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Lot Essay
This rare and interesting early drawing was reputedly made when Rossetti was studying under Ford Madox Brown in the spring of 1848. He had been an admirer of Brown's work ever since he had encountered it at the second Westminster Hall competition, held in 1844 to find artists capable of executing wall paintings for the new Houses of Parliament, and having tired of the teaching at the Royal Academy Schools, which he had entered in 1844, he had asked Brown to take him as a pupil. In the event, finding Brown's teaching in turn too restricting, he spent only a few weeks in his Clipstone Street studio before moving on to work with Holman Hunt. This was in August 1848. The following month the two young artists, together with Millais and four others, launched the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
Rossetti presumably either gave Brown the drawing or left it in his studio. Brown kept it all his life, and on 3 September 1893, almost exactly a month before his death on 6 October, he gave it to Elsie Martindale, who was engaged to his grandson Ford Madox Hueffer, later better known as the novelist Ford Madox Ford. In his 'critical essay' on Rossetti (1902), Hueffer described how Brown had tried to make Rossetti follow 'a rational course of development', beginning with factual accounts of 'still-life objects', while Rossetti, ever the impetuous romantic, preferred to rush into imaginative subjects. 'A few days before his death Madox Brown gave the present writer's wife a small study... which he said was the first imaginative watercolour Rossetti painted in his studio... He said at that time: "Gabriel painted a number of things like this whilst I tried to make him stick to work." '
William Michael Rossetti, who was also related to Brown, having married his daughter Lucy in 1874, had already referred to the drawing in his book Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Family Letters, with a Memoir (1895):
My brother made also many original drawings or slight paintings under Brown's eye. These I no longer remember, but I have lately seen one, which is said to be the first of all, and which was presented by Brown, only a few days before his death, to the young lady who is now Mrs Ford M. Hueffer. It is a drawing of a long narrow shape, in body-colour barely a little tinted, with a plain gilt ground; and represents a young woman, auburn-haired, standing with joined hands. The face seems to be a reminiscence of Christina, but the nose is unduly long; the drapery is delicately felt and done, and the whole thing has a forecast of the 'Preraphaelite' manner. Without being exactly good, the work shows distinct promise for a youth, almost a novice at holding the brush.
In style the drawing belongs to a specific group of early composition drawings by Rossetti. Of the others, the most important are The Sleeper, in the British Museum (fig. 2) and two illustrations to Edgar Allan Poe: Ulalume, in the Birmingham Art Gallery (fig. 3) and The Raven, in the Victoria and Albert Museum (Surtees, no. 19B, pl.7). Characteristic features of all these drawings are the rather plain faces, with straight hair and the long noses noticed by William Michael Rossetti, and the drapery falling in crisp, angular folds, as if it was formed out of metal foil rather than fabric. Even the pen used by the artist, delivering touches which are unusually dry and finicky even by Rossetti's standards, seems to be the same, and the drawings must be more or less contemporary.
None of the drawings dated, and at first sight the plain faces, angular drapery, and, in the case of the Ulalume (fig. 3), the angels' long pointed wings, are so reminiscent of early Flemish paintings that one might be tempted to place them immediately after Rossetti's visit to Belgium with Hunt in the autumn of 1849. After all, wherever he went - Brussels, Antwerp, Ghent, Bruges - he had found himself overwhelmed by the 'miraculous works' of Van Eyck and Memling, the latter particularly a 'stunner' whose 'pure religious sentiment and ecstatic poetry' inspired him to write two sonnets.
However, the evidence for dating our drawing to the spring or early summer of 1848, the short period when Rossetti was working in Brown's studio, seems to be so strong and circumstantial that we can only accept it, while assigning the other drawings in the group to the same time. Nor would this give us an illogical picture of Rossetti's stylistic development. The chronology of his early drawings is undoubtedly problematic and calls for further research, but this group seems to represent a transition between the idiom influenced by such contemporary illustrators as Gavarni and Cruikshank that he had adopted in 1846-7 and the more overt essays in Pre-Raphaelite values that he was making towards the end of the year. He has clearly moved on, for instance, in a highly finished illustration to Faust, showing Mephistopheles tormenting Gretchen in church (Surtees no. 34, pl. 19), which is dated July 1848, the moment when, as it were, he was between Brown and Hunt. Another step is taken in Genevieve (Surtees no. 38, pl.23), executed the following August, the month he moved into Hunt's studio, in the wiry, Retzsch-like manner that also characterises the contemporary drawings of Hunt and Millais. Finally, in The First Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice (Surtees no. 42, pl.27), which is dated 1849, we have a drawing that achieves full Pre-Raphaelite status so far as graphic expression goes.
