Influence of Browning and Tennyson—Comparison of Rossetti and Browning—Influence of Dante—Introduction to Miss Siddal—Rossetti’s Water-colours—Madox Brown and Romantic Realism—The Dispersal of the Brotherhood—Departure of Woolner—Ideals of Portraiture—Rossetti and Public Exhibitions—Death of Deverell—Rossetti’s Friendship with Ruskin—Apostasy of Millais—The Rank and File of the Movement—Relation to Foreign Schools.

While Millais and Holman Hunt were outwardly dominant in the region of reform, and, in the exhibitions of 1850–51, were leading the Brotherhood Militant boldly into the enemy’s camp, Rossetti was entering upon a phase of doubt and perplexity, of self-distrust and hesitation, which resolved itself into an important crisis in his artistic development. A variety of circumstances diverted him in 1850 from the special line of religious painting, exemplified in “The Girlhood of Mary Virgin” and “Ecce Ancilla Domini,” which had been the chief outlet of his early enthusiasms in art,—if indeed so inadequate a phrase be permissible in regard to pictures which must rank with the purest products of his genius in its pristine robustness and simplicity. An incident in the studio-annals of the Brotherhood now turned him aside from the mediÆvo-religious manner adopted directly and literally from the early Italian masters. Rossetti’s convert and disciple, James Collinson, striving to imitate afar off the sincere habit of his leader, set to work upon a congruous subject, “The Renunciation of St. Elizabeth,” and produced a picture so mystical in conception and so hysterical in sentiment, albeit not without a certain grace and beauty of its own, that the sound and practical good sense which tempered the mysticism of Rossetti revolted at once from the extravagance of such a style. He now perceived the danger of pursuing too exclusively a path bordering on the metaphysical and occult, and quickly sought to brace and strengthen both his own imagination and that of his comrade, by departing for a time from the field of what is commonly called “sacred” art, and seeking fresh inspirations in a less rarefied air.

Other influences, chiefly of a personal kind, began to play around Rossetti at this time. He had moved, early in the year 1850, to a suite of rooms at 14, Chatham Place, Blackfriars; a block of houses since demolished, but then hospitable enough in a sober charm of environment; within view of the river and the historic horizon of its shores, and of certain grim but not wholly unromantic vistas of the great metropolis. In this home was spent the happiest decade of Rossetti’s life. Here began, soon after his settlement in the new abode, his friendship with the greatest poet of the Victorian age, and with another conspicuous in the second rank of its singers,—Tennyson and Browning,—both destined to exercise a strong influence on Rossetti’s art, though (singularly as it happened) not on his poetry; which remained, through years of intellectual intercourse and the reading together of each other’s verse, absolutely unaffected by either of the widely different poetic styles of the then Laureate and his great contemporary.

It is not easy for a succeeding generation to understand with what enthusiasm, with what delight and invigoration, the little company of painter-poets plunged into the writings of Browning when, following Rossetti, who was first on the track of the new fount of refreshment, they discovered therein the tonic which they needed. No better antidote to the sensuous mysticism into which some of the Pre-Raphaelites were threatening to lapse could have been found than the wholesome modernity and salutary brusquerie of the author of “Pauline” and “Bells and Pomegranates.” It was probably because they stood most in need of his gospel that the influence of Browning was at first more strong upon the readers than that of Tennyson, who affected them in the direction of pure romance, and distilled for them all that was sanest and noblest in the mediÆval world.

In the autumn of 1850 Rossetti began, during his stay with Hunt and F.G. Stephens at Sevenoaks, a number of sketches with a view to a large and elaborate picture of “Kate the Queen,” from Browning’s well-known lyric. But he could never satisfy himself with the design, and after much toil, disheartenment, and perplexity, the subject was abandoned, like many more promising themes which from time to time inspired Rossetti. The entire year, save for the success of “Ecce Ancilla Domini,” had been one of disappointment to him, and of disconsolate struggles for a new departure. He had made many futile attempts at designs for “The Germ,” but none pleased him, and now he was casting about for new matter and media. For, as his standard of excellence rose higher, he began to feel more acutely his technical shortcomings,—the results partly of his incomplete training and desultory study in youth, partly of singular ill-luck in his figure-models, and partly also of a curious constitutional deficiency—not of industry per se, but of the faculty to direct and apply his industry along right lines. No modern artist has disproved more completely than Rossetti the barren platitude which defines genius as “the capacity for taking infinite pains.” Comparison between Rossetti and Browning in their struggle with mental tendencies unfavourable to lucid and well-ordered art is too obvious to demand pursuit in detail. Both took the prescribed “infinite pains,” but neither in the most profitable directions. Browning was over-charged with thought; Rossetti with imagination; and both were cumbered with the difficulties of artistic speech. The art of Browning has frequently been pronounced crude, raw, and “undigested.” One would hesitate to apply such terms to any work of Rossetti’s; for his, even at its most elemental stages, generally erred in the direction of strained and laboured purism, being over-wrought rather than unripe in conception or performance. In both artists, an exuberant activity of output was combined with a curious inability to undergo the full discipline of just and coherent expression. Browning’s prolific and incorrigible chaos of diction and metre, and Rossetti’s want of balance and sobriety in draughtsmanship, are but instances of the too frequent impediments of genius in the process of transmission. Rossetti, when he attained perfection in technique—and that he did so absolutely and repeatedly can no longer be questioned—seemed to stumble on it, as we have already suggested, by a sort of exquisite chance, a divine surprise, rather than a logical issue. And, manfully as he strove to recover in technical science, and did indeed recover to a marvellous degree, the lost ground of early days in a splendid maturity, his sense of perfect drawing was too fine for him not to suffer keenly—so long as that sense remained unimpaired—from that inability to realize at will his own ideals of perfection, which to every true worker is the only thing to be called failure.

