The Morbid Romantic: Dante Gabriel Rossetti

 

 


 

    On October 5, 1869, under cover of darkness, several men crept through London’s Highgate cemetery with shovels. They began digging. When they reached the rotting coffin, beneath the London clay, they wrenched the lid off. It was half-full of water. Inside was Elizabeth Siddall, who had lain beneath the earth for six years. She had been the long-suffering wife and muse of the painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. He had paid these men to dig her up. Entwined in her long red hair was a mouldering book containing the only hand-written copies of Rossetti’s poems. He had placed it in the coffin, all those years ago, in a theatrical show of grief, but he now found that he couldn’t remember them and wanted it back.

    Dante Gabriel Rossetti, born in London on May 12, 1828, was the son of émigré Italian scholar Gabriele Rossetti. When he was seventeen, Rossetti entered the antique drawing course at the Royal Academy. He was not the most talented of students, but he was supremely self-assured, and he quickly became contemptuous of the lecturers, whom he considered old-fashioned and boring. In 1848 he withdrew from the course to become the private student of the artist William Holman Hunt, in a studio in Cleveland Street. Here he met the boy genius John Everett Millais, then aged 19, who had, on the strength of his astounding drawing ability, gained entrance into the Royal Academy at the age of eleven – the youngest student ever to be admitted (his fellow students referred to him as 'the child'). These three young men were keenly aware of their own talent, and, in the manner of all precocious art students, they thumbed their noses at tradition, and wanted to usurp the previous generation of artists. They founded an art movement which revolutionised and changed British art forever - the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Their manifesto had four main rules: to have genuine ideas; to work directly from nature; to take their work very seriously; and to only make work of the highest quality. The Brotherhood was initially a secret organisation. Accordingly, in the early days, the young artists each placed the cryptic initials ‘P.R.B’ on their finished canvases. Wags asserted that because of Rossetti’s womanising, on his paintings this stood for: ‘Penis Rather Better’. These three artists soon became seven, but this was enough to change everything forever.

    Today, the PRB has rather unfairly come to represent a kind of kitsch, artistic cul-de-sac. But at the time it stood for a revolutionary overthrowing of the dead-end Academia of the period - it was a kind of proto-punk, cultural backlash. Later, a second generation of artists was influenced by the movement, most notably Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris, who said of Rossetti: “Sometimes he was an angel, and sometimes he was a damned scoundrel.”

   In 1850, when he was just twenty-one, Rossetti met the ethereally beautiful shop-girl Elizabeth Siddall, who became an important model for the Pre-Raphaelite artists, who affectionately called her ‘Guggams’. She is the model for Millais’ painting, ‘Ophelia’. Rossetti eventually married her, in 1860, after an engagement of ten-years, during which he had been conducting an affair with Jane, the wife of his close friend, the artist William Morris.

    Exacerbated by Rossetti’s philandering Lizzie's mental and physical health deteriorated. She began taking laudanum, an addictive tincture of opium, which was widely used and freely available over the counter as a cure-all: women took the drug to help with menstrual cramps; infants were fed it to help them sleep. The wife of Abraham Lincoln was a laudanum addict, as was the English poet Coleridge. Laudanum was cheaper than a bottle of gin.

    In 1861 Lizzie found that she was pregnant, but her laudanum addiction meant that five months into the pregnancy the baby girl was stillborn. Lizzie plunged into depression, becoming increasingly irrational. On February 10, 1862, Rossetti arrived home to find her unconscious in bed, with an empty container of laudanum. She was pronounced dead the next morning. Rossetti never got over the loss and he suffered guilt for the rest of his life.

     After Lizzie’s death, Rossetti moved to 16 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, where he lived for the next two decades, surrounded by an exotic menagerie, which contained: peacocks, raccoons, mice, parrots, owls, parakeets, a Japanese salamander, woodchucks, kangaroos, wallabies, a deer, kookaburras, armadillos, marmots, a Brahmin bull, wombats, and a toucan which he dressed in a cowboy hat and trained to ride a llama round the dining table. He even made an unsuccessful attempt to purchase a baby African elephant – but at £400 the price was prohibitive. The decadent poet Algernon Swinburne also lived at this address with Rossetti for a couple of years: the artist appears not to have minded the rumours that the poet had once trained a pet monkey to masturbate him.

Wombats were a favourite animal of Rossetti’s. In 1862 and 1863, several of these animals were sent to London’s Regent’s Park Zoo from the Melbourne Zoo and the artist would regularly meet friends at their enclosure and marvel at their appearance and demeanour. His first wombat was purchased in 1869.

    In later years Cheyne Walk boasted homes to numerous bohemian artists, writers, actors and musicians, including: J.M.W.Turner, James McNeill Whistler, Henry James, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Keith Richards, Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithful and Laurence Olivier.

    Rossetti was haunted by Lizzie’s death. He became addicted to chloral, a powerful sedative. He declined into physical and mental agony, becoming obese and suffering from terrible headaches, insomnia and a testicular hydrocele which needed regular draining by his doctor. He developed a morbid fear of strangers and of the outside world, and an unfounded psychosomatic fear that he was going blind. He arranged séances, trying to contact his dead wife. He was often found stumbling in the street, drunk, or completely overcome by the various drugs he was taking. Paradoxically, the death of Lizzie, and the enormous grief he suffered, inspired Rosetti to make some of his greatest paintings during this period. They are suffused with loss and an almost unbearable longing.

In 1869, William Morris and Rossetti together rented Kelmscott Manor, Oxfordshire, as a summer house. It soon became the setting for Rossetti’s long-standing affair with Morris’ wife, Jane, which was conducted with the full knowledge, and perhaps even approval, of Morris himself. The pair spent summers there with her children, while Morris travelled to Iceland in 1871 and 1873. In an ink sketch from 1869, Rosetti depicts Jane with a wombat on a leash. The fact that, at the time, he named his own pet wombat ‘Top’, and Morris’ nickname was ‘Topsy’, seems an undeniably hurtful reference in the face of their affair.

In 1872 Rossetti’s first collection of poetry was met with savage criticism and as a result he suffered a mental breakdown. On June 8th of that year he drank an entire bottle of laudanum in an unsuccessful suicide attempt. Recovering from that, he abandoned most of his friends and again joined Jane at Kelmscott, where he slept through the days and stayed up all night, drunk and drugged. He experienced paranoid hallucinations. Nothing could expunge the memory of Lizzie.

He suffered further breakdowns in 1877 and 1879. He was also now experiencing alcohol psychosis due to his prodigious intake of whisky, which he drank to mask the terrible taste of the chloral. In 1881 he had a stroke which left him paralysed. He died the following year of kidney failure exacerbated by years of drug and alcohol abuse.

    Rossetti was arguably the least technically-proficient of the PRB artists. His dream-realm imagery is pervaded by a drug-induced, obsessive fantasy of plump-lipped models in languorous poses, sometimes holding pomegranates – that Victorian symbol of decadent fecundity. But amongst his Pre-Raphaelite brothers it is his imagery alone that we are most keenly aware of today. For it has infiltrated every advertisement for women’s cosmetics and perfumes that we are likely to see. We need only look at his paintings: ‘The Beloved’ (1866); ‘Lady Lilith’ (1873); ‘Proserpina’ (1874); 'The Day Dream’ (1880) to see that we still haven’t been able to shake the vision. Over one-hundred years later we are still inextricably beholden to his revolutionary medieval hallucinations

Comments

  1. I’m in awe of the description of your introduction Steve what an incredible insight. P.R.B remain long in my memory as being unrivalled 🌿 thank you incredible writing of one of my favourite times in Art History 🌟

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