.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
A very Rossettian conception, the drawing takes its subject from a lyric in Philip van Artevelde, the historical drama in verse by Sir Henry Taylor that made its author's reputation when published in 1834. Rossetti was acquainted with Taylor, perhaps meeting him at Little Holland House, Kensington, where the poet was a fixture of Mrs Prinsep’s salon and a frequent sitter to her sister, the photographer Juliet Margaret Cameron. Certainly, as his brother William Michael Rossetti recorded, he had a ‘fervent admiration’ for Philip van Artevelde, which he had 'read and re-read…at a very youthful age’.
The composition shows an interior after a night of revelry. Two men continue to throw dice, accompanied by their paramours, but while one of the women embraces her lover and croons a song, the other – ‘yesterday’s rose’ – turns away, hiding her face in shame. Innocence and depravity are respectively symbolized by the young girl who strums a lute to the left and a seated ape scratching itself on the right.
The drawing is a sketch for a larger and more finished work in pen and ink (Tate Britain; illustrated in Surtees, op. cit. vol. 2, pl. 49). They bear identical inscriptions, which seem to imply that our drawing dates from 1850, when Rossetti ‘composed’ the design, and the Tate's from 1853. Each was given by Rossetti to F.G. Stephens, his fellow PRB who later abandoned painting for art-criticism, devoting forty years to reviewing exhibitions and writing ‘Fine Art Gossip’ columns for the Athenaeum.
The design of the stool on which the men play dice differs in the two versions. In our drawing the piece is seen at an angle and has cabriole legs; in the Tate’s, it is placed parallel to the picture plane and has sturdy upright members. Originally the Tate drawing too showed the motif as it appears in our sketch, and a photograph in the gallery’s archive represents it before the change was made. This was probably in the late 1850s. The 'new' stool is reminiscent of the medievalist furniture that appears in Rossetti’s ‘Froissartian’ watercolours of this date and that William Morris actually made when, with the help of Rossetti, Burne-Jones and others, he set up his firm of ‘fine art workmen’ in 1861.
F.G. Stephens was not our drawing’s only owner of interest. We do not know when it left his collection (the Tate version was bequeathed to the gallery by his son, Lt. Col. H.F. Stephens, in 1932), but by 1953 it belonged to Sir Kenneth Clark. A former director of the National Gallery, Clark is best known to posterity for Civilisation, the series of BBC television programmes he broadcast in 1969.
Rossetti executed two watercolour versions of the composition at later dates: one (Surtees, 57. R.1.) in 1865 for his Manchester patron Frederick Craven, the second, larger and re-titled Elena’s Song (Surtees, 57.R.2.) in 1871. The Craven version is in the Bancroft Collection at Wilmington, Delaware; Elena’s Song is untraced.
The composition shows an interior after a night of revelry. Two men continue to throw dice, accompanied by their paramours, but while one of the women embraces her lover and croons a song, the other – ‘yesterday’s rose’ – turns away, hiding her face in shame. Innocence and depravity are respectively symbolized by the young girl who strums a lute to the left and a seated ape scratching itself on the right.
The drawing is a sketch for a larger and more finished work in pen and ink (Tate Britain; illustrated in Surtees, op. cit. vol. 2, pl. 49). They bear identical inscriptions, which seem to imply that our drawing dates from 1850, when Rossetti ‘composed’ the design, and the Tate's from 1853. Each was given by Rossetti to F.G. Stephens, his fellow PRB who later abandoned painting for art-criticism, devoting forty years to reviewing exhibitions and writing ‘Fine Art Gossip’ columns for the Athenaeum.
The design of the stool on which the men play dice differs in the two versions. In our drawing the piece is seen at an angle and has cabriole legs; in the Tate’s, it is placed parallel to the picture plane and has sturdy upright members. Originally the Tate drawing too showed the motif as it appears in our sketch, and a photograph in the gallery’s archive represents it before the change was made. This was probably in the late 1850s. The 'new' stool is reminiscent of the medievalist furniture that appears in Rossetti’s ‘Froissartian’ watercolours of this date and that William Morris actually made when, with the help of Rossetti, Burne-Jones and others, he set up his firm of ‘fine art workmen’ in 1861.
F.G. Stephens was not our drawing’s only owner of interest. We do not know when it left his collection (the Tate version was bequeathed to the gallery by his son, Lt. Col. H.F. Stephens, in 1932), but by 1953 it belonged to Sir Kenneth Clark. A former director of the National Gallery, Clark is best known to posterity for Civilisation, the series of BBC television programmes he broadcast in 1969.
Rossetti executed two watercolour versions of the composition at later dates: one (Surtees, 57. R.1.) in 1865 for his Manchester patron Frederick Craven, the second, larger and re-titled Elena’s Song (Surtees, 57.R.2.) in 1871. The Craven version is in the Bancroft Collection at Wilmington, Delaware; Elena’s Song is untraced.