Distracted as Rossetti was throughout his life by the very richness and fertility of his own genius, torn ever between divided aims and conflicting purposes, the more mutually obstructive because of the restless and hyper-sensitive nature which was the field and victim of their strife, the difficulty of concentrating that genius upon the highest aim and purpose within its proper sphere was never more stubborn than at this period. So largely did the poetic impulse, in his youth, predominate over the pictorial method, that, as he himself declares in a letter written in retrospect, it was not until 1853, when he was twenty-five years of age, that he definitely adopted painting as his life-study and profession, and relegated his literary efforts to a subordinate place. Subordinate they were in name and for a time only: to be put forth with fresh ardour and greater mastery at intervals of his painting, and to surpass it in some respects in the essentials of fine art. Rossetti had yet to learn that he, even more than Hunt and Millais, was primarily and supremely a colourist in the broadest sense of the word.

But a still deeper and more abiding influence from the literature of the past was by this time ascendant in Rossetti’s mind. The love of Dante, already inherent in him, was nurtured by many tender associations of youth: it now increased and swayed him as a direct and urgent spiritual power. In 1845 the vague spell of the old name upon the young namesake had changed, for the latter, into an eager study of his great poetic inheritance. The magic and majestic visions of the “Purgatorio” and “Paradiso,” and still more, the unforgettable life-tragedy of their seer, had sunk deeply into Rossetti’s thought, until, from his own recreative alembic of fantasy, he began, about 1850, to bring them forth again on paper and canvas, in a rich and profuse miscellany of rough sketches and brilliant vignettes and colour-studies, too often left unfinished at a point of high promise and alluring suggestions of success.

It is not difficult to trace, through the strange parallels of circumstance and destiny, the sombre charm that bound the exiled poet of the fourteenth to him of the nineteenth century. It has been said that no ascendancy of a great poetic personality over one born in a later age has been more potent and fruitful in art than that of Dante Alighieri over Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In 1849–50 we find the latter sketching, first in ink and then in colours, the historic or legendary meeting of Dante and Beatrice Portinari at a marriage feast, when Beatrice is said to have laughed with her companions at the shyness and confusion of the young patriot-guest. The second of these sketches was severely criticised when exhibited in 1851–52, on account of a daring juxtaposition of bright light green and bright light blue in the colour scheme. This bold experiment was afterwards defended by Ruskin by analogy with the natural disposition of green grass, etc., against a summer sky.

It was at this time also that another new and important personal influence came upon Rossetti’s life. James Collinson had now separated from the Brotherhood, and was succeeded, at all events probationally, by Walter Howell Deverell, through whom, by one of those strange chances which sometimes modify in a moment the destinies of a lifetime, Rossetti made the acquaintance of Miss Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal; a young girl of such remarkable beauty that Deverell at once asked her to sit to him as a model, and introduced her to Rossetti for the same purpose. The story runs to the effect that Deverell, who was himself of singularly handsome and winning presence, accidentally caught sight of Miss Siddal’s face, with its regular, delicate features and profusion of rich, dark auburn hair, in the background of a shop-window where she—the daughter of a Sheffield cutler—was engaged as a milliner’s assistant. To Deverell, being at that time in search of a model for his new picture, “Viola,” from Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night,” the sight of such a face was doubly welcome. He quickly made such frank and honourable advances as his graces of person and character facilitated, and Miss Siddal’s dÉbut in the studios of the Brotherhood brought not only to Deverell a perfect Viola, but to Rossetti an ideal and actual Beatrice. For the young artists soon found their model to be—in the old fairy-tale phrase—“as good as she was beautiful.” Of that goodness and beauty, that incomparable charm of talent and of character, of manner and temperament, which soon made her the centre of the warmest admiration and affection, enough has long since been written, by those who knew her, to render the tardy praise of less qualified historians alike needless and impertinent. The members of the Brotherhood vied with each other in the endeavour to immortalize her in their paintings. Rossetti, Hunt, and Millais did so with unqualified success. Rossetti, in his turn, discovered that she herself possessed extraordinary aptitude for art. He gave her lessons in drawing and painting, and the two worked together upon kindred ideals. Her presence in the studios was soon upon the footing of equal friendship and pleasant cameraderie. The vigour of her imagination is best seen in a water-colour drawing, “Sir Patrick Spens,” in Mr. Theodore Watts’s collection. It represents the wives of the men on the doomed ship waiting in agonized expectancy upon the shore.

Soon a different and deeper attachment sprang up between teacher and pupil. Her exquisite spirit, her gracious ways, appealed as deeply to Rossetti’s sensitive and passionate nature as did her beauty to his Æsthetic judgment. His love for her was as the gathering up of all the scattered forces of his being into one consecrated worship. It may well be that the progress of courtship was not invariably favourable to the progress of art, but several rough portraits by Rossetti of himself and Miss Siddal, and of Rossetti by his fair companion, remain as pleasant witnesses of idle hours, and are at the same time drawn with singular vividness and force.

Early in 1851, or perhaps at the close of the previous year, Miss Siddal appears to have given sittings to Holman Hunt for the face of Sylvia in his picture of “Valentine and Sylvia,” already referred to. Rossetti sat with her as the Jester in Walter Deverell’s “Viola”—his most successful picture; taken from the scene in which the Duke asks the Jester to “sing again that antique song he sang last night.” The artist served as his own model for the Duke.

It appears probable that Rossetti and Miss Siddal were engaged as early as 1853, though the relationship was not openly avowed for a considerable period, and did not terminate in marriage until 1860. Rossetti’s pecuniary position, at the outset of his career, was naturally uncertain; nor did it materially improve with subsequent prosperity and fame; for his tastes and habits, according to the traditions of artistic Bohemia, were as luxurious and improvident as his earnings were precarious. Miss Siddal, too, was delicate in health. An early sketch of her, from Rossetti’s hand, and now in the South Kensington Museum, representing her as she stands by a window, in a gown of quaint simplicity and soberness, gives perhaps the truest impression of her personality that could be selected from the portraits of that period. The artless and yet somewhat austere pose, the fragile grace and slightly languid sweetness of aspect, afford a key to the criticism once passed to the effect that “she would have been a Puritan if she had not been an invalid.” The latter she never was in the sense of chronic inactivity, but of such delicacy as to give a peculiar tenderness to her service as a model, and unhappily both to delay and abbreviate the short period of married life.

