Making an Unfrequented Path of Art His Own: Rossetti's Paintings in The

This work has been reproduced on behalf of the author for web publication with minor corrections and formatting changes, and the addition of hyperlinks to images of paintings and illustrations mentioned in the text. Readers wishing to refer to this essay should use the original place of publication: Bentley, D.M.R. “Making an Unfrequented Path of Art His Own: Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Paintings in the Aesthetic Mode.” Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies NS 17 (Spring 2008): 21-35. MAKING AN UNFREQUENTED PATH OF ART HIS OWN: DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI’S PAINTINGS IN THE AESTHETIC MODE D.M.R. BENTLEY In a brief article entitled “Mr. Rossetti’s Pictures” in the 21 October 1865 number of the Athenaeum, F.G. Stephens provides analytical descriptions of three recent paintings by Dante Gabriel Rossetti: The Blue Bower (c. 1863-65), Venus Verticordia (1863-68), and The Beloved (1863-66). In doing so, Stephens usefully identifies the characteristics of Rossetti’s single-woman portraits in the emergent Art-for-Art’s-sake tradition and establishes the terms in which they can be discussed and judged: 1: “The scale of the pictures is almost that of life”; 2: They are pictorial equivalents of “lyrical poem[s] [that] aim… at effect quite as much by means of inherent beauty and melodious colouring as by the mere subject, which is superficial”; and 3: “Inasmuch as its subject is defined,” a painting is “somewhat less purely lyrical” than one whose subject is not defined. (545, 546) On the basis of these characteristics and criteria Stephens pronounces The Blue Bower the most “lyrical” of Rossetti’s three paintings because its subject is least “defined.” The analytical descriptions that support these judgements remain remarkable for their perceptions and insights and cumulatively constitute a model for the appreciation of Rossetti’s paintings in the aesthetic mode. That they are also consistent with the painter’s own aims is apparent from letters written in response to Stephen’s article in which the painter thanks his one-time Pre-Raphaelite brother for “so full and friendly description of … [his] paintings,” declares himself “completely gratified … with all” that the article [21] says about them, and characterizes the descriptions as “praise on the highest grounds” (Correspondence 3:338, 339).1 Although only Venus Verticordia (38 ⅝ x 27 ½ in.) is over three feet in height, all three of the paintings described and analyzed by Stephens accord with his statement that their “scale … is almost that of life,” as do most of his other works in the aesthetic mode inaugurated by The Blue Bower (35 ½ x 27 ¼ in.). Stephen’s recognition of the “scale” of these works is important for two reasons: first, because their life-like dimensions help to differentiate them from the smaller cabinet pieces of the 1860s such as Joli Coeur (1867; 14 ¾ x 11 ⅜ in.) and Fiammetta (1868; 12 ⅞ x 11 ½ in.) whose dimensional lineage lies in MAKING AN UNFREQUENTED PATH OF ART HIS OWN Bocca Baciata (1859; 13 ¼ x 12 in.) and whose effect is proportionally less decorative; and, second, because his remark points to the face-to-face relationship between the viewer and the women in the paintings that their larger “scale” encourages. These are highly decorative paintings whose “life-size figures” are executed with sufficient “felicity” (Stephens 546) to foster the illusion of actuality and, by doing so, elicit the participation of the viewer, exemplify the appeal of a beautiful woman in beautiful surroundings, and lavishly promote a sense of the desirability of such surroundings. Hung in the public rooms of the houses of their purchasers, such paintings as The Blue Bower would not merely enhance and humanize the decor; they would also bespeak their owners’ aesthetic sensibility and their financial ability to indulge it on an impressive “scale.” In short, they belong squarely in the tradition of bourgeois portraiture that emerged in the early fifteenth century in concert with Renaissance individualism. Not surprisingly, their purchasers tended to be Medicis in small like George Rae and William Blackmore, the former a successful banker and the latter a successful solicitor. Stephens begins his analytical description of The Blue Bower by linking and likening it to the work of “Titian and Giorgione,” who “produced lyrics of this sort in abundance” (and, of course, were greatly admired by Rossetti).2 He then identifies the source of the “appeal to the observer” of “pictures [that] are nothing if not lyrical” as their “poetic spirit” and proclaims The Blue Bower “triumphant” in “its exquisite feeling for colour and delicacy of expression,” these being “qualities” sought by “the master of matters technical … [and] the mind which is habituated to such phases [i.e., aspects] of pictorial