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ROSSETTI’S PORTRAITS Sylvie Broussine Christopher Newall

Christopher Newall Sylvine Broussine

PA L L A S ATHENE

ROSSETTI’S PORTRAITS Sylvie Broussine Christopher Newall

Christopher Newall Sylvine Broussine

PA L L A S ATHENE

contents director’s foreword chris stephens p. 7 ROSSETTI THE PORTRAITIST

christopher newall p. 11

PORTRAITS OF THE MODELS

sylvie broussine p. 61 chronology p. 114

notes and bibliography p. 118 list of illustrations p. 121 index p. 125 Fig. 1: Self-Portrait, 1855

contents director’s foreword chris stephens p. 7 ROSSETTI THE PORTRAITIST

christopher newall p. 11

PORTRAITS OF THE MODELS

sylvie broussine p. 61 chronology p. 114

notes and bibliography p. 118 list of illustrations p. 121 index p. 125 Fig. 1: Self-Portrait, 1855

DIRECTOR’S FOREWORD chris stephens

he highpoint of the Holburne Museum’s display is its collection of eighteenth-century portraits. Based, of course, on Bath’s role in late Georgian and Regency society, this includes masterpieces by Thomas Gainsborough and Johan Zoffany, along with works by Allan Ramsay, George Stubbs, Joseph Wright of Derby, George Romney and Thomas Lawrence amongst others. Consequently, an important part of our programme of temporary exhibitions has focused on portraits and the nature of portraiture. An especially unusual subsection of our own holdings is the collection of eighteenth-century theatrical portraits that once belonged to the author Somerset Maugham. In these, actors like David Garrick are portrayed on stage, performing a role. The status of these paintings is ambiguous: to what extent are they portraits of an actor, and to what extent are they depictions of a performance? Portraiture is not as straightforward as it might at first appear and this is never more true than in the sumptuous work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Rossetti’s art is, famously, dominated by depictions of a small number of beautiful women with whom he was in different ways intimately acquainted. Often these portrayals of recognisable individuals are identified as representing literary or mythological subjects. They serve a dual purpose, then, of being at once portraits and history Detail of fig. 24: Jane Burden (later Morris), 1857

DIRECTOR’S FOREWORD chris stephens

paintings. More than that, though, frequently it seems the sitter and the literary subject are chosen for the ways in which one echoes the other. The representation of familiar, contemporary individuals and of historical narratives of one sort or another thus elide. This complexity underpins many of Rossetti’s exquisite creations and lies at the core of this book and the exhibition to which it relates. I am deeply grateful to my colleague Sylvie Broussine for leading the project, selecting the exhibition and co-authoring this book. Both outputs reflect the enthusiasm and diligence she has brought to the task. We have been very fortunate, and I am very grateful, to have secured the support of the great Rossetti specialist Christopher Newall. Christopher has advised on the shape and selection of the exhibition and has brought his knowledge to bear on the exposition of Rossetti’s portraiture in this book. We have also benefited from advice from Alison Smith at the National Portrait Gallery, and Harriet Drummond at Christie’s. As always, we are deeply grateful to the private collectors who have agreed to part with their treasured objects and with the custodians of those works in public collections: I would like to thank, especially, Nicola Kalinsky at the Barber Institute of Art in Birmingham, Ellen McAdam and Victoria Osborne at Birmingham Museums, Luke Syson at the Fitzwilliam Museum, John Lewis, Kate Bagnall and Kathy Haslam at the Society of Antiquaries, and Alex Farquharson, Carol Jacobi and David Blayney Brown at Tate Britain. Such important works of art are not easily lent, I know, and I am appreciative of the fact that people have been especially generous because of the challenging times through which this exhibition has been developed. Thank you! On that subject, we are very grateful to our friends at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art for a grant from their

COVID-19 crisis fund to enable Sylvie to come back to work from 9 furlough in order to complete her research. We are delighted to be working once again with Alexander Fyjis-Walker at Pallas Athene. Finally, I am grateful, as ever, to my colleague Nina Harrison Leins and everyone at the Holburne who has helped realise this book and the exhibition it complements so well.

