In his own lifetime, Evelyn Waugh tells us, Dante Gabriel Rossetti was “the bogey of many Victorian drawing-rooms,” scandalizing society with his splashy, vibrant paintings. Few then were ready to appreciate a true romantic who brought a new way of thinking about beauty and life.
His Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of artists blended hyper-realistic detail with medieval-inspired treatments, resulting in a highly individualized style which remains unique and widely admired. While often messy when came to personal matters like money and women, Rossetti was the right artist to challenge a stale period for British culture.
Waugh found this still true nearly a half-century after Rossetti’s death: “By no means the least of the advantages to be gained from a study of Rossetti is the stimulus it gives to one’s restiveness in an era of competent stultification,” he writes.
As straightforward biography, Rossetti: His Life And Works is only occasionally successful. Written for an audience Waugh assumes already knows Rossetti rather well, the book is careless in introducing key players, haphazard in its chronology, and too free in smugly delivered critical judgments. Multi-page excerpts from first-hand accounts by contemporaries give Rossetti a scrapbook feel.
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| Ecce Ancilla Domini, an 1850 Rossetti painting of the Annunciation, used as its model for Mary the artist's sister, Christina. Waugh notes it was denounced by one art correspondent as "absurd, affected, ill drawn, insipid, crotchety, puerile." Others were also harsh. Image from https://www.instagram.com/p/C3AcaU5uxP4/ |
Waugh talks through Rossetti’s various paintings as if you have them readily at hand. But how did he know about Wikipedia?
What makes Waugh’s Rossetti fascinating nearly a century later is not the subject as much as the author. This is Waugh’s first published book, which he began writing soon after leaving Oxford University. Here we see the younger Waugh later depicted in Brideshead Revisited, channeling through Rossetti his own refined appreciation for the temporal pleasures of youth and beauty.
Who was Rossetti? Waugh doesn’t explain this well. Dante Gabriel Rossetti was one of the most original of British artists, notable like the earlier William Blake not only for the groundbreaking style of his work but for his repute as both painter and poet. His life was a rollercoaster of drama, heartbreak, and triumph that ended all too soon.
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| Arthur's Tomb, an 1855 watercolor. Waugh writes: "To look at it for a long time is like looking at a traction engine, only a continual exercise of reason and calculation of stress can quell the instinctive terror that it must inevitably burst all at once." Image from https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/rossetti-arthurs-tomb-n03283 |
All this would be well known by the book’s intended audience, Waugh’s professors and fellow former students. The fact Waugh was writing for them alone is laid bare by its often impenetrable prose: “He was never convinced by the Athenasian certainty of judgment that never resulted in creative art.”
A son of a famous family, Rossetti achieved fame in his early 20s. He married one of his own models, Elizabeth Siddal, whose life and death became its own matter of legend. There is a lot to tell here, but Waugh uses Rossetti’s story mostly as a backboard for critical evaluation:
Like the young lover in the Heptameron, Rossetti, in the full vigour of his youth and in the exultation of first love, found himself suddenly brought up sharply by the icy breath of corruption and mortality in the being most dear to him. He had for a long time been in love with love and, when he at last found it, it withered at his approach. How much of the turmoil and darkness of his later years we may attribute to this malignant and perverse experience!
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| Ophelia, a painting by Rossetti's colleague and fellow Pre-Raphaelite John Everett Millais, depicts the drowning of Hamlet's love object. The model was Elizabeth Siddal, whom Waugh notes was made deathly ill from posing for the artist in chilly water. Image from https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/11018800/Ten-things-you-never-knew-about-Ophelia.html |
Waugh’s artistic critiques are a key takeaway of this book. Rossetti: His Life And Works is enjoyable less for what it says about the artist and more for how it showcases the author’s responses. Sometimes he is a fan; sometimes he is put off. Either way, he lets you know it.
Around 1926, after leaving Oxford, Waugh began work on a paper on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; this seems to have morphed into the Rossetti biography. That would help explain the diffuse focus of the book, which dawdles at length on other members of this circle, as well as the art critic John Ruskin, who was their early champion.
There was much hostility for this new style of art from the beginning, Waugh writes. “Pre-Raphaelitism is spreading, I am glad to see,” wrote Lord Macaulay, “glad, because it is by spreading that such affectations perish.”
Rossetti’s lack of appreciation for Ruskin and others who helped him along the way is a recurring theme. Of Ruskin, Waugh notes, “if he was partly a prig, Rossetti was partly a cad.” Rossetti eventually fell out with him, as well as with many other close friends and colleagues. “He was at heart essentially ramshackle in the ordering of his life; he liked things to be untidy,” Waugh writes.
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| Found, a incomplete Rossetti painting, shows a prostitute dragged off by a client, her plight mirrored by a trapped calf behind her. "But Rossetti had outgrown this didactic theme and ingenuous treatment long before it was finished," Waugh notes. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Found_(Rossetti) |
Women were the key to Rossetti’s life and art, Waugh avers: “…in later life he came to regard Woman as being in some perceptible but scarcely definable manner the mediating logos between flesh and spirit.” This would be represented best by Siddal, who was early on the principal model of Rossetti’s paintings. “Rossetti never ceased painting and drawing her in every conceivable disguise for ten years,” Waugh writes.
