After the death of Elizabeth Siddal, Rossetti moved to Tudor House in Chelsea.  There he lived an increasingly eccentric life, surrounded by exotic animals, and began his long descent into the hell of drugs and alcohol.  Between 1864 and 1870 he painted Beata Beatrix, a work that breaks completely with the sensual and luminous visions of women that marked his work after Bocca Baciata.  This painting is a memorial to Elizabeth Siddal, in which the painter compares his dead wife to the Beatrice of Vita Nuova and identifies with the grieving Dante.  The blurred quality of the painting may have been inspired by the photographs taken by Julia Margaret Cameron, which Rossetti greatly admired.  This kind of timelessness between life and death, the sensual and the spiritual, looks forward to the hypnotic states that the Symbolist painters explored. [Source: The Pre-Raphaelites, Romance and Realism, Laurence des Cars]

LANCELOT AND ELAINE
by ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

 
Julia Margaret Cameron's  Dante Gabriel Rossetti's
Call and I follow (1867)     Beata Beatrix (1864-1870)