ROSSETTI THE PORTRAITIST christopher newall

ante Gabriel Rossetti made portraits of about ninety different people. Sitters included his family, members of the Pre-Raphaelite circle, patrons, models and friends in the wider art world, and most notably the three women— Elizabeth Siddal, Fanny Cornforth and Jane Morris—with whom he had long-term loving relationships. As a portraitist he worked principally in ink, chalk and pencil, but also occasionally in oil, and created works of art which are intense and intuitive, and in which the identity and individuality of the sitter are to the fore. Rossetti first drew portraits in 1846 when he made studies of his sister Christina, who was then sixteen, and his brother William Michael, who was a year older. In his profiles of Christina, he paid particular attention to the arrangement of her hair, showing her variously with a pigtail gathered at her temple or with ringlets falling to her shoulder (fig. 4). The studies of his brother (fig. 3), again often profiles, show him with hair falling to the nape of his neck and foppishly accoutred with outsize neckerchiefs, collars and lapels, and frequently seen in the glaring light of a gas mantle. Rossetti also drew his parents, Gabriele and Frances; his maternal grandfather, Gaetano Polidori; and his aunts, Eliza and Charlotte. In April 1853 he showed his father seated at a writing-desk and wearing a cap and top-coat, suggesting that even in the spring the Rossetti family home in Arlington Street Fig. 2: Self-Portrait, 1847

ROSSETTI THE PORTRAITIST christopher newall

Fig. 3: William Michael Rossetti, 1846

Fig. 4: Christina Rossetti, 1847

Fig. 3: William Michael Rossetti, 1846

Fig. 4: Christina Rossetti, 1847

representation of a formidable matriarch. Safeguarded by William Mi- 15 chael Rossetti, these drawings give an affectionate record of an Italian refugee family living in comfort and political security in London in the mid-nineteenth century. The artist’s first self-portrait (fig. 2), drawn in March 1847 and of which the most conspicuous feature is his own long dark hair, conveys self-awareness and emotional intelligence. In a sketch of 1853 (fig. 6) he showed himself seated in an upright chair, his gangly legs crossed at the knee and resting on another chair, as he prepares to be drawn by a female companion (probably Rossetti’s first representation of Lizzy Siddal). Here the artist makes play of his own dishevelled appearance in an image of casual and insouciant bohemianism.

Fig. 5: Frances Rossetti, the Artist’s Mother, 1853

was hard to make warm. By the mid-1850s he was sufficiently confident as a portraitist to show his subjects full face, most remarkably in the pencil and chalk study he made of his mother (fig. 5). Wearing a white pleated muslin bonnet with loose streamers, Mrs Rossetti—with large, dark pupiled eyes, aquiline nose, pursed lips, and the unflattering suggestion of a jowl—is impassive. Mother and son enjoyed a close and loving friendship, but there is no suggestion of informality in this

Fig. 6: Self-Portrait, sitting to Elizabeth Siddal, 1853

Fig. 5: Frances Rossetti, the Artist’s Mother, 1853

Fig. 6: Self-Portrait, sitting to Elizabeth Siddal, 1853

PORTRAITS OF THE MODELS sylvie broussine

n March 1849 Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s first oil painting, The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (fig. 36) went on public display at the National Institution’s Free Exhibition of Modern Art on Hyde Park Corner. Inscribed in the bottom left corner were the letters ‘P. R. B.’, marking the public announcement of the PreRaphaelite Brotherhood, a secret society formed in 1848 by Rossetti, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais who shared an objection to what they saw as the insincere and repetitious conventions of contemporary academic painting. This group of young artists were particularly critical of the Royal Academy of Arts’ veneration of the classical ideal in art, influenced by the founding president, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and represented through the work of Raphael. Instead, Rossetti and his contemporaries looked to the Italian and Flemish painters that preceded Raphael, and began producing paintings characterised by religious and medieval subject matters, highly detailed representation, vibrant tones and a direct observation of the natural world. For the last of these qualities they were also looking to John Ruskin’s first two volumes of Modern Painters (published in 1843 and 1846), in which he encouraged artists to ‘go to Nature in all singleness of heart […] rejecting nothing, selecting nothing and scorning nothing’.1 Treating their subjects with uncompromising realism, the practice of working from live models became central to the Pre-Raphaelites’ artistic production and prompted Rossetti and his fellow artists to Fig. 36: The Girlhood of Mary Virgin, 1848-49

PORTRAITS OF THE MODELS sylvie broussine

work with individuals whose personalities and circumstances echoed those of the figures for which they posed. The unidealised faces of the Virgin and St Anne in The Girlhood of Mary Virgin, for example, were taken from the artist’s deeply religious sister, Christina, and mother, Frances, and much of the painting’s ritualistic symbolism, including the embroidery, organ and stone altar, refers to the contemporary practices of High Anglicanism, of which both women were devotees. Over ten years later, Christina returned to the role of the Virgin Mary in the stained glass design, The Sermon on the Mount (fig. 37), alongside members of the second generation of Pre-Raphaelites who posed in similarly appropriate roles: the figure of Christ is George Meredith; St John (patron saint of authors) is writer Algernon Charles Swinburne; St James is Simeon Solomon; St Peter is William Morris; Mary Magdalene is thought to be Fanny Cornforth (who was possibly a former sex worker); and Judas is the art dealer Ernest Gambart (a figure despised by Rossetti and others in the Pre-Raphaelite circle). Though occasionally working with professional models, Rossetti often cast members of his social circle in his works; it was cheaper, easier, and enabled the artist to represent his characters as individuals as opposed to more generic figures that working with less familiar models would risk. Asking friends and family to pose, however, could only happen with careful observation of the rules around improper casting; it was not appropriate for friends or family to perform as salacious or corrupt characters.2 As is evident from The Sermon on the Mount, models continued to play a central part in Rossetti’s artistic practice beyond the years of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which slowly disbanded in the early 1850s. Around this time Rossetti formed an attachment with the artist Fig. 37: The Sermon on the Mount, c. 1861

