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Lot Essay
The novelist George MacDonald (1824-1905), who had started his career as a Congregationalist minister and retained a mystical turn of mind throughout his life, knew many members of the Pre-Raphaelite circle. He was particularly intimate with Ruskin, in whose fraught relationship with Rose La Touche he was deeply involved, and with Arthur Hughes, who illustrated many of his books (Phantastes, Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood, At the Back of the North Wind, etc.). Rossetti's drawing shows MacDonald lecturing, and seems to date from the early 1860s. With a large family to support, MacDonald was not only a prolific author but a busy lecturer. From 1859 to 1867 he occupied the post of Professor of English Literature at Bedford College for Ladies in London. Rose La Touche attended his lectures on Shakespeare there in February 1863, but Rossetti evidently heard him speak at some private gathering on Camden Hill, using the back of the programme to make his sketch. Later MacDonald was to undertake lecture tours in Scotland (1869) and the United States (1872).
From 1867 MacDonald owned the house on the Upper Mall in Hammersmith that William Morris took over as his London home in 1878, changing its name from 'The Retreat' to 'Kelmscott House'. Rossetti himself thought of leasing the house in 1877, and there are some unflattering references to the current tenants in his correspondence with Jane Morris. According to him, 'the dirty MacDonald tribe' led a pig-like existence in the house, living on one floor and grabbing food when it suited them from a table that was never cleared. 'Your tenancy following theirs', he joked, 'must have required Augean labours of cleansing.'
The drawing does not appear in Virginia Surtees' catalogue raisonné of Rossetti's work, but it is said to have belonged to Maria Zambaco, the Greek beauty who conducted a torrid affair with Burne-Jones in the late 1860s. It is possible that she acquired it when she was sitting to Rossetti for her portrait in 1870, but whether she particularly admired MacDonald research has yet to show.
From 1867 MacDonald owned the house on the Upper Mall in Hammersmith that William Morris took over as his London home in 1878, changing its name from 'The Retreat' to 'Kelmscott House'. Rossetti himself thought of leasing the house in 1877, and there are some unflattering references to the current tenants in his correspondence with Jane Morris. According to him, 'the dirty MacDonald tribe' led a pig-like existence in the house, living on one floor and grabbing food when it suited them from a table that was never cleared. 'Your tenancy following theirs', he joked, 'must have required Augean labours of cleansing.'
The drawing does not appear in Virginia Surtees' catalogue raisonné of Rossetti's work, but it is said to have belonged to Maria Zambaco, the Greek beauty who conducted a torrid affair with Burne-Jones in the late 1860s. It is possible that she acquired it when she was sitting to Rossetti for her portrait in 1870, but whether she particularly admired MacDonald research has yet to show.