To some critics it has been a source of regret that Rossetti should have come in youth so unreservedly under the spell of a type of beauty as exclusive as that of this well-beloved model. The rare blending of spiritual with sensuous charm which she presented in feature and expression so fully satisfied his own ideal of that harmony as to make him dwell upon, and perhaps specialize it, in a way which constituted a danger to his art; inducing him to read into other feminine types the individual characteristics of the one. Fortunate as he was in after life in obtaining for his models some of the most beautiful and cultured women in the artistic and literary circles of London, his tendency was almost always to look at them, as it were, in the light of that established ideal, and to conceive them as versions merely of that elemental loveliness which so dominated his thought. But it was inevitable that a temperament like Rossetti’s should specialize, through their very intensity, the dominant characteristics most familiar to his pencil and his brush. The case of Miss Herbert, an accomplished actress who gave him a number of sittings in the next decade, is perhaps the most striking exception to the rule; but her style of beauty was in too complete a contrast to that of Miss Siddal (being of a severe, robust, and Hellenic type) to allow of any compromise between the features of the two.

The combined influence of Browning and Tennyson among contemporary poets, and the increasing sway of Dante over the young painter, inclining him the more strongly in the direction of historic romance, produced, as we have seen, a somewhat desultory course of pen-and-ink sketches and water-colour studies during the next few years. The interval from 1850 to 1858 may be reckoned as Rossetti’s second period. After the completion of “Ecce Ancilla Domini,” he painted no important oil picture until the Llandaff “Triptych” of 1859, and the contemporary “Bocca Baciata,” which stands first in point of time, and high in point of merit, among the masterpieces of his maturity.

Yet the water-colours of the second period, capricious and experimental in treatment as many of them are, include some of the most valuable, because the most characteristic and significant, of Rossetti’s work in the realm of pure romance. In these rough and often hasty sketches, sometimes less than twelve by twenty inches in size, his imagination seems to have been exercising itself upon the poetic subjects that haunted him by turns with the vividness of actual life, more vital and urgent than the realities of every day. Several, indeed, of the finest of these water-colours are now dated, on good authority, as early as 1848–49; such as the lovely little sepia sketch, “The Sun may Shine and we be cold,” given to his friend, Alexander Monro, a young Scottish sculptor of high promise, whose early death from consumption removed an artist who could ill be spared from the small and never very strong sculpture-branch of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. To this period also belong some of the most important of the Dante subjects. From 1849 is dated “A Parable of Love,” one of the best of Rossetti’s early drawings in pen and ink. The lady is seated at an easel on which she has been painting her own portrait from a mirror at her side. Her lover, bending over her from behind, lays his hand upon hers to guide the brush anew. Mr. Woolner served as the model for the lover. A pen-drawing from Browning’s “Sordello,” entitled “Taurello’s First Sight of Fortune,” also belongs to 1849, together with the powerful little sketch, “The Laboratory,” from the same poet, showing a strange, brilliant, witch-like or almost serpent-like woman in an alchemist’s shop, procuring from him some fateful elixir wherewith to play upon her rival and avenge herself upon the lover, once her own.

One of the most beautiful water-colours of 1850 is the “Morning Music;” a dainty little half-length figure of a white-clad girl seated at her toilet, another maiden brushing her long bright hair, while her lover stands, making music from some archaic instrument, at her side. At this time also Rossetti made the first sketch of a subject which fascinated him with peculiar force almost throughout his artistic career, and to which he returned again and again in several media, even within a short time of his death, but without ever achieving a finished picture—“Michael Scott’s Wooing.”

In 1851 were made the best of several water-colour drawings from the subject of “Lucretia Borgia,” and the first pen and pencil sketches of a subject suggested by the famous DÖppelgÄnger legends of northern Europe. The design for “How they met themselves” remains among the very highest of Rossetti’s conceptions in pure romance. The final pen-and-ink version was not done till 1860, nor the water-colour till 1864. The subject demands further study in a separate chapter, together with the principal Dante sketches in this group. Several drawings from Shakespearean subjects, including “Benedick and Beatrice” (“Much Ado about Nothing”) and “Orlando and Adam in the Forest” (“As You Like It”), were also executed about this time.

Mr. F.G. Stephens traces some interesting modifications of Rossetti’s technique between the years 1850 and 1853 to the influence of his comrades in the course of associated work. From Millais he seems to have gained something of the easy grace and suavity of style which was lacking in his first too strenuous work; from Holman Hunt, the scrupulous and laboured detail which readily became as exhaustively (and sometimes exhaustingly) symbolic as Hunt’s own; and from Ford Madox Brown a certain robust breadth and dramatic mastery which was needed to lift his subjective creations into a large and quickening atmosphere. Probably it was the influence of Madox Brown that led him to the field of stern and practical social problems, of everyday romance; to deal with the eternally crucial relationship of frail womanhood to passionate manhood, and all its sweet and bitter and profound significance upon the life of humanity, as he dealt with it in the wonderful “Hesterna Rosa” (“Yesterday’s Rose”) of 1851, in “The Gate of Memory” six years later, and in the great realistic picture, “Found,” which was begun in 1852, but which, after many vicissitudes of neglect, spasmodic effort, and frequent despair, remained still unfinished at the painter’s death. It may be wished that Rossetti had pursued more thoroughly the motif which thus yielded some of the most remarkable and suggestive of his designs. This group, however, again affords a subject for consideration on a future page.

But the year 1853 saw also the first outward signs of the breaking-up of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Thomas Woolner, the oldest member of the Brotherhood, at this time twenty-eight years of age, being still unable to earn a living in London by his art, now determined to emigrate to Australia, where some friends of his family were already established at Melbourne, and to try his luck at the gold-diggings, which were at that time a source of much excitement and speculation in English circles. Woolner had already achieved some unpretentious but exceedingly thoughtful and conscientious work in sculpture, but he had not met with much academic recognition, nor with any substantial favour from the art-patronising public. For many years a pupil of Behnes, he entered the Academy Schools in 1842, and contributed a large composition of life-size figures representing “The Death of Boadicea” to the Westminster Cartoon Competition of 1844. His contributions to the Royal Academy exhibitions in Trafalgar Square had included “Eleanor Sucking the Poison from the Wound of Prince Edward” (1843), “Alastor” (from Shelley, 1846), “Feeding the Hungry” (bas-relief, 1847), “Eros and Euphrosyne” and “The Rainbow” (1848), and portraits of Carlyle and Tennyson. At the British Institution he had also exhibited a statuette of “Puck” (1847) and “Titania Caressing the Indian Boy” (1848). He sailed for Australia in the spring of 1853, accompanied by a promising young sculptor named Bernhard Smith (who died somewhat prematurely in 1885), and followed shortly afterwards by E.L. Bateman, another close sympathizer with Pre-Raphaelite aims. Woolner returned to England early in 1857, and then executed the fine bust of Tennyson recently placed in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey. His later work, however, can hardly be classed with that of the Pre-Raphaelite band. He died on the 7th of October, 1892.