Moreover, the stylistic traits in our group of drawings that might, lacking evidence to the contrary, have led us to place them after the visit to Belgium, can equally well be attributed to stimuli received by Rossetti in Brown's studio. Brown himself had recently undergone a dramatic change of style, in may ways similar to that awaiting the younger Pre-Raphaelites. It was, of course, the great bond between them, with Rossetti, hopping from Brown's studio to Hunt's, acting as the vital link. The crucial experience for Brown had been his journey south in 1845-6 for the sake of his wife's health, visiting Brussels, Basle and Florence en route for Rome, where he had lived for seven months. His travels had given him ample opportunity to study early Flemish, German and Italian painting, as well as the work of the Nazarenes, the two most famous of whom, Cornelius and Overbeck, he had met in Rome. All this had a profound impact, causing him to abandon the lush, international Romantic manner he had worked in hitherto for a much tighter, paler and more 'primitive' idiom. Examples included at least two of the pictures that so impressed Rossetti that he sought Brown's tuition: A Reminiscence of the Early Masters and Oure Ladye of Saturday Night. The latter, subsequently re-titled Oure Ladye of Good Children (Tate Gallery), was described by Brown himself as 'little more than the pouring out of the emotions and remembrances still vibrating within me of Italian Art' after his return to London, while the Reminiscence of the Early Masters may well be the picture also known as Cherub Angels watching the Crown of Thorns, one replete with early Italian and Nazarune references.
The Cherub Angels itself is lost, but we know what it looked like because it was copied by Rossetti in Brown's studio, evidence in itself of his identification with Brown's 'primitive' tendencies. Nor were these the only examples that must have impressed him. Wycliffe reading his Translation of the Bible to John of Gaunt (Bradford), a major expression of Brown's new style, was being completed and exhibited just as he entered Brown's studio, while the great Chaucer at the Court of Edward III (Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney) was in progress. Begun during Brown's stay in Rome, the picture was conceived as the centre panel of a triptych representing 'the seeds and fruits of English poetry'. The national genius in literature was to be celebrated in a format intimately associated with early devotional art, a composition that paid homage to the Raphael stanze and their many Nazarene derivatives, and a formal language that owed much to Brown's study of Holbein in Basle on his journey south.
There was, then, ample reason why Rossetti showed work in a style reminiscent of early Flemish painting while he was in Brown's studio. Who knows what visual material reflecting Brown's current preoccupations may have been lying around and caught his attention? Nor, in fact, are these drawings only 'Flemish' in feeling. The late John Gere, cataloguing the British Museum's Sleeper in 1994, was reminded by 'the scratchy penwork and angular drapery' of 'German fifteenth-century engravings', while the open window is a very Nazarene device, recalling numerous prototypes. As for the present drawing, it is surely consciously modelled on those innumerable early Italian panels in which a figure is uncompromisingly etched against a flat gold ground.
Even William Michael Rossetti was a little hesitant in claiming that the figure's head was a 'reminiscence' of the artist's younger sister Christina. She certainly appears in many of Dante Gabriel's early paintings and drawings, notably his two first paintings in the Pre-Raphaelite style, The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1848-9) and Ecce Ancilla Domini! (1849-50), both in the Tate Gallery. But to see her features in our drawing is surely going too far and unnecessary.
Another suggestion should, however, be taken seriously. In his account of the drawing, F.M.Hueffer quotes 'a lady' as observing that the image 'exactly answers to the description of the painting of the soul in the story of Hand and Soul which Rosssetti was writing at that time'. Hand and Soul is a prose tale, the hero of which is a thirteenth-century Pisan artist called Chiaro dell'Erma. Everthing has failed him: worldly ambition, even his desire to make his art a force for good, 'the presentment of some moral greatness that should impress the beholder'. One hot day, sitting alone in his studio, he senses the presence of a woman 'clad to the hands and feet with a green and grey garment, fashioned to that time... Though her hands were joined, her face was not lifted, but set forward; and though the gaze was austere, yet her mouth was supreme in gentleness'.
The woman tells him that she is 'an image of (his) own soul', and chides him for being egotistical. Rather than consciously seeking to further God's purpose, he should 'work from (his) own heart, simply', and leave God to use the results as He thinks fit. She then commands him to paint her, so that his soul shall 'stand before (him) always, and perplex (him) no more'. The story ends with the author encountering the picture in the Pitti in Florence in the spring of 1847. 'The picture I speak of is a small one, and represents merely the figure of a woman, clad to the hands and feet with a green and grey raiment, chaste and early in its fashion, but exceedingly simple. She is standing: her hands are held together lightly, and her eyes set earnestly open'.
There is obviously a remarkable similairity between our drawing and Rossetti's account both of Chiaro's personified soul and the picture she bids him paint. More than this, the considerable knowledge of early Italian art that the story displays fully explains the 'Italian primitive' quality of the drawing, with its hieratic figure and flat gold ground. No-one reading Hand and Soul is left in any doubt that the author, who never in fact went to Italy, is vividly aware of the circumstances in which early Italian art was produced.
There is, however, a problem. The 'lady' quoted by F.M. Hueffer was wrong in stating that Hand and Soul dates from the period when Rossetti was working in Brown's studio. On the contrary, it was written in haste in December 1849 for publication in the first number of The Germ, which appeared on the last day of the year.
Clearly this discrepancy needs explaining, and Virginia Surtees has suggested that perhaps the drawing was not in fact 'made in 1848 in Brown's studio, but in the following year, and was given to Brown at a later date'. This theory, of course, would have the additional attraction of placing the drawing soon after Rossetti's visit to Belgium in the autumn of 1849, and his exposure to the 'miraculous works' of Memling and Van Eyck, but it would invalidate Brown's recollections, apparently faithfully recorded by Hueffer and William Michael Rossetti, and make a mockery of the chronology suggested above.
Until the whole subject of Rossetti's early drawings is fully investigated, everyone has to make up his or her own mind on this issue in the light of the available evidence. One further point should, however, be considered. We do not have to assume that the drawing was made after Hand and Soul was written, and was an illustration to an existing text. It could equally well have come first, by as much as the twenty or so months between Rossetti's entering Brown's studio and writing Hand and Soul, creating an image of which the descriptions in the story are a reminiscence. Indeed, accepting that the drawing was made in Brown's studio in the spring of 1848 could indicate that Hand and Soul itself had been conceived by that date, even if it was not committed to paper till later.
Rossetti presumably either gave Brown the drawing or left it in his studio. Brown kept it all his life, and on 3 September 1893, almost exactly a month before his death on 6 October, he gave it to Elsie Martindale, who was engaged to his grandson Ford Madox Hueffer, later better known as the novelist Ford Madox Ford. In his 'critical essay' on Rossetti (1902), Hueffer described how Brown had tried to make Rossetti follow 'a rational course of development', beginning with factual accounts of 'still-life objects', while Rossetti, ever the impetuous romantic, preferred to rush into imaginative subjects. 'A few days before his death Madox Brown gave the present writer's wife a small study... which he said was the first imaginative watercolour Rossetti painted in his studio... He said at that time: "Gabriel painted a number of things like this whilst I tried to make him stick to work." '
William Michael Rossetti, who was also related to Brown, having married his daughter Lucy in 1874, had already referred to the drawing in his book Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Family Letters, with a Memoir (1895):
My brother made also many original drawings or slight paintings under Brown's eye. These I no longer remember, but I have lately seen one, which is said to be the first of all, and which was presented by Brown, only a few days before his death, to the young lady who is now Mrs Ford M. Hueffer. It is a drawing of a long narrow shape, in body-colour barely a little tinted, with a plain gilt ground; and represents a young woman, auburn-haired, standing with joined hands. The face seems to be a reminiscence of Christina, but the nose is unduly long; the drapery is delicately felt and done, and the whole thing has a forecast of the 'Preraphaelite' manner. Without being exactly good, the work shows distinct promise for a youth, almost a novice at holding the brush.
