Edward Burney Rossetti

“ Sixteen months after their marriage she died, and on a morbid impulse of remorse for inconsiderateness in his treatment of her Rossetti buried his poems, still unpublished, in her coffin. After some years, however, he was persuaded to disinter and publish them. Meanwhile he had formed friendships with the slightly younger artists William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, and they established a company for the manufacture of furniture and other articles, to be made beautiful as well as useful, and thus to aid in spreading the esthetic sense among the English people. ”

“ For a while Rossetti frequented the circle, but this wayward spirit drifted into other paths, and the chief service which he did to Watts was to introduce to him Edward Burne-Jones, most refined of artists and most lovable of men. The latter's work commanded Watts's highest admiration, and his friendship was valued to the end. To many lovers of painting these two remain the embodiment of all that is purest and loftiest in Victorian art ”

“ 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. ”

“ It may, as I have said, have been true then—though I was unaware that I had ever betrayed the feeling to Rossetti—that Burne-Jones stood foremost in my appreciation of the painters of the time. It is certainly not true now in any sense that would consign Rossetti to an inferior place; for I have come to think, in the light of later study of the two men’s work, that, in some undefinable and yet indisputable quality of genius, especially as exemplified in his earlier work not then so well known to me, he stands pre-eminent among those who influenced his generation. ”

“ At Christmas 1855 Burne-Jones came up to London and was introduced to Rossetti, whom he and Morris admired greatly. Rossetti [36] contributed “The Burden of Nineveh,” and a little altered version of “The Blessed Damozel” to the “Oxford and Cambridge Magazine,” the organ of William Morris.
One year later Burne-Jones and Morris settled in London in rooms at 17 Red Lion Square. Both young men were soon completely under Rossetti’s influence, and their studio became a sort of centre for all members of his circle. ”

“ The knowledge of the disappointment at home and the small means at his disposal did not hinder him from forsaking the profession his family had chosen for him, for was he not following the advice of the great painter, Rossetti? Not many young artists have found such a friend as Rossetti was to Burne-Jones. He not only gave the desired instruction but helped his pupil get such work as he was capable of doing. When the glass makers applied to Rossetti for a design for a stained-glass window, he declined to undertake the work but recommended his pupil instead. ”

“ Men friends came and went as they pleased; tavern dinners relieved the strain of studio work, and little if any respect was paid to the conventions of social intercourse. Mrs. Rossetti's delicate health alone made it impossible for her to go about much, except amongst devoted and intimate friends, the chief of whom in these days perhaps were Algernon Charles Swinburne and the Madox Brown and Morris families. ”

“ Burne-Jones' figures live in a dream in which the world has little part, whilst Rossetti's dream is of the world itself. His work is rich with the human experience that is absent in the art of his friend. ”

“ It is possible to like the art of Rossetti very deeply, and also to love the changing colours of the sea and the shadows of the sun clouds moving swiftly on the hills. But often to pagan lovers of such things the art of Rossetti, shuttered close in its mediaeval darkened rooms, has seemed as an almost poisonous flower, with its forgetfulness of the world without. ”

“ Cousins Richard and Edward were younger sons of Uncle Richard Burney, of Worcester. Edward was successful as an artist, especially as a book- illustrator. He painted the portrait of Fanny Burney, a reproduction of which forms the frontispiece to the present volume. Some of his work may be seen in the South Kensington Museum. Chesington, where we shall presently find Fanny on a visit to Mr. Crisp, was an old roomy mansion, standing in the midst of a lonely common in Surrey, between Kingston and Epsom. ”

“ A short note on Rossetti's movements during the period just covered may be given here. We left him in 1848, after a few months' work at Madox Brown's, sharing a studio with Holman Hunt in Cleveland Street, Soho, and painting at the Girlhood of the Virgin. At the beginning of 1851, he took in common with Deverell the first floor rooms at No. 17, Red Lion Square—the rooms which Morris and Burne-Jones occupied subsequently from 1856 to 1859, and which served as a cradle for the famous firm. ”

“ Rossetti's record as a painter divides itself naturally into three periods, beginning with a fairly numerous series of small romantic water-colours, which to many people represent the most charming, if not the most mature, feature of his work. The subjects for these were selected largely from Browning, from the "Vita Nuova" of Dante, and from the Arthurian legends, themes which appealed irresistibly to his imaginative mind, and which formed a common link between the members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the later group of young Oxford men which included William Morris and Burne-Jones. ”

“ He worked in Street's office for the rest of that year, first at Oxford, and afterwards in London when Street removed thither in the autumn. Meanwhile Burne-Jones had left Oxford without taking a degree in order to begin life as a painter in London. The influence of Rossetti was immensely strong on both ; and when Morris also came to London and shared rooms with Burne-Jones, Rossetti succeeded in convincing him that he too ought to be a painter. ”

“ One inevitable drawback was a spirit of cliquishness; another, which might have been avoided, was the assumption of the unlucky badge of ‘pre-Raphaelite,’ indicative of a feeling which, though Rossetti shared in early years to a marked degree, he very soon abandoned. No one could have less sympathy with the ugly, the formal, or the merely edifying in art, and his reproduction of nature was never microscopic. ”

“ Rossetti and Burne-Jones, indeed, never formally joined the Brotherhood, though they were influenced by its ideals and pursued the same strict fidelity to nature in all the accessories of a picture. Millais and Holman Hunt, original members of the Brotherhood, painted men and women of the mid-Victorian epoch with every detail of their peaked bonnets and plaid shawls, and were comparatively indifferent to beauty of form and face. But Rossetti and Burne-Jones created a type of ideal beauty which they employed on their canvases with persistent repetition. ”