In the summer of the same year the Brethren agreed to paint together a group of their own portraits, in order to send them over as a gift to their distant comrade on the gold-fields of the Antipodes. Accordingly, they met one day at Millais’s studio in Gower Street. There were present Dante and W.M. Rossetti, F.G. Stephens, Millais, and Holman Hunt. Mr. W.M. Rossetti, ranks the results in the following order of merit:—The portrait of Stephens by Millais, of Millais by Hunt, of W.M. Rossetti by Millais, of Dante Rossetti by Hunt, and of Hunt by Dante Rossetti.

Rossetti himself, as we have already seen, produced but very few male portraits. The large oil-painting of his godfather, Mr. Charles Lyell, and the pencil drawings of his father and grandfather; the water-colour sketches of Browning and Swinburne, and the admirable life-size chalks of Mr. Ruskin, Mr. Theodore Watts (said by Mr. Swinburne to be his masterpiece in portraiture), Mr. F.R. Leyland, Dr. Gordon Hake, Mr. George Hake, and Mr. W.J. Stillman, two or three pencil drawings of Madox Brown, and the painting of Holman Hunt, as above recorded, seem to exhaust the list of his efforts in that field, if we exclude the consideration of many excellent likenesses which occur among his genre-pictures. W.M. Rossetti, for instance, sat more than once to his brother for the head of Dante, and many other important figures; in fact, there was a general practice of mutual accommodation among the Brothers in serving as models one to another.

Yet the immense influence of the Pre-Raphaelite movement upon English portraiture in the latter half of the nineteenth century would be difficult to over-estimate. It must be remembered that the first principle of Pre-Raphaelitism—namely, that nature, including human nature, is to be painted truthfully and unflinchingly as it presents itself to the painter’s eye—strikes directly at the root of the conventional habit, which aimed at “idealizing” the subject into something far superior to the present reality. Still, as “the eye sees what it brings the power to see,” so the rightly-trained artist sees infinitely more than the casual observer, and his purest realism becomes the highest ideality. For in order to represent nature truly, something more is demanded than imitation. Diderot tells a story of a painter well known to him and to fame, who, on beginning work upon a new subject, always went down upon his knees and prayed to be delivered from the model. There was a grain of truth in his notion. To be delivered from the letter in order to apprehend the spirit, yet to follow faithfully the visible in order to attain the invisible, is the task of the portrait-painter. The mistake of the pseudo-classic idealists, as of the impractical folk in other walks of life, is to suppose that by aiming at the spirit they are absolved from the letter altogether; not perceiving that to gain the spirit they must reach through the letter, and beyond it. Every true portrait-painter is an idealist in this highest sense, that he perceives and reproduces the inmost and essential Self of his sitter, and in supreme moments resolves, as Spinoza would have it, the “potential human” into the “actual divine.” He portrays scrupulously the outward aspect, but interprets the whole by that pervading spirit from within to which the outward aspect has given him—as a seer—the key. The face he paints is not transfigured by his own imagination, his own conceit, however fair, of what that face might or ought to be; but it is revealed in its own distinct and actual being by a witness which, if truthful, must be as generous as stern. It is the immortal and inevitable “Thou Thyself” of which Rossetti sings:

Yet if we may risk a paradox, it is precisely in the reality that there lies the potentiality of the life within; behind the physical is abides the spiritual may be; the “everlasting no” of the uncompromising realist, sifting, limiting, and analyzing down the human unit into bare and rigid matter, often conceals the hidden hope and promise of the idealist’s “everlasting yea.” Hence a great portrait is charged to the full with latent possibilities of character and destiny. It suggests forces as well as phenomena, causes as well as effects, inherent tendencies as well as facts. Someone has said that a human face should be either a promise or a history. The definition is too narrow. Every face, save perhaps in childhood, and not always with that exception, contains both promise and history inextricably blended each with each. A great portrait must be passionately personal, intensely individual; presenting one single, complete, and separate identity to the eye and mind, and yet in a very real sense impersonal, having a certain universal, humanitarian significance. For the artist’s hand sets the human unit in its place in the great Family; lifts it on to the broad planes of the world’s common life. As his eye sees all things, like Spinoza, sub specie eternitatis—sees Time in the light of Eternity—so it sees one Man in the light of Humanity. He knows no isolations of being, conceives no man as “living to himself;” but is concerned ever with relationships and imperative sympathies between the subject of his portrait and the rest of mankind; so that the personality that looks forth from his canvas, faithfully and profoundly interpreted by his own, has in it the elements of appeal and challenge, and sends out a radiance of vitality to its spiritual kin.

In this ideal of portraiture the young Pre-Raphaelites had been confirmed by Ruskin long ago; and he had pointed them to the incomparable portraits of Dante by Giotto, of Petrarch by Simon Memmi, and of Savonarola by Fra Bartolomeo, as examples among the Italian Pre-Raphaelites of the attainment of such success. Rossetti and his comrades in their turn, more especially some of the younger and more independent spirits not actually or permanently connected with the Brotherhood, developed and perfected the ideal to a degree incalculably fruitful in contemporary art. It will hardly be disputed that in Mr. G.F. Watts, one of the truest Pre-Raphaelites in aspiration and temper, though utterly distinct from them in original genius and intellectual range, England has found at last her greatest portrait painter, while to Millais, one of the original members of the Brotherhood, the judgment of posterity will attribute a scarcely less exalted place. They found the art of portraiture degraded, almost without exception, to the lowest level of trivial prettiness as regards women, and vulgar affectation in dealing with men. “The system to be overthrown,” as Ruskin said, “was one of which the main characteristic was the pursuit of beauty at the expense of truth.” And such pursuit leads in all ages to the same inexorable fatality,—the beauty so gained is always of a false and spurious kind. The ancient allegory of Pandemos and Urania is for ever true in art. The seeker for ideal beauty seeks it only in visible forms, pursues it through the physical world alone, awaits it at the doors of sense merely, and is straightway ensnared by the earthly Pandemos, the Venus of the flesh. But let him steadfastly set his soul to the higher worship, let him seek reverently the moral and spiritual loveliness of human character in the great is and the greater may be of the throbbing, actual life around him, and surely he will be brought into the near presence of the heavenly Urania; surely he will pass, with Rossetti, through “Body’s Beauty” to “Soul’s Beauty,” and worship with him

