Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Making his Homes reflect Art and Character

 Rossetti was one of those unique, brilliant men who stand out amongst their contemporaries and remain fascinating figures for future generations.  It is true that his deep, searching, sometimes tormented poetry may no longer be considered of such interest, but his art still draws us with its colour, sensuality and mythical themes.

A home is a reflection of its occupants.  And it is interesting to see how homes change or are altered along with the character of the occupants, each new inhabitant putting their personal stamp upon them.  To my mind, a house, or anywhere we consider as home, becomes a reflection of our feelings and physical bodies, the symbolic place the soul inhabits.  Often when a building becomes neglected and starts to need repair, a person’s health also suffers as if the house is an outer shell to the human bodies within it.  Jung might have considered this as synchronicity but I have observed a definite relationship with bodies and surroundings and the places that draw us to them or the type of house we may want to live in but which life and fortunes deny us.  We still dream.  I always yearned for a villa in Italy but that’s not going to happen in this lifetime!   It isn’t because I couldn’t do so but I choose to stay in a country with which I am now familiar, near family and the English countryside I love. 

On the whole, woman was and still is largely the home maker and a house reflects much of her taste.  It’s always interesting to see how single men furnish or neglect their home!  Their taste is generally more sparse and utilitarian but perhaps things are changing as men and women share the task of homemaking far more. Gabriel Rossetti did share his first real home with his eventual wife, Lizzie Siddal, but after her death remained a widower till he died.  In his case, both of his important homes tended to reflect his own dominant, energetic, eclectic personality far more than a shared one.   And it was by no means a utilitarian or sparse taste.  It befitted such an artistic, flamboyant nature with a love of unusual and beautiful objects to delight the eye.  

Rossetti moved around London at first, renting studios.   He and his fellow Pre-Raphaelites, Hunt, Stevens and Collinson chanced upon a beautiful old house along the riverside at Chelsea.  It was said to be built on the site of a mansion used by Queen Catherine Parr, Henry the Eighth’s last wife, and named Queen’s House or Tudor House.  It had a many bedrooms, sitting rooms, drawing rooms and a kitchen and cellars.  The young artists easily envisaged having a studio each.  But the rent and the long lease were more than they could afford and they regretfully gave up the idea, going for separate studios instead.  Gabriel took a room in Newman St. over the top of a dancing academy and continued to live at his parental home.

This was followed by a studio in the garden of a house called The Hermitage on Highgate’s West Hill. During this time, Gabriel was painting and falling deeply in love with his red-haired muse, Lizzie Siddal.   His fascination with the great Dante Alighieri, his namesake, led him to see Lizzie as his own Beatrice.  He often painted her as such in his varied pictures with Dantesque themes.   However, it was a complicated relationship due as much to the fact that their social standing was very different and so marriage seemed unlikely in those class-ridden times. They were said to be engaged but it was nothing definite or declared publicly. 

Lizzie Siddal (Rossetti archive)

Chatham Place, Blackfriars:

For various reasons, of which Lizzie was one, Gabriel needed a new ‘crib’.  He and his brother, William,  (who purportedly shared it and paid half the rent) eventually found rooms on the second floor of a house in Chatham Place, very close to Blackfriars Bridge and over the confluence of the Fleet and the Thames.  The buildings no longer exist sadly, part now of Blackfriars Station.  There were two rooms; one was to be the studio, the other a small bedroom with a balcony overlooking the river from whence arose the stench of sewage, meat thrown in from Smithfield’s and other unpleasant odours.  Londoners were used to the foulness of their river.  It was a busy river in those days and no doubt interesting.  It had its charms according to Gabriel’s visitors.

Lizzie as Beata Beatrix painted after her death

The rooms had windows on all sides and virtually hung out over the river, which made it light and cheerful. As always, Gabriel begged and borrowed furnishing from home, particularly mirrors which he considered essential for his studio. He was always fond of mirrors.  This, his first home, so to speak, reflected the young Rossetti.  It was cheerful, bright, adequate to his simple needs and his beloved Lizzie lived just a short distance away in the Old Kent Rd.  A convenient place therefore for her to model as well as remain and dine with him, allowing them to enjoy each other’s company without interference.   George Boyce, an artist friend, wrote that it was a picturesque place, especially at night with the gas lamps on the bridge and wharf side shedding their wavering reflections on the river.  Here was enjoyed the intelligent, good-hearted  company of gentlemen who could speak freely without need for coarseness or fear of public mores and opinions.  The whole ethos of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood . . . and they did indeed feel like brothers at first . . . was that it was to be about truth, freshness, no pretentious nonsense, secrecy or chiaroscuro.   It seems that these were Gabriel’s happiest days; deeply in love yet uncommitted, his greatness rising and manifesting itself in his poetic and artistic works with more beautiful work still to come.  Poetry in his heart and soul.  Simplicity was the order of the day then.  He disliked ‘tobacco, tea, coffee, stimulants’, drank water, allowing others in his usual easy going and uncritical manner to imbibe what they would.  How different he became in later life when disappointment, tragedy and depression overcame that sweet, pure young soul.

