this section of the panel. Some areas remain unfinished; for example, the crescent moon enclosing the Head of Beatrice was to have been inscribed with lines from La Vita Nuova: 'QVELLA BEATA BEATRICE CHE MIRA CONTINVAMENTE NELLA FACCIA DI COLVI' [that Blessed Beatrice who continuously gazes at Him.' The lines carry on into Christ's halo: 'QVI EST PER OMNIA SAECVLA BENEDICTVS' [Who is blessed throughout eternity].
Further reading:
Leslie Parris (ed.), The Pre-Raphaelites, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London 1984; reprinted 1994, pp.179-80, reproduced p.180, in colour.
Virginia Surtees, The Paintings and Drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882): A Catalogue Raisonné, 2 vols., Oxford 1971, pp.70-1, no.116, reproduced pl.172.
Andrew Wilton and Robert Upstone (eds), The Age of Rossetti, Burne-Jones & Watts - Symbolism in Britain 1860-1910, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London 1997, pp.135-6, reproduced p.135, in colour.
Frances Fowle
December 2000
Tate
Wednesday, April 9, 2014
rossetti's obsession - images of jane morris
http://www.bradfordmuseums.org/whatson/event_detail.php?ID=778
http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/ladylever/events/displayevent.aspx?EventID=18012
http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/ladylever/events/displayevent.aspx?EventID=18012
Sunday, April 6, 2014
Tuesday, March 18, 2014
Moving
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Moving tomorrow. Virgin Media tell me I'll be reconnected by the 26th (sigh) so see you then.Going for a break back on the 6th April.
Monday, March 17, 2014
Saturday, March 8, 2014
Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Pandora expected to set record price at Sotheby's
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/mar/07/dante-gabriel-rossetti-pandora-sothebys-pre-raphaelite-morris#_
Monday, February 24, 2014
Hand Blown Glass panel at The Red House, detail, signed by May Morris
from the brilliant
http://a-little-bit-pre-raphaelite.tumblr.com/
Tuesday, February 18, 2014
Friday, February 14, 2014
Thursday, February 13, 2014
Wednesday, February 12, 2014
The Muse who never smiled
Posed by D.G Rossetti and photographed by John R Parsons in 1865
Photographed by Emery Walker 1898
Monday, February 10, 2014
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