The attention of Mr. Ruskin had meanwhile been diverted to some extent from the work of Millais and Hunt by his entrance in 1854 upon a close personal friendship with Rossetti, which lasted in cordial fidelity for some ten or twelve years. At the time of his first public championship of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Mr. Ruskin had known nothing of Rossetti’s work, inasmuch as it had never yet appeared on the walls of the Academy or in any of the popular exhibitions of the period. But, for such unintentional and unconscious neglect of the real leader of the movement which he so warmly endorsed, the great critic now made ample reparation. He became a constant and generous patron of Rossetti’s pictures until the painter passed, about the year 1865, into his third artistic period, and developed methods less in accordance with Ruskin’s especial tenets. That the gradual severance of intimacy between artist and buyer should have been brought about by the former’s independence of spirit and resolute adherence to his own inspirations and aims, in the face of some, perhaps, over-officious criticism and counsel from his patron, is certainly no discredit to Rossetti. At the same time, the art-world owes a debt of gratitude to Mr. Ruskin for having so long encouraged, by his support and sympathy, the production of those exquisite water-colours which Rossetti, unsettled as he then was in habits of painting, might not otherwise have accomplished in such splendour and cogency during his transition period.

And to these years of intimacy with Ruskin belong nearly all the finest drawings of his “Morte D’Arthur” series, such as “King Arthur’s Tomb” (called sometimes “The Last Meeting of Launcelot and Guinevere,” though the design by no means gives the impression of a meeting in the flesh), “The Damozel of the Sanct Grael,” “The Chapel before the Lists,” “The Meeting of Sir Tristram and Iseult,” “Sir Galahad in the Ruined Chapel,” “Sir Galahad and Sir Bors,” “Launcelot Escaping from Guinevere’s Chamber,” and “The Death of Breuse sans PitiÉ;” together with a fresh and important group of Biblical subjects treated in a more daringly romantic manner than before, including “The Passover in the Holy Family,” “Bethlehem Gate,” “Ruth and Boaz,” “The Crucifixion,” “Mary in the House of John,” and the first sketch for “Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon the Pharisee;” also the “Triptych” for the altar-piece of Llandaff Cathedral, “The Infant Christ Adored by a Shepherd and a King.” The Dante subjects again appear in 1854–55, with “Francesca di Rimini,” “Paolo and Francesca,” “Matilda Gathering Flowers” (from the “Purgatorio”), “Dante’s Vision of Rachel and Leah,” “Dante at Verona,” and the first version of the picture afterwards among Rossetti’s masterpieces, “Dante’s Dream.” The little drawings of “The Tune of the Seven Towers” in 1850, “Carlisle Tower,” “Fra Angelico Painting,” and “Giorgione Painting” in 1853, “The Queen’s Page” (from Heine) in 1854, “Fra Pace” and “Monna Rosa” in 1856, “The Blue Closet,” “The Blue Bower,” “The Bower Garden,” and the first design for a favourite subject variously known as “Aurelia” and “Bonifazio’s” or “Fazio’s Mistress” in 1857; these, together with some further sketches for “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” a number of portraits of Miss Siddal, Browning, Tennyson, and Swinburne, whom he knew in 1857, are but a selection from the almost countless studies, in pencil, pen and ink, neutral tint, water-colour, and occasional oil, scattered over Rossetti’s transition period.

“St. Luke the Painter,” in 1857, is notable as being Rossetti’s first success in coloured chalk; a medium which he affected more freely in after years, and with extraordinary power and felicity; the medium, in fact, in which some of the noblest of his later half-length symbolic figures were executed.

After the year 1850 Rossetti almost ceased to exhibit in picture galleries. A very few of his pictures, including the “Bocca Baciata” and a version of “Lucretia Borgia,” were thenceforth seen in the Hogarth Club, a small society of artists and amateurs to which he belonged, and others afterwards in the Arundel Club, which he joined in 1865. An important exception, however, was made to this rule of seclusion in 1856, when a small but highly representative Pre-Raphaelite Exhibition was opened at 4, Russell Place, Fitzroy Square. Among Rossetti’s contributions were the first water-colour draft of “Dante’s Dream,” already alluded to, and its pendant, “The Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice,” “Hesterna Rosa,” “The Blue Closet,” and “Mary Magdalene.” The other exhibitors were Millais, Holman Hunt, Madox Brown, Arthur Hughes, Charles Collins, William Davis, W.L. Windus, Inchbold, Seddon and Brett. The “Dante’s Dream” re-appeared at the Liverpool Academy in 1858, together with “A Christmas Carol,” and “The Wedding of St. George”; “Fair Rosamund,” and “The Farmer’s Daughter” (study for “Found”) went to the Royal Scottish Academy in 1862; and “Mary in the House of John” appeared at the Fine Art Society’s Galleries in 1879. A version of “Pandora,” in 1877 or 1878, and a lovely little water-colour, “Spring,” in 1879, were lent by their purchasers to the Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts; “Tibullus’s Return to Delia” was similarly lent to the Albert Gallery Exhibition at Edinburgh in 1877; and in 1881 the Loan Exhibition at the Royal Manchester Institution included four important water-colours—“Proserpine,” a “Lucretia Borgia,” “Hesterna Rosa,” and “Washing Hands;” and five oils—“Proserpine,” “Two Mothers,” “Joli Coeur,” “A Vision of Fiametta,” and “Water-Willow.” These instances complete the brief list of Rossetti’s pictures exhibited in public galleries during the lifetime of the artist.