power” (545). Even as they prepare the way for the analytical description to come these assertions implicitly situate the painting over and against what it is not—namely, a work in which the “subject” per se is of paramount importance, as would be the case, for example, in a religious, historical, or literary painting, where the figures, expressions, actions, and setting would have been selected to represent a moment in a narrative deemed by the artist to be worthy of pictorial treatment. All of the works that Rossetti painted or wrote during and for some years after the period of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (1848-53) [22] were governed by such a deterministic approach,3 but by the mid-1850s with such pieces as The Blue Closet (1857) and The Tune of Seven Towers (1857) he had begun the experiments with indeterminacy and subjectlessness that would lead by way of Bocca Baciata to The Blue Bower and similar aesthetic works in which, in Stephens’s phrases again, “inherent beauty,” “melodious colouring,” and “poetic spirit” trump “mere subject.” An awareness of this progression as well as of recent controversies surrounding the work of James McNeill Whistler (more of which in a moment) may well lie behind Stephens’s observation that “Rossetti long ago saw … and pursued” a “direction [in which] English Art has not yet ventured far” (545). The first section of Stephens’s analytical description of The Blue Bower focuses on its “technical” and representational aspects in order to allow the reader to envisage the actions, posture, dress, and surroundings of its female figure, who was modelled by Fanny Cornforth. After a near-mechanical emphasis on the position of the figure’s hands and musical instrument, he proceeds to a series of increasingly sensuous references to her “fingers,” “hair,” “lips,” “breath,” “eyes,” “throat,” “bosom,” and “shoulders” that convey a sense of languid and inviting sexuality: [The painting] represents a lady playing on a dulcimer that lies upon a table; over the strings her fingers stray, eliciting sounds which are now loud, now low, and seem to murmur all about her. The fingers of the left hand retain the sound of the dulcimer, while those of the right, with the thumb, produce the MAKING AN UNFREQUENTED PATH OF ART HIS OWN music. She listens to the floating sound and accordant notes; to do so easily her hair is removed from the shell of the delightful ear; her lips are just apart, for the escape of the soft breath; her eyes are softly veiled by levelled lids, and seem attending, in perfect unison with the ears. Solid masses of hair, coloured like the inside of a chestnut rind, that is, a greyish, golden brown, with sparks of light, hang dishevelled about her face, heap on her shoulders and pass in abundance to her back; a great pin, or aigrette, of gold, studded with pale turquoises and a sanguine carbuncle, keeps it from before the ear. Her throat is bare; masses of white fur cover the bosom; with this material the whole of her robe is lined; that robe wraps her shoulders, and is of a deep, watery green, bound with black and buttoned with gold. Passion-flowers, whose purple disks are backed by white petals, trail with dark-green leaves on either side of the figure, and are entwined with the paler foliage and bell-shaped flowers of the wild convolvulus. (545) Bracketed and glossed, as it were, by flowers that, like her “dishevelled” hair and “bare” throat, proclaim her sexuality, the “lady” looks directly and appraisingly at the viewer with her head slightly cocked to one side to reveal the “shell” of her ear and the curve of her jaw and neck. As indicated by several parts of the description, not least the statement that the lady’s “lips are [23] just apart, for the escape of the soft breath” and the statement that “the whole of her robe is lined” with the “white fur” that “cover[s] … [her] bosom,” The Blue Bower is an image whose curves, textures, and openings invite and encourage fantasies about the female body. Background, foreground, costume, and jewellery are all integrally important to the aesthetic appeal of the painting, but the physical beauty and the sheer physicality of the woman at its centre are crucial to its effect and are amplified here, as in Bocca Baciata, by déshabille. Not surprisingly, there is a slightly defensive tone as well as an anticipation of the “Fleshly School” controversy in Stephens’s subsequent description of the lady’s beauty and implied actions and their effect on the viewer: “[She] is beautiful in no common way; but her air more powerful entrances us to sympathy with her act of slowly drawing luxurious music from the strings, so that the eyes and the ear of fancy go together. Then we have the marvellous fleshiness of the flesh; the fascinating sensuousness of the expression, which is refined, if not elevated, by the influence of the music” (546).

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