The fact her beauty was tinged with an unhealthy pallor was no accident of the paintbrush; Siddal lived in ill health, was often despondent, and died under a cloud from an overdose of laudanum while Rossetti was out and about, perhaps, Waugh speculates, with another woman. Whatever the reason, his absence from her deathbed would haunt him for life.
Other models are featured in other great Rossetti works. Waugh calls special attention to two, Fanny Schott [a. k. a. Fanny Cornforth] and Jane Morris, both of whom had been his lovers. Schott was “fair and voluptuous” while Morris was “dark and pensive.”
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| Fanny Schott as painted by Rossetti for his 1859 Bocca Baciata (Mouth That Has Been Kissed.) Fanny was Rossetti's go-to model for his more sensuous studies of the female form. Image from https://preraphaelitesisterhood.com/the-mystery-of-fanny-cornforth/ |
It is wrong to suppose that he employed no other models, and he greatly resented the imputation, which was frequently repeated in his own time; but the fact remains that all the voluptuous figures do bear a most confusing resemblance to Mrs. Schott, and all the pensive ones – even those that are designedly portraits of quite other people – to Mrs. Morris.
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| Janey Morris as painted by Rossetti in a period Waugh calls "the Good Years," a period after the death of Elizabeth Siddal when the artist enjoyed total freedom in both his life and art. Image from https://www.pictorem.com/47881/jane-morris/ |
Much of Rossetti’s life was difficult on account of various excesses. Waugh notes these included a sudden, unbalanced temper and a spendthrift nature: “He never gambled or frequented expensive restaurants. But his money oozed from him as quickly as it came.”
Other maladies affecting him included sleeplessness, which eventually drove him to abuse chloral and alcohol. As he aged, he began to suffer from loss of vision, which impacted his art so much that he shifted over to poetry. In earlier days, Waugh reports, Rossetti would say: “If any man has poetry in him, he should paint, for it has all been said and written, and they have scarcely begun to paint it.” But as he struggled to see his canvas, Rossetti reconsidered this view.
Eventually the pursuit of poetry took him in a morbid direction. He had placed in his wife’s coffin a collection of his poems that were neither published nor copied anywhere else. As he found himself unable to reconstruct the verses from memory, he had her grave opened:
There is no reason why one should look upon the grave as more sacred than the dung-heap. The point is that Rossetti did so look upon it, and it is his reluctance to comply, coupled with his compliance, that clearly indicates a real degradation in his character.
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| Venus Verticordia used as its model a cook Rossetti met in the streets. Waugh describes the result "lamentable." Rossetti rarely painted nudes, Waugh notes there was little money in it given the Victorian attitudes of art buyers. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_Verticordia_(Rossetti) |
Waugh does go on to heap praise the recovered poems: “Despondency, desire, sense of loss, realisation of transience and of mortality, hope, all the common emotions ornamentally expressed – no wonder that he should think it had all been done before. But for these very reasons they are poems that have given, and always will give, genuine pleasure, and for these very reasons, too, are of interest to the biographer.”
Perhaps Rossetti’s poetry was in wider circulation in Waugh’s youth; it’s hard to get much information about it today. Most of the book focuses on the painting, which is where his reputation rests now.
Waugh’s descriptive abilities in capturing Rossetti’s art are a highlight, especially when the prose is enlivened by snarky wit:
These other things have to be sought out, the great swirl of gold and white, prolonged and accentuated by the folds of the dress, stands out from the picture as though at some yards’ distance from the rest of the body, like the partially deflated envelope of an airship designed by some tipsy maharajah….
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| Waugh on this Rossetti painting of Elizabeth Siddal: "You can if you are so disposed dismiss with a clear conscience half at least of Rossetti's work as artistically negligible, you can go further and denounce his whole reputation as a fraud, but as long as Beata Beatrix stands in the Tate Gallery there is a problem to be faced." Image from https://www.amazon.com/TopVintagePosters-BEATRIX-ALIGHIERIS-ROSSETTI-REPRODUCTION/dp/B0BV3G6XPM |
Anyone who has painted at all in oil colours knows the heart-breaking way in which apparently vivid colours on the palette become muddy and toneless on the canvas. If they wish to, very few people could rival the brilliance of the scintillation that this picture shows. It is instructive on a student day to glance at some of the attempts to copy it.
Despite some wry touches here and there, the Waugh who wrote Rossetti was far more serious than the one who burst onto the scene later the same year with Decline And Fall, and even more different than the one who emerged a few years later. He writes critically here of Rossetti’s Catholic influence, “the taint of Popery,” which of course is not the sort of thing the converted Catholic Waugh would have said a few years on.
There is an element of censure in Waugh’s biography; he opens it by reflecting on Rossetti’s “turgid and perverse genius” and later concludes that “he lacked the moral stability of a great artist.” But for the most part Waugh’s book is an appreciation for an artist who rose above the norms, from an artist who would strive to do the same in his own life.
Rossetti is not a first
choice for learning about Rossetti, nor the best way to begin discovering the joy
of Waugh. Still, I enjoyed reading it the more I got into it, and think it
captures well the spirits of distant times.
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