In the year 1854, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, already practically broken up by divergence of method in the leading painters, and changes of aim and sphere among the lesser lights of the revolutionary dawn, may be said to have been finally dispersed by the lamented death of Walter Deverell, and the departure of Holman Hunt for a lengthy sojourn in the East, there to paint directly from nature—according to the much boasted but oft-broken rule—the backgrounds and appurtenances of those Biblical subjects to which he was now strongly drawn. The death of Deverell at an early age was a heavy personal bereavement to Rossetti, and an occasion of genuine grief to all the Brotherhood, with whom he was exceedingly popular. Nor was the loss to art easily reparable, or the work of his surviving comrades unaffected by the removal of a painter of such singular purity and grace. He was a son of the Secretary of the Schools of Design, which were the precursor of the South Kensington Science and Art Department.

Rossetti and Millais were thus, in 1854, left alone as practical painters; W.M. Rossetti having been from the first exclusively a littÉrateur, while F.G. Stephens, after having produced in youth some work of high quality on strictly Pre-Raphaelite lines, had by this time adopted the same sphere of energy, especially in the realm of the art-critic.

But the phase of doubt and hesitation, of compromise (in no invidious sense) between the first inflexible attitude of revolt and the further impulse of re-construction, which had overtaken the Brotherhood in 1851, was by no means the special ordeal of Rossetti. It came soon afterwards upon Millais with an equal import and significance; as though each must pass, in individual experience, through the several stages of destructive and re-creative energy, first of protest, then of reform, and afterwards of reconciliation and progress, which they had recognized in the history of the past, and which their own work as a whole afforded to the history of the nineteenth century. They had to exemplify, each for himself, the resolute overthrow of partial and degenerate principles, and the pursuit, more or less successful, of a further and perhaps undefined ideal, or the reaction towards that very order against which their own strenuous protest had been set. And it is remarkable that, in the case both of Rossetti and of Millais, the painter should have reached his highest level of excellence in art precisely at the moment when his methods were the most unsettled and his principles the least assured. The most discerning critics now agree in placing the high-water mark of Rossetti’s genius in the midst of this transition period, ranging from 1850 to 1860, or, if the decade may be stretched by a license of etymology, covering the “Beata Beatrix” of 1863. And it is scarcely disputable that the supreme achievements of Millais lie within a narrower space, comprising chiefly the “Hugenot” and “Ophelia” of 1852, “The Order of Release” of 1853, “Autumn Leaves” and “The Blind Girl” of 1856, and “The Eve of St. Agnes” in 1863, which really belongs in conception and spirit to the Keats epoch, if we may so call it, which gave birth to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Just as in the dawn of the Italian Renaissance the point of absolute greatness in art was gained at the momentary coalition of the old forces with the new, when the classic spirit was conquered and absorbed by the spirit of romance, and the romantic spirit still beat tremulously about the new world’s doors, so in the struggle of the modern Pre-Raphaelites to reconcile the new impulse with the heritage of the past, the triumph came in the midst of the conflict rather than after the victory. Just as Leonardo and Michaelangelo gathered up and combined the discordant elements of the strife around them into a noble harmony of art, so did the Pre-Raphaelites attune and interpret the diverse forces of their own revolution when they felt its import most acutely, and least knew whither it would lead them. And to almost opposite poles of thought and sentiment were Millais and Rossetti led.

The extraordinary change which gradually came over the work of Millais after his election to the Associateship of the Royal Academy in 1854—the youngest painter, with the exception of Lawrence, ever admitted to that rank—has been the subject of much criticism and controversy. It has been contended by several writers that Millais lacked original imagination, and could not sustain his early level without the constant inspiration and stimulus of Rossetti and Hunt, both of whom were by this time absorbed in fresh developments of their own. More ardent apologists have claimed that his Pre-Raphaelite period was but a curious episode in Millais’s career; a mere incident in the growth of a genius too brilliant to submit for long to bias from without; and that his impressionable nature was only temporarily swayed by the proselytizing enthusiasm of his comrades. It is hard to attribute the qualities of his finest work—qualities of a high imaginative order, as in “The Eve of St. Agnes,” or “The Enemy Sowing Tares,” to any genius but his own, or to believe that the painter of “Ophelia” and the “Blind Girl” was not himself profoundly moved by the pathos and tragedy which he therein conceived. Nor can it be urged that the exigencies of ill-fortune, the stress of poverty, or any of those dire necessities of fate which have driven many a true artist on the downward road, drove Millais to paint as unblushingly for the Philistine market as he had formerly done for an obscure and despised coterie of artistic revolutionists. Free as he always was of pecuniary care, and favoured by destiny with all the pleasures of domestic and social prosperity, if he was spoilt, it was by success, not failure; if corrupted, it was by popularity, not neglect: though it must be remembered that none of the Pre-Raphaelites can justly pose as martyrs in the matter of a livelihood.

Nor is it permissible to urge that fame, at first well earned and richly justified, entitles any great painter to repudiate the convictions and ideals on which that fame was built, or to play with a reputation won at a heavy cost to himself and others. It can only be assumed that Millais, in forsaking the high and steep paths which he had once chosen, sincerely followed what he felt to be a more excellent way, and honestly believed his decadence to be an advance upon his maturity. To doubt this would be to pass the sternest moral condemnation on an artist of incomparable endowments, and to brand him as the wanton betrayer of a sacred trust, the deliberate concealer of a divine talent, for which, at the ultimate judgment-seat of art, the inevitable account must at last be given.

Speaking of this turning-point in Millais’s career, Mr. Ruskin said in 1857:—“The change in his manner from the years of ‘Ophelia’ and ‘Mariana’ to 1857 is not merely Fall; it is Catastrophe; not merely a loss of power, but a reversal of principle; his excellence has been effaced ‘as a man wipeth a dish—wiping it and turning it upside down.’”

