Chapter VIII Close of the Record. 1874-1882
One of the first incidents to be recorded after Rossetti’s return to London in 1874 was the dissolution of the partnership of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co., and the re-construction of the firm under the sole management of William Morris. The dissolution was not effected without some unpleasantness, resulting in the estrangement of Morris and Brown. Morris and Rossetti never actually quarrelled; but from 1874 onwards the two men seldom saw each other, Rossetti’s recluse habits of life being possibly responsible to some extent for the severance.
The latter part of 1875 and the first half of 1876 Rossetti spent at Bognor, and after that he visited the Cowper-Temples (afterwards Lord and Lady Mount Temple) at Broadlands in Hampshire, being then engaged upon his picture of The Blessed Damozel.
In 1877 he had a very severe physical illness, due to an uraemic affection which had been set up in 1872, and which eventually was the active cause of his death. He was removed to a little cottage near Herne Bay, and at one time gave up all hope of resuming his profession. “At last,” says Mr. William Rossetti, “the power and the determination returned simultaneously; he drew an admirable crayon-group of our mother and sister, two others equally good of the latter, and yet another of our mother. Weather had been favourable, spirits and energy revived, and he came back to town nerved once more for the battle of life and of art.” The group of Mrs. and Miss Rossetti is now in the National Portrait Gallery.
After 1877 Rossetti seldom if ever went beyond the doors of No. 16, Cheyne Walk, and as he suffered from fits of melancholy, and disliked being alone, a few faithful friends formed the practice of coming to visit him by turns. Mr. Theodore Watts was a more constant attendant, and had a bed at his disposal. A good number of acquaintances also frequented the house, some of them much more intimate than others and dating back in their relations to about 1866. Among these may be mentioned the artists J. M. Whistler and Alphonse Legros, Frederick Shields, F. A. Sandys and Fairfax Murray.
In 1878, or thereabouts, Rossetti’s devotion to poetry received a fresh impulse, and he set himself assiduously to the production of sonnets. It was not until 1880, however, that he began really to compile materials for a new volume. In that year he wrote “The White Ship,” and in the year following “The King’s Tragedy.” Finally, by March of 1881 the copy for “Ballads and Sonnets” was complete, and was accepted by Messrs. Ellis and White on the same terms as the first book. At the same time the latter, which was by now out of print, underwent some material alterations and was re-published in a new form.
The pictures for 1875 include La Bella Mano, which represents a lady washing her “beautiful hands” in a scalloped basin of brass; also some of the studies for the Blessed Damozel, a finished pen-and-ink study for a great picture of 1877, the Astarte Syriaca, and a large pencil drawing called The Question or The Sphinx.
The following year was mainly devoted to the Blessed Damozel, an attempt to realize on canvas Rossetti’s early poem which first appeared in “The Germ.” The picture is a very fine one. Rossetti filled in the background behind the stooping figure of the damozel with a heavenly landscape, in which were countless pairs of embracing lovers. In 1877 he added a predella representing the earthly lover gazing up through space, and in 1879 he painted a replica, omitting the background of lovers and substituting two angel heads rather suggestive of those which occur in La Ghirlandata.
The year 1877 contains but three items, two of which are, however, the important oil-pictures Astarte Syriaca and The Sea-Spell. The third was a Magdalen bearing the vase of spikenard.
Astarte Syriaca is a massive figure, with face and hair strongly reminiscent of Mrs. Morris. It was bought at its first owner’s death for the Corporation Art Gallery of Manchester.
The two finished items of 1878—for as the years advance the output grows less and less—are A Vision of Fiammetta and a water-colour study of a head called Bruna Brunelleschi. Fiammetta is a fine and striking conception, representing on a life-size scale the lady beloved by Boccaccio, to whom he addressed the sonnet which begins: “Round her red garland and her golden hair, I saw a fire about Fiammetta’s head.” The sitter for Fiammetta was Mrs. W. J. Stillman.
La Donna della Finestra was painted in 1879. This “Lady of the Window,” also known as “The Lady of Pity,” is she who in Dante’s “Vita Nuova” is described as looking down upon the poet one day when he was overcome with grief. The head is taken from Mrs. Morris, much modified by the conventions which Rossetti at this time introduced into all his faces. Not the least charming feature of the picture is the clustering mass of beautifully painted fig-leaves growing up to the balcony in which the lady sits.
During 1880 and 1881 Rossetti was occupied with three large pictures, The Day Dream, The Salutation of Beatrice, and La Pia; with Found, which had been re-commissioned by Mr. William Graham; and with several replicas, of which the most important was the smaller Dante’s Dream.
The Day Dream is a portrait of Mrs. Morris seated in the lower branches of a sycamore tree. La Pia, the last original picture painted by Rossetti, depicts the story of Pia de’ Tolomei, told in the fifth canto of the “Purgatorio.” In Rossetti’s canvas she is seen, sitting forward in a window, gazing out over the poisonous Maremma from the fortress where her husband had placed her to die. Found, which was one of the first pictures Rossetti attempted, was never completed. After Rossetti’s death, as already mentioned, Sir Edward Burne-Jones added a little work to it, and in this condition it was taken over by the purchaser. It is now in America.
With this we come to an end of Rossetti’s work as a painter. It remains briefly to close the record of his life.
In September, 1881, Rossetti, accompanied by Mr. Hall Caine, undertook an expedition to the lake district of Cumberland; but after a month his health, which at first had appeared to benefit, became alarmingly bad, and he returned hurriedly to London. After a partial recovery from this illness his work was once more interrupted in December by an attack of nervous paralysis, traceable to the effects of the drug he had been taking. In February, 1882, he was taken to Birchington-on-Sea, where a cottage had been placed at his disposal, and here he died on the 10th of April. He was buried, quietly and simply, in the little churchyard at Birchington, where a stone monument has been erected by his family in the form of a Celtic cross designed by Madox Brown. A memorial window embodying his own early design of The Passover, adapted by Mr. Shields, was also set up in the adjoining church.
So passed away, in the fifty-fourth year of his life, one of the most original artists of our time; I will not say one of the greatest painters, for that would invite controversy as to points in which he was, and knew himself to be, deficient. But as an artist, as one who saw, and could interpret and depict beautiful things in a beautiful way, there can be no two questions about Rossetti’s greatness. Never before has one man blended so perfectly the sister gifts of poetry and painting that it was impossible to pronounce in which he was superior.
To complain, as some have done, of the mediaeval quality of his subjects is foolish. As well complain that fairy tales are old. Rossetti was mediaeval in his thoughts and tastes. Without any affectation or straining for effect he lived his intellectual life in a mystical, richly-coloured world of romantic knights and ladies. These, and not the hedgerows or buttercups of to-day, were what came to the surface in his creative moods. We have witnessed in these latter years a great revival of romance, springing up in various ways all over the continent of Europe. Of this revival in England, on the side of pictorial art, Rossetti was the fountain head. The gentle melancholy that pervades his work was derived from his namesake Dante, to whom he was doubly allied by ties of birth and sentiment. “He was moreover driven by something like the same unrelaxing stress and fervour of temperament, so that even in middle age it seemed scarcely less true to say of Rossetti than of Dante himself:
‘Like flame within the naked hand,
His body bore his burning heart.’”
The direction of his influence, and of the Pre-Raphaelite movement generally, has been worked out in a scholarly manner by Mr. Percy Bate, in a book called “The English Pre-Raphaelite Painters,” where an attempt is made for the first time to trace the artistic lineage of such diverse executants as Mr. Spencer Stanhope, Mr. Walter Crane, Mr. Strudwick, Mrs. de Morgan, Mr. Byam Shaw, and others. On many of these the influence of Burne-Jones is more evident than that of Rossetti; but Burne-Jones himself owed much to Rossetti at the critical period of his career.
The subject of Rossetti’s art is one that presents difficulty, on account of the semi-privacy which surrounded it during the painter’s lifetime. The subject of Rossetti himself is more difficult still. It has become a sort of fashion to decry the man, and to forget the genius, among some who knew him only in his latest years—perhaps by hearsay mainly. Stories of his want of consideration for others, his egotism, his shabby treatment of patrons, his ungoverned temper, are reeled off with a sort of zest, as though they summed up the man. But in Rossetti good and bad were, as usual, inextricably mixed up, with a strong preponderance towards the former. There were periods when his brilliant, impulsive, magnetic personality swamped the most audacious faults. For a man to stand out above his fellows is often enough a signal for petty jealousy and stone-throwing. But in such cases, one may remark, it is not always a David who prepares the sling, nor is it always the giant who is on the side of the Philistines.