The Poets' Space

by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
(British, 1828 - 1882)

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)

Love Among the Ruins
Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, 1st Baronet

'...But he looked upon the city, every side,
      Far and wide,
All the mountains topped with temples, all the glades'
      Colonnades,
All the causeys, bridges, aqueducts,--and then
      All the men!
When I do come, she will speak not, she will stand,
      Either hand
On my shoulder, give her eyes the first embrace
      Of my face,
Ere we rush, ere we extinguish sight and speech
      Each on each.

In one year they sent a million fighters forth
      South and North,
And they built their gods a brazen pillar high
      As the sky
Yet reserved a thousand chariots in full force--
      Gold, of course.
O heart! oh blood that freezes, blood that burns!
      Earth's returns
For whole centuries of folly, noise and sin!
      Shut them in,
With their triumphs and their glories and the rest!
      Love is best.'

excerpt from Love among the Ruins, Men and Women: Vol. I
Love among the Ruins by Robert Browning (1812-1889)
Representative Poetry Online

Buscot Park, Faringdon, Oxfordshire | Home of The Briar Rose

                 
     Jane Morris seated, leaning forward        Reverie, pastel, 1868
     photographer: John Robert Parsons        by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
     posed by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

BMAGiC Collections Online Database
Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery

Images provided by Stephanie Pina, Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood