After the death of his wife, Elizabeth Siddal, in 1862, Rossetti lived in Chelsea where he was a neighbour and friend of Whistler. The aesthetic paintings and drawings he made here became a formative influence on the development of ‘art for art’s sake’ in Britain; his sensuous portraits of female figures evoking the art of the Venetian Renaissance. Dante Gabriel Rossetti chose a variety of voluptuous models during the 1860s to sit for him, including Alexa Wilding and his mistress, Fanny Cornforth. Although Virginia Surtees has not identified the sitter, it is, in our opinion, a portrait of Alexa Wilding. This portrait head clearly compares to her likeness in Monna Vanna (1866), Veronica Veronese (1870-2) and The Bower Meadow (1871-2). Rossetti’s stylised heads are naturally a poetic fusion of the ideal model and his mental picture of his muse.

Frederick Sandys had first met the Pre-Raphaelites in 1857 through his lampoon of Sir John Everett Millais’ St Isumbras at the Ford, a print entitled The Nightmare, which contained caricatures of Millais, Rossetti, Hunt and Ruskin. Sandys was a superb draughtsman and a master of the pastel technique. It was he who encouraged and taught Rossetti to work in coloured chalks and it was no coincidence that Rossetti produced a series of strong chalk heads and full-length subjects in 1866, the year that Frederick Sandys stayed at his house in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea.

 

Peter Nahum At The Leicester Galleries