Fine Art (ART17C) Thu, 5th Oct 2017 Lot 262 Estimate: £10000 - £15000 + Fees Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 1828-1882 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 1828-1882 William Bell Scott, October 1852, pencil, black chalk and grey wash on paper, dated October 1852 to upper right, 296 x 240 mm (11.75 x 9.4 ins), framed and glazed, with remains of label for the Rossetti exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, 1973, and photocopy of the catalogue raisonné entry for this work in Virginia Surtees, Paintings and Drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, to verso Provenance: Rossetti sale (1882), lot 1, £6 6s, bought by Fawcett; Alice Boyd, Penkill Castle; Evelyn M. Courtney- Boyd; purchased 1967 by M. Clayton-Stamm; thence by descent to the present owner. Exhibited: Royal Academy of Arts, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, painter and poet, 13 January to 11 March 1973, 244. References: Marillier 314. Virginia Surtees, Paintings and Drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 456. Reproduced in Holman Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism, volume 1, facing page 160. This striking drawing was probably made on 23 October 1852 when William Bell Scott was at John Everett Millais's house in Gower Street, Bloomsbury, with other members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, including Rossetti (see Rossetti's letter to Ford Madox Ford, in William Fredeman, Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 52. 14). The present work (dating from the early 1850's, the decade in which the artist was at his most imaginative and original), with its intimate, compressed focus and downward tilt of the head, vividly conveys the psychology of the sitter as a fellow artist and poet, and expresses Rossetti's dictum 'Conception, my boy, fundamental brain-work, that is what makes the difference in all art'. William Bell Scott (1811-1890) was associated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement from its beginning through his friendship with Rossetti. Born in Edinburgh, he moved to London in 1837 where he associated with the genre painters of the Clique, including Augustus Egg, Richard Dadd, John Phillip, and William Powell Frith. He exhibited at the British Institution from 1841 and the Royal Academy from 1842. In 1847 Rossetti wrote to Scott to express his admiration for Scott's new poem The Year of the World, initiating their friendship, and shortly thereafter elicited contributions from Scott to the short-lived Pre-Raphaelite magazine The Germ. Qty: 1.