“ On the frame, designed by Rossetti himself, are the first words of the lamentation from Jeremiah, Quomodo sedet sola civitas: "How doth the city sit solitary that was full of people." There is a replica of this picture in the Corporation Art Gallery of Birmingham, but it was an unfinished one which was worked on after Rossetti's death by Madox Brown.
Our next illustration is from a pen-and-ink drawing, and is typical of a branch of work in which Rossetti excelled almost as notably as Burne-Jones. It represents:
(4) Mary Magdalene at the house of Simon the Pharisee. ”

“ His writing was seldom emotionally autobiographic as Rossetti’s always was, his painting and designing were not the expression of a personal mood as was the case with Burne-Jones. But no one of his special time and group gave himself more fully or more freely for others. No one contributed more generously to the public pleasure and enlightenment. No one tried with more persistent effort first to create and then to satisfy a taste for the possible best in the lives and homes of the people. ”

“ Rossetti's interest in his young admirer was no momentary matter; he backed up the advice he had offered by taking him as a pupil and by aiding him in many ways to gain a footing in the art world. When [Pg 27] Burne-Jones, having at last shaken the dust of Oxford off his feet, settled in London early in 1856, he found Rossetti quite ready to supervise his education and to lead him to that fuller knowledge of art practice which he so sorely lacked. The method of education adopted departed very definitely from accustomed lines ”

“ He was interred at Birchington under a tomb designed by Madox Brown, bearing an epitaph written by his brother.
Rossetti is a unique instance of an Englishman who has obtained equal celebrity as a poet and as a painter. It has been disputed in which class he stands higher; but as his mastery of the poetic art was consummate, while he failed to perfectly acquire even the grammar of painting, there should seem no reasonable doubt that his higher rank is as a poet. ”

“ My father did not like artists, and in time, my mother, being a dutiful wife, got her gowns from Worth until he died, although permitted to invite Rossetti and a few others to her big parties. And she had much political entertaining, political work generally, to do; she had little leisure to cultivate that side of London.”
“Well, I am rather glad she has followed her natural bent since,” said Mrs. Cutting, pleasantly. “Those nice Burne-Jones gowns she wears—or are they Rossettis? ”

“ The comfort and certainty of such an arrangement were invaluable to Rossetti, whose constant altercations with other patrons and with dealers bring out the least attractive side of his character. The arrangement lasted a considerable time: that it should eventually die lay in the nature of things. ”

“ Here we have praise indeed; but there is at least one painter, he whose long life still kept the stainless record of unswerving loyalty to a noble ideal, to whom also Burne-Jones has here owned his indebtedness, who would, I believe, have accepted and endorsed even such a judgment as this. And if an artist’s fame lives most sweetly, most securely, in the regard of his fellows, who could ask aught higher of the living or the dead of our times, than that the award of Rossetti should be confirmed and enforced by the painter of “Love and Death”? ”

“ There is nothing which could possibly shock us now in the simple, girl-like figure of Rossetti's Virgin, crouching in half-awakened awe upon her pallet couch before the grave-faced angel who is holding out to her a lily. In many ways it is a far more reverent treatment of the scene than one is accustomed to in old Italian canvases with their sumptuously robed madonnas and angels gay with peacock-wings and jewelled trappings. The painting, too, is a masterpiece for so young and inexperienced an artist, full of skill in the handling of white draperies and restrained in the use of colour. ”

“ Rossetti was a sweet lady, and Christina, who still lives, a higher poet than her brother, is of the noblest brand. The family, one and all, are almost purely Italian. The father, a poet, was a Neapolitan; the mother was a Tuscan, with some Scotch blood. Rossetti may be regarded, not as English, but as one of those powerful leavens with which the genius of one country sometimes ferments that of another, to give it a new vitality. ”

“ On the other hand, if we are not to credit the "Pre-Raphaelites" with all the fine sentiments attributed to them in Ruskin's inspired defence, it is absurd to imagine, as some have done, that they failed to take themselves or their work seriously because Rossetti in his family letters used to speak flippantly of his unlucky little picture, which, like a curse, had come home to roost. Men often enough speak lightly to friends of things which have lain at the heart ”

“ Rossetti lies buried in Highgate Cemetery, with the following inscription: “To the dear memory of my husband, Gabriele Rossetti; born at Vasto d’Ammone in the Kingdom of Naples, 28th February 1783; died in London, 26th April 1854.” “He shall return no more nor see his native country.”—Jer. xxii. 10. “Now they desire a better country, that is an heavenly.”—Heb. xi. 16. “Ah Dio ajutami Tu.”
The concluding phrase formed the last emphatic words which Rossetti pronounced in a loud voice, in the evening of 25th April, after some hours of approximate loss of speech. ”

“ This beautiful little water-colour represents the first compartment of the double subject. In it Paolo and Francesca are seated before a window bearing the arms of Malatesta. Outside is a bright and sunny landscape. The lovers have stopped in the midst of their reading to give the fatal kiss that sealed their doom.
In 1861 or 1862 Rossetti designed two woodcuts for his sister Christina's "Goblin Market," published by Messrs. Macmillan. In 1865 he drew two more designs for "The Prince's Progress." ”

“ I had a splendid evening last night, and Rossetti read a lot more of his latest work. Splendid as his published work is, it is surpassed by what has yet to be published. The more I look into and hear his poems the more I am struck with the incomparable power and depth of his genius—his almost magical perfection and mastery of language—his magnificent spiritual strength and subtlety. He read some things last night, lines in which almost took my breath away. No sonnet-writer in the past has equalled him, and it is almost inconceivable to imagine any one doing so in the future. ”