But the Pre-Raphaelite movement, so far from being at an end, was now only emerging from the first tentative phase of its activity. It had yet to be absorbed in a larger reformation, and to act thereby even more potently than if it had remained the specific crusade of a clique or faction. The difficulty which the historian finds at this crisis in the artistic career of Rossetti and his friends, and still more so in their subsequent developments,—the difficulty of defining strictly Pre-Raphaelite work, and of deciding as to who of the now rapidly expanding circle of painters may justly be claimed as Pre-Raphaelites, is itself evidence of the permeating force of the initial movement, and of the ready soil which was prepared for the dissemination of its dominant ideas. For the circle of literary and artistic aspirants, patrons, students, amateurs, and connoisseurs of many grades and varied gifts who now surrounded Dante Rossetti, included men whose names afterwards became honoured in fields of art quite untouched by Pre-Raphaelitism in its distinctive form, but imbued through their influence with fresh and quickening impulses of revival.

One of the most poetic of the painters intimately associated with the Brotherhood was Arthur Hughes, who, though only eighteen at the time of its formation, took an active share in its practical work, and painted, according to its main tenets, with a rare facility and tender charm. He was born in London in 1832, passed through the Academy Schools without much recognition, but won cordial admiration among the limited company who could then appreciate his work, by his beautiful “April Love” in the Academy of 1854. He was also singularly successful at a later date in a subject from Keats’s “Eve of St. Agnes”—the source of inspiration for some of the finest work of the Pre-Raphaelite leaders at various times. Like Millais and several others of the band, he attained considerable popularity as an illustrator of books. His religious paintings, moreover, will demand attention among those of his more illustrious friends. “The Cottager’s Return” and “The Reaper and the Flowers” may be remembered, among others of his always graceful pictures, by those who recall the first decade of Pre-Raphaelite propaganda in public exhibitions. He sat as the model for the hero in Millais’s “Proscribed Royalist” of 1853.

Charles Allston Collins, a son of William Collins, R.A., and brother of Wilkie Collins, painted for some time in the manner of the Pre-Raphaelites, but subsequently devoted himself to literature. His first exhibited picture, “Convent Thoughts,” in the Academy of 1850, shared with Millais’s “Christ in the House of His Parents,” the torrent of opprobrium showered on the innovators in that eventful year. Yet three of his works were accepted by the Academy the following season,—“Lyra Innocentium,” on a verse from Keble; representing a young girl in a white gown against a background of blue; “May in the Regent’s Park,” a wonderfully minute study of foliage, as if seen through a window opening close upon the trees; and “The Devout Childhood of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary,” calling to mind the treatment by James Collinson of the familiar renunciation-legend anent the same much-maligned saint. The Elizabeth of the “Childhood” is depicted as a homely-looking little girl of thirteen, kneeling at the iron-barred oaken door of a chapel in the Palace grounds. Her missal is laid on the doorstep beside her, and she is imagined, according to the account of her early piety, to be at prayer on the inhospitable threshold of the shrine to which she cannot for the moment gain access. Charles Collins acted as Millais’s model for “The Hugenot” and “The Black Brunswicker.” He married a daughter of Charles Dickens, who posed with him as the lady in the “Hugenot.”

William L. Windus, a Liverpool artist and member of the Academy of that city, made his modest but genuine fame chiefly through his powerful romantic picture of “Burd Helen,” the “burd” or sweetheart of the Scottish border ballad, who swam the Clyde in order to avenge herself upon a faithless lover. The work was pronounced by Ruskin to rank second only in order of merit to Millais’s “Autumn Leaves” in the Royal Academy of 1856. He painted altogether some eight or ten pictures of a very earnest and imaginative kind, of which one of the finest was entitled “Too Late,” and represented a dying girl whose lover had forsaken her and returned too late for reparation. “The Surgeon’s Daughter” is also remembered as a composition of much chastened and subdued power. Windus ceased painting at an early age, and was lost sight of by the Brotherhood.

Robert B. Martineau was a pupil of Holman Hunt, but painted, among some three or four pictures which constitute the brief total of his achievements, only one of striking merit,—“The Last Day in the Old Home,” which for sincerity and depth of feeling won considerable appreciation in 1865. His career was cut short by untimely death soon afterwards.

Cave Thomas, who so infelicitously christened “The Germ,” had gained a prize in the Westminster Cartoon competition, and was the painter of one very beautiful picture, “The Protestant Lady,” exhibited in the Academy, and greatly admired by the Brotherhood. He published in 1860 a monograph entitled “Pre-Raphaelitism Tested by the Principles of Christianity;” and subsequently became art professor to the Princess of Wales.

Mr. Frederick Sandys was not personally known to the leading Pre-Raphaelites until 1857, and was by that time too original and accomplished an artist to be claimed by them as a disciple, but his work was for some time intimately associated with theirs. He was to the last a valued friend of Rossetti, who always affirmed that while in draughtsmanship he had no superior in English art, his imaginative endowment was of the richest and rarest kind.

Mr. Henry Wallis is justly remembered by his one great picture, “The Death of Chatterton,” which touched popular feeling as its true pathos and dignity deserved to do, and won universal praise.

Mark Anthony is rightly regarded by the Pre-Raphaelites as the most poetic of their landscape painters. His grandly simple and reposeful “Old Churchyard” will compare even with Millais’s “Vale of Rest,” and his “Nature’s Mirror” with Mr. Burne-Jones’s “Mirror of Venus” in later years. Mr. John Brett, now famous in seascape, was for some time intimate with the Brotherhood; and among friends and sympathizers on a similar footing may be mentioned Val Prinsep, Thomas Seddon, J.D. Watson, J.F. Lewes, W.S. Burton, Spencer Stanhope, M.F. Halliday, James Campbell, J.M. Carrick, Thomas Morten, Edward Lear, William Davis, W.P. Boyce, J.W. Inchbold, and, by no means least, John Hancock, a young sculptor who won an Art Union prize in 1848 with a bas-relief of “Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem.” He was a friend and fellow-worker with Woolner, and fell so far (with Rossetti) under the fascination of the Dante legends as to accomplish a very fine statue of “Beatrice” in or about 1852. One other artist of the first rank in his generation remains to be named,—Frederick Shields, an intimate and warmly-loved friend of Rossetti, cherished by him in close and unbroken companionship even to the hour of death; and in point of critical estimate pronounced by him to be one of the greatest of living draughtsmen, taking rank with Sir Frederick Leighton, Sir Noel Paton, and Mr. Sandys.