In style the drawing belongs to a specific group of early composition drawings by Rossetti. Of the others, the most important are The Sleeper, in the British Museum (fig. 2) and two illustrations to Edgar Allan Poe: Ulalume, in the Birmingham Art Gallery (fig. 3) and The Raven, in the Victoria and Albert Museum (Surtees, no. 19B, pl.7). Characteristic features of all these drawings are the rather plain faces, with straight hair and the long noses noticed by William Michael Rossetti, and the drapery falling in crisp, angular folds, as if it was formed out of metal foil rather than fabric. Even the pen used by the artist, delivering touches which are unusually dry and finicky even by Rossetti's standards, seems to be the same, and the drawings must be more or less contemporary.
None of the drawings dated, and at first sight the plain faces, angular drapery, and, in the case of the Ulalume (fig. 3), the angels' long pointed wings, are so reminiscent of early Flemish paintings that one might be tempted to place them immediately after Rossetti's visit to Belgium with Hunt in the autumn of 1849. After all, wherever he went - Brussels, Antwerp, Ghent, Bruges - he had found himself overwhelmed by the 'miraculous works' of Van Eyck and Memling, the latter particularly a 'stunner' whose 'pure religious sentiment and ecstatic poetry' inspired him to write two sonnets.
However, the evidence for dating our drawing to the spring or early summer of 1848, the short period when Rossetti was working in Brown's studio, seems to be so strong and circumstantial that we can only accept it, while assigning the other drawings in the group to the same time. Nor would this give us an illogical picture of Rossetti's stylistic development. The chronology of his early drawings is undoubtedly problematic and calls for further research, but this group seems to represent a transition between the idiom influenced by such contemporary illustrators as Gavarni and Cruikshank that he had adopted in 1846-7 and the more overt essays in Pre-Raphaelite values that he was making towards the end of the year. He has clearly moved on, for instance, in a highly finished illustration to Faust, showing Mephistopheles tormenting Gretchen in church (Surtees no. 34, pl. 19), which is dated July 1848, the moment when, as it were, he was between Brown and Hunt. Another step is taken in Genevieve (Surtees no. 38, pl.23), executed the following August, the month he moved into Hunt's studio, in the wiry, Retzsch-like manner that also characterises the contemporary drawings of Hunt and Millais. Finally, in The First Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice (Surtees no. 42, pl.27), which is dated 1849, we have a drawing that achieves full Pre-Raphaelite status so far as graphic expression goes.
Moreover, the stylistic traits in our group of drawings that might, lacking evidence to the contrary, have led us to place them after the visit to Belgium, can equally well be attributed to stimuli received by Rossetti in Brown's studio. Brown himself had recently undergone a dramatic change of style, in may ways similar to that awaiting the younger Pre-Raphaelites. It was, of course, the great bond between them, with Rossetti, hopping from Brown's studio to Hunt's, acting as the vital link. The crucial experience for Brown had been his journey south in 1845-6 for the sake of his wife's health, visiting Brussels, Basle and Florence en route for Rome, where he had lived for seven months. His travels had given him ample opportunity to study early Flemish, German and Italian painting, as well as the work of the Nazarenes, the two most famous of whom, Cornelius and Overbeck, he had met in Rome. All this had a profound impact, causing him to abandon the lush, international Romantic manner he had worked in hitherto for a much tighter, paler and more 'primitive' idiom. Examples included at least two of the pictures that so impressed Rossetti that he sought Brown's tuition: A Reminiscence of the Early Masters and Oure Ladye of Saturday Night. The latter, subsequently re-titled Oure Ladye of Good Children (Tate Gallery), was described by Brown himself as 'little more than the pouring out of the emotions and remembrances still vibrating within me of Italian Art' after his return to London, while the Reminiscence of the Early Masters may well be the picture also known as Cherub Angels watching the Crown of Thorns, one replete with early Italian and Nazarune references.
The Cherub Angels itself is lost, but we know what it looked like because it was copied by Rossetti in Brown's studio, evidence in itself of his identification with Brown's 'primitive' tendencies. Nor were these the only examples that must have impressed him. Wycliffe reading his Translation of the Bible to John of Gaunt (Bradford), a major expression of Brown's new style, was being completed and exhibited just as he entered Brown's studio, while the great Chaucer at the Court of Edward III (Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney) was in progress. Begun during Brown's stay in Rome, the picture was conceived as the centre panel of a triptych representing 'the seeds and fruits of English poetry'. The national genius in literature was to be celebrated in a format intimately associated with early devotional art, a composition that paid homage to the Raphael stanze and their many Nazarene derivatives, and a formal language that owed much to Brown's study of Holbein in Basle on his journey south.