Rossetti’s paintings of her, Cornforth has largely been defined by such 89 accounts, though in recent years much work has been done to understand her as an individual.21 The last major oil painting for which Cornforth’s features were used is The Blue Bower (fig. 50), Rossetti’s great masterpiece of the 1860s. Rossetti again takes inspiration from sixteenth-century Venetian painting through warm, sensuous tones and the shallow perspective that pushes the figure forward. The lack of depth enables him to record in detail the texture and colours of the different fabrics and jewellery, including the heart-shaped pendant (fig. 51) which draws the eye to the centre of the composition. In the foreground lies a koto, a Japanese stringed instrument which, though incorrectly played (her left hand is in the wrong position), highlights the sensory qualities of the painting as well as the artist’s interest in fashionable japonaiserie.22 The decorative setting for the ‘bower’ (a woman’s intimate space) is defined by a wall of hexagonal, Arab-inspired tiles and the passion Fig. 51: Brooch in the shape of a heart flowers and wild convolvulus that frame the model. These given by Rossetti blossoms are thought to refer to the sitter’s fiery nature, while to Jane Morris, the cornflowers resting in the foreground play on her name. 1840-65 The work has the feeling of a character study; Cornforth is commanding and meets the spectators’ gaze as if to challenge their observation of her beauty. The interaction between model and viewer is made all the more intense by the scale and position of the figure; painted life-size and with an immediacy that brings her right up to the picture edge, Cornforth almost penetrates our world. Cornforth’s role in Rossetti’s life provoked a stylistic transformation that would have a lasting impact on his career. His half-length Fig. 50: The Blue Bower, 1865

Fig. 52: The Farmer’s Daughter (Hanging the Mistletoe), 1860

Fig. 53: The Farmer’s Daughter, 1860s

single female figures became a commercially successful formula that he replicated with various other models throughout the 1860s and beyond. Following in Cornforth’s steps, such women as Annie Miller, Ellen Smith, Alexa Wilding and several unidentified figures graced Rossetti’s canvases. After the seminal Bocca Baciata, one of the earliest works to share this format is Hanging the Mistletoe, also known as The Farmer’s Daughter (fig. 52), made at Christmas in 1860. Showing an unidentified model in a rich festive setting, the composition establishes an interaction between the viewer and the figure who, while tying up the mistletoe, turns to face us, her gaze meeting ours. In a chalk version

(fig. 53) that was given to George Price Boyce on 6 December 1868, Rossetti altered the model’s pose, removing such exchange with the beholder to make her seem more introspective as she stares into the distance. As well as slightly altering her pose, Rossetti reduced the surrounding foliage and decorative costume and in doing so, invites the viewer to focus their attention on her beauty, recorded in soft chalk lines. Though her identity remains a mystery, her columnar neck, cupid-bow lips, pale complexion and vibrant red hair appear to merge the attributes the artist most admired in Siddal and Cornforth, making her an archetypal Rossettian model.

Fig. 52: The Farmer’s Daughter (Hanging the Mistletoe), 1860

Fig. 53: The Farmer’s Daughter, 1860s

Fig. 55: Annie Miller, 1860-63

Annie Miller, famous for her role as the so-called ‘fallen woman’ in Holman Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience (1853, Tate), modelled for Rossetti on several occasions in the 1850s (much to the displeasure of Holman Hunt with whom she had a turbulent relationship involving an engagement in 1855 that was broken off in around 1859), and again in 1860 and 1863, when she posed in the oil painting Helen of Troy (fig. 54). Executed in the same year that Rossetti painted Aurelia (Fazio’s Mistress) (fig. 44), this alluring portrayal of Greek mythology’s most beautiful woman is also a study in colour; the composition is dominated by the golden yellow hues from her abundance of hair and the rich red of her lips. Around this time Rossetti also produced a handful of portrait drawings of the model, including one now at the Fitzwilliam Museum (fig. 55) that follows the familiar format of Fig. 54: Helen of Troy, 1863

Fig. 55: Annie Miller, 1860-63