Such were a few of the personalities that gathered between 1848 and 1858 around the three prime movers in the Pre-Raphaelite revolt. To claim them as merely, or chiefly, satellites drawn into the orbit of genius, or as forming a distinct and coherent school, would be both foolish and unjust. To attempt an estimate of their relative merit independent of, or in proportion to, the artistic work of the Brotherhood, would be no less invidious than unprofitable. The glory of Pre-Raphaelitism was that it gave the utmost play to individual methods, and even idiosyncrasies,—nay, that its very first principle was “each for himself”—painting his own impressions, his own ideals—and no imitation of one artist by another. Its primary insistence lay on the watchword of all Protestantism—the authority of the individual conscience as against that of a class or a system, and the immediate access for every soul to the source of its highest inspiration. Therefore the “diversities of gifts” which flourished and increased under the sway of the Pre-Raphaelite spirit were the best evidence of that spirit’s quickening power. “A man will always emphasize,” says Mr. P.G. Hamerton, writing on the ultimate effects of the movement, “those truths about art which most strongly recommend themselves to his own peculiar personal temperament. This comes from the vastness of art and the variety of human organizations. For art is so immense a study that no one man ever knew the whole truth about it.” In other words, all the Pre-Raphaelite painters in any sense worthy of the name are intensely individual in quality, and cannot be classed, arranged, or compared together in the order of a system or a school. Each artist must make his original and distinctive contribution to the sum-total of artistic truth; must paint the single aspect, or the most familiar aspect, of the life around him which presents itself to his mind. The more honest he is, and the more true to his own observations and convictions, the more inevitably will he see the world through his own spectacles—well for his superficial happiness, at all events, if they be rose-coloured, and not of a more sombre hue. “We all,” says another art-critic,^[5] “have a sense of some particular colour, and because we can paint this colour best we do so at all times and in all places. This may be unconscious on our part—this predilection for a particular colour; but we all unconsciously blab the fact to others; we talk in our dream of art, and tell all our secrets. Old David Cox, when out sketching with his pupils, would go behind them while at work and say to one, ‘Ah, you see green;’ to another, ‘You see purple,’ ‘You see red,’ ‘You see yellow.’ So it is with the colour vision of many who are called Masters. We can identify almost any landscape of our more prominent painters by their special idiosyncrasy of colouring, such as Cuyp with his evening yellows, Linnell with his autumnal browns, or Danby with his sanguinary sunsets. These colours, which are exceptional with external nature, are the rule with them. Not only is this so with regard to colour, but, more or less, we put ourselves, form and feature, into our work, and paint our own character, physical as well as mental, in all we do. Raphael, on being asked where he obtained the type of his Madonna, replied, ‘out of his own head,’ which really meant that he had unconsciously painted his own fair features: and this ideal was what he eternally repeated. So was it with Michaelangelo, Leonardo, Murillo, Rubens, Vandyke—they all portrayed themselves recognizably. There is a picture of Jesus and the twelve Apostles in which the whole thirteen faces are all alike, and every one an identifiable copy of the painter’s own. Of course where the face and form are noble we have the less to object to.”

This indeed is the crux of the whole matter. As the man is, so will his work be. To portray one’s very self—and first to have such a self as can dignify the portrayal; to paint faithfully what one sees—and first to see the true and the beautiful in the familiar and the commonplace; to depict the world in which one lives—living in a world apart, noble and fair, full of opportunities, if also of mysteries, with bright horizons, however low the sun; and yet to be ever conscious of wider worlds than the imagination can compass though the heart may yearn over them like the heart of him who said Homo sum; nihil humana mihi alienum puto: this is fine art; this is “the vision and the faculty divine.” “Produce great Persons!” cries Browning,—“the rest follows.” Therefore it is safe for those who in any real sense know Rossetti to prophesy, with Mr. Harry Quilter, that “the day will surely come when it will be seen that the essence of what is now known as Pre-Raphaelitism was not the influence of a school or a principle, but simply the influence of one man, and that man Dante Gabriel Rossetti.” Personal ascendency, says Emerson, is the only force much worth reckoning with. And if that ascendency, over many who never saw Rossetti on earth, has become an intimate and precious inspiration, a motive-impulse abidingly sacred and high, what must it have been to those who knew him in the flesh?

Mr. W.M. Rossetti thus succinctly sums up the immediate issue of the movement which his brother inspired:—“As it turned out, the early phases of the movement did not repeat themselves on a more extended scale. Partly, no doubt, through the modification of style of the most popular Pre-Raphaelite, Mr. Millais, and partly through the influx of new determining conditions, especially the effect of foreign schools and of Mr. Leighton’s style (this was written in 1865), Pre-Raphaelitism flagged in its influence towards the production of what are distinctively termed Pre-Raphaelite pictures just at the time when it had virtually won the day. But the movement had broken up the pre-existing state of things, and the principles and practices which it introduced took strong root, and germinated in forms not altogether expected. Pre-Raphaelitism aimed at suppressing such styles of painting as were exemplified by Messrs. Elmore, Goodall, and Stone at the time of its starting; and it did suppress them.”^[6]

The relation of Pre-Raphaelitism to the “foreign schools” here referred to is as much a matter of historical controversy as the relation of Rossetti to Italy is of biographical criticism; nor is it easy to determine how far the Pre-Raphaelite movement in England was the effect or the cause of similar waves of experiment in France and Germany, and how far all such impulses were but the symptoms of a great social and ethical development in European life. But while the Barbizon School must be seriously recognized as working side by side with the Pre-Raphaelites upon kindred ideals, and even surpassing them at some points in a certain largeness of outlook on humanitarian themes, the influence of Cornelius and Overbeck in Germany, with the very crude and sickly mediÆvalism which they affected, has no doubt been greatly overrated, and may be dismissed as having very little to do with the main current of the romantic revival. In France, Corot and Millet, Daubigny and Rousseau, had taken their stand against the old Heroic School in art, just as ThÉophile Gautier and Victor Hugo had taken it against the Academies of literature. In England, it was the task of Rossetti and his comrades “to force,” as it has been aptly expressed, “an artificial art backed upon nature’s reality; and they did it amid neglect, misunderstanding, and even coarse vituperation.”