There was, then, ample reason why Rossetti showed work in a style reminiscent of early Flemish painting while he was in Brown's studio. Who knows what visual material reflecting Brown's current preoccupations may have been lying around and caught his attention? Nor, in fact, are these drawings only 'Flemish' in feeling. The late John Gere, cataloguing the British Museum's Sleeper in 1994, was reminded by 'the scratchy penwork and angular drapery' of 'German fifteenth-century engravings', while the open window is a very Nazarene device, recalling numerous prototypes. As for the present drawing, it is surely consciously modelled on those innumerable early Italian panels in which a figure is uncompromisingly etched against a flat gold ground.
Even William Michael Rossetti was a little hesitant in claiming that the figure's head was a 'reminiscence' of the artist's younger sister Christina. She certainly appears in many of Dante Gabriel's early paintings and drawings, notably his two first paintings in the Pre-Raphaelite style, The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1848-9) and Ecce Ancilla Domini! (1849-50), both in the Tate Gallery. But to see her features in our drawing is surely going too far and unnecessary.
Another suggestion should, however, be taken seriously. In his account of the drawing, F.M.Hueffer quotes 'a lady' as observing that the image 'exactly answers to the description of the painting of the soul in the story of Hand and Soul which Rosssetti was writing at that time'. Hand and Soul is a prose tale, the hero of which is a thirteenth-century Pisan artist called Chiaro dell'Erma. Everthing has failed him: worldly ambition, even his desire to make his art a force for good, 'the presentment of some moral greatness that should impress the beholder'. One hot day, sitting alone in his studio, he senses the presence of a woman 'clad to the hands and feet with a green and grey garment, fashioned to that time... Though her hands were joined, her face was not lifted, but set forward; and though the gaze was austere, yet her mouth was supreme in gentleness'.
The woman tells him that she is 'an image of (his) own soul', and chides him for being egotistical. Rather than consciously seeking to further God's purpose, he should 'work from (his) own heart, simply', and leave God to use the results as He thinks fit. She then commands him to paint her, so that his soul shall 'stand before (him) always, and perplex (him) no more'. The story ends with the author encountering the picture in the Pitti in Florence in the spring of 1847. 'The picture I speak of is a small one, and represents merely the figure of a woman, clad to the hands and feet with a green and grey raiment, chaste and early in its fashion, but exceedingly simple. She is standing: her hands are held together lightly, and her eyes set earnestly open'.
There is obviously a remarkable similairity between our drawing and Rossetti's account both of Chiaro's personified soul and the picture she bids him paint. More than this, the considerable knowledge of early Italian art that the story displays fully explains the 'Italian primitive' quality of the drawing, with its hieratic figure and flat gold ground. No-one reading Hand and Soul is left in any doubt that the author, who never in fact went to Italy, is vividly aware of the circumstances in which early Italian art was produced.
There is, however, a problem. The 'lady' quoted by F.M. Hueffer was wrong in stating that Hand and Soul dates from the period when Rossetti was working in Brown's studio. On the contrary, it was written in haste in December 1849 for publication in the first number of The Germ, which appeared on the last day of the year.
Clearly this discrepancy needs explaining, and Virginia Surtees has suggested that perhaps the drawing was not in fact 'made in 1848 in Brown's studio, but in the following year, and was given to Brown at a later date'. This theory, of course, would have the additional attraction of placing the drawing soon after Rossetti's visit to Belgium in the autumn of 1849, and his exposure to the 'miraculous works' of Memling and Van Eyck, but it would invalidate Brown's recollections, apparently faithfully recorded by Hueffer and William Michael Rossetti, and make a mockery of the chronology suggested above.
Until the whole subject of Rossetti's early drawings is fully investigated, everyone has to make up his or her own mind on this issue in the light of the available evidence. One further point should, however, be considered. We do not have to assume that the drawing was made after Hand and Soul was written, and was an illustration to an existing text. It could equally well have come first, by as much as the twenty or so months between Rossetti's entering Brown's studio and writing Hand and Soul, creating an image of which the descriptions in the story are a reminiscence. Indeed, accepting that the drawing was made in Brown's studio in the spring of 1848 could indicate that Hand and Soul itself had been conceived by that date, even if it was not committed to paper till later.