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Lot Essay
William Michael Rossetti, who owned the drawing in 1899, expressed doubts about its subject in an inscription on the back. H.C. Marillier, cataloguing it in his monograph of that year, reflected this uncertainty, describing the drawing as a 'rough sketch' for a painting illustrating 'The Bride's Prelude' and dating it 1870, but observing that both subject and date were 'conjectual'. Virginia Surtees, re-cataloguing the drawing in 1971, when it was temporarily missing, retained the traditional identification while opting for a date of 'c. 1870'.
'The Bride's Prelude' was one of Rossetti's earliest poems. Originally called 'Bride Chamber Talk', it was begun in 1848, the year the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded. He continued it the following year, finding inspiration in the Musée de Cluny, which he visited when in Paris with Holman Hunt that autumn, and the aim was to publish it in the Pre-Raphaelite journal, The Germ. However, despite intermittent tinkerings, the poem was never finished, and only Part I was published in Rossetti's lifetime. He included it in the 1881 edition of his Poems, largely to provide ballast. He was under no illusions about it. 'Its picturesqueness is sufficient to make it pass muster', he wrote, 'though it has no other quality to recommend it. Besides, I don't see how it can be spared as the space must be filled.'
The poem describes a conversation between two sisters, Aloÿse, who is about to be married, and the younger Amelotte, who is acting as bridesmaid. Aloÿse confesses to an old affair with the man to whom she is now betrothed and by whom she has had a child, but the fragment ends with much of the story unexplained.
While the poem is replete with medieval detail, bearing out the connection with the Musée de Cluny, the figures in the drawing seem almost eighteenth-century in feeling. Perhaps this was the source of William Michael Rossetti's doubts about the subject.
It is not clear why Rossetti should have decided to paint the theme around 1870, unless the publication of his Poems that year turned his thoughts in this direction. Whatever the case, no picture based on the sketch was ever painted.
'The Bride's Prelude' was one of Rossetti's earliest poems. Originally called 'Bride Chamber Talk', it was begun in 1848, the year the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded. He continued it the following year, finding inspiration in the Musée de Cluny, which he visited when in Paris with Holman Hunt that autumn, and the aim was to publish it in the Pre-Raphaelite journal, The Germ. However, despite intermittent tinkerings, the poem was never finished, and only Part I was published in Rossetti's lifetime. He included it in the 1881 edition of his Poems, largely to provide ballast. He was under no illusions about it. 'Its picturesqueness is sufficient to make it pass muster', he wrote, 'though it has no other quality to recommend it. Besides, I don't see how it can be spared as the space must be filled.'
The poem describes a conversation between two sisters, Aloÿse, who is about to be married, and the younger Amelotte, who is acting as bridesmaid. Aloÿse confesses to an old affair with the man to whom she is now betrothed and by whom she has had a child, but the fragment ends with much of the story unexplained.
While the poem is replete with medieval detail, bearing out the connection with the Musée de Cluny, the figures in the drawing seem almost eighteenth-century in feeling. Perhaps this was the source of William Michael Rossetti's doubts about the subject.
It is not clear why Rossetti should have decided to paint the theme around 1870, unless the publication of his Poems that year turned his thoughts in this direction. Whatever the case, no picture based on the sketch was ever painted.