Sunday, March 3, 2013

The Seat of a Bishop



This is fascinating, a sketch by Ned that he gave to Jane. Shows both had a sense of humour. Called The Seat of a Bishop; inspired by the Baedeker's Guide to Italy. Ned went to Italy four times (as did Jane). An inscription asks Jane not to show the sketch "to your lady friends because they would think ill of me."

How Rossetti used the Jane photographs



http://www.rossettiarchive.org/docs/sa140.raw.html

The painting is Reverie of 1868. The photo was taken in Rossetti's garden in London in July 1865.

Mrs Cimabue Brown



Isn't it odd, never seen this mentioned before. Reading David Rodger's book 'Rossetti' he says that George Du Maurier was no admirer of Jane and based Mrs Cimabue Brown, an ambitious hostess with 'artistic' tastes, on Jane for his cartoons in Punch. He first met Jane in 1870. 

"At the height of public interest in the Aesthetic Movement, between the opening of the Grosvenor Gallery in London at the end of the 1870s and Oscar Wilde's lecture tour of 1882, Punchran a brilliant series of caricatures by Du Maurier satirising the manners and poses of the Aesthetes."

http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O198444/frustrated-social-ambition-collapse-of-drawing-du-maurier-george/

The Blessed Damozel detail



The main model is Alexa (Wilding) but the background lovers are Jane and presumably a younger Rossetti

La Bella Mano detail (The Beautiful Hand)



Alexa with May Morris as the attendants.

Saturday, February 23, 2013

Thursday, February 21, 2013

sketch by William of Jane



This is the only known sketch by William of Jane. So different from the Rossetti sketches. 

In the late summer of 1857 Rossetti and Burne Jones, then in Oxford engaged on the decoration of the Union (see 1885,0613.81), went one evening to the theatre, where they were struck by the extraordinary beauty of a girl in the audience. They succeeded in making her acquaintance, and in persuading her to act as a model for their paintings. She appears as Guenevere in Rossetti's 'Sir Lancelot's Vision of the Sanc Grael' in the Union, and in Morris's only known easel-picture, the 'Queen Guenevere' (also sometimes known as 'La Belle Iseult') which he painted in 1858 (Tate Gallery), and for which the present drawing may be a preliminary study. He is said to have scrawled on the canvas "I cannot paint you, but I love you"; and in April 1859 they were married. By the late 1850s Rossetti's relationship with Elizabeth Siddal was under increasing strain, and he too was attracted by Jane Burden. She, for her part, found Morris a not altogether congenial husband, and a triangular relationship gradually developed in which he seems to have been the odd man out. Mrs Morris, who behaved with impeccable dignity and discretion, became Rossetti's confidante and intimate friend, as well as his chief source of artistic inspiration and his favourite model. Her face haunts his paintings from the late 1860s onwards, as Elizabeth Siddal's does those of the 1850s. The letters they exchanged (more of his than hers seem to have survived) from 1868 until 1881 - the year before Rossetti's death - were published in 1976 by John Bryson in association with Janet Camp Troxell. Jane Morris herself died in 1914.

Portrait of Jane Morris; shoulder length, seen almost in profile to left, turned slightly to front Graphite Verso; Figure sitting in a toga with a sword Graphite

This actually belonged to Jenny.