Rossetti at last committed himself to marriage with Lizzie in 1860.  They had been together for so many years that love had altered to companionship and mutual understanding but the fires of passion had long gone.  By this time Lizzie, always a sensitive, refined woman had become sickly, perhaps a little hypochondriac, unhappy and sad, reliant on laudanum to ease her pains of mind and body, feeling that Rossetti was now replacing her with younger models and perhaps in love with them.  But his love for her was real and constant in its way even though, as with all long-term relationships, well past the ‘first fine careless rapture’.   He had at one point broken off their engagement but knowing she was very ill, married her as much from pity as anything else.  Sadly, in 1861 she lost her eagerly desired first child, a stillborn girl, becoming pregnant again almost immediately that year. Whether she suffered from postnatal depression, or was heart broken because she felt that Rossetti’s love was slipping away and thus committed suicide, we shall never really know.  Ford Madox Brown destroyed the note she left and the verdict was recorded as an accidental overdose.

Tudor House, Cheyne Walk  

 

Cheyne Walk in early 1800's

By 1869, Gabriel had changed greatly.  He was now addicted to drugs and alcohol . . .  this the young man once desirous of being clear-headed and inwardly pure!  From a slender, handsome young man he was now corpulent, said to eat enormous amounts of food where once he had lived simply and lightly. 

After Lizzie’s death, Rossetti was able to achieve his earlier dream of renting the house in Cheyne Walk in Chelsea, the large, rambling place called Tudor House. Thus, his new home was now enlarged like himself!  It was a quiet, out of town location along the Thames close to the Chelsea Physic Garden and the Royal Hospital.  Now as the centre of the bustling London Metropolis, it is hard to imagine that it was once such a quiet peaceful backwater with moorings, landing places and boats and barges sailing past.  There was no embankment built at that time and occasionally the tides would flow over from the river and flood his cellars. The house itself is still there and very imposing, with its elegant courtyard and well-proportioned windows and doorways.

Cheyne Walk today

 16 Cheyne Walk.  You can just see the blue plaque behind me.

  

The Sitting Room at 16, Cheyne Walk by Henry Treffry Dunn (a studio assistant of Rossetti)

At first, Rossetti hoped to be able to bring all the women of his family together in the large house to take care of the place and himself.   Marriage held no attractions for him.  One doubts if it ever did and if his release from the invalid, Lizzie, was not a relief deep down in his heart, much as he grieved her loss and grieved for old memories of passionate love.  However,  grief or not, within a very short while, he installed Fanny Cornforth, his golden haired model of many years, purportedly as the housekeeper.  Fanny, who did love Rossetti, had by now left her husband whom she had married in a sort of pique when Rossetti married Lizzie.   She was followed by Swinburne the poet, Meredith the novelist and William Rossetti who also now occupied the large house.   Rossetti was an individualist and a loner, yet like many such loners, he did not want his own company for too long.   He needed people around him, needed recognition while at the same time spurning it.  A complex character.  The whole idea of the Pre Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded on the idea of non-conformity to the given artistic values of his day.  Rossetti steadfastly refused to enter his pictures in the Royal Academy and exhibited them privately if at all.  Yet as he grew older, hopes of nomination did arise.  Thus do we all change our tunes as we grow older and become the very thing we once despised!

Tudor house began to take shape in the style of Rossetti.  The large, spacious, beautiful rooms slowly filled with amazing and unusual items picked up from curiosity shops, a mix of high quality articles and junk.  Many of the items were used in his pictures as background; furnishings, materials, peacock feathers, pieces of jewellery.  None of the decorative jewellery was of any real value, his favourite being the pearl pin, which features in many portraits.  Sadly, this has not survived though other items did.  While away with his brother William in Antwerp, the two men enjoyed themselves scouring old shops for brooches, ‘a large jar with blue birds’ old prints and varied items.  When a fried, Henry Munby, dined with Rossetti he was amazed and fascinated by the wonderful drawing room filled with so many objects, curios, mirrors on ever wall, pictures and Italian cabinets, Dutch blue tiles on the fireplaces.  He walked up and down the room, examining everything with delight absorbing ‘the aroma of its manifold romance’.  On another occasion, an evening this time, he found the room bathed in the glow of the firelight with huge Elizabethan candlesticks gleaming on ebony furnishings, silver gilt dishes  and flagons, creating a delightful ambience of poetry and beauty.  Rossetti lived out his inner romance through his house and his unique style of furnishing.  The intriguing and eclectic mix also reflected Rossetti’s own interests and the breadth of his conversation which all those who loved and knew him acknowledged to be erudite and filled with arcane as well as modern knowledge.

Rossetti's bedroom reflected in a mirror by H T Dunn.

The strangest room in the house was Rossetti’s bedroom, which was particularly dark and heavy.  In it he installed a dark black mantelpiece that rose to the ceiling. 

According to Hall Caine, the bedroom ‘was entered from another and smaller room, used as a breakfast-room. This outer room was made fairly bright and cheerful by a glittering chandelier (the property once, he said, of David Garrick), and from the rustle of trees against the window pane one perceived that it overlooked the garden; but the inner room was dark with heavy hangings round the walls as well as the bed, and thick velvet curtains before the windows, so that candles seemed unable to light it and voices sounded thick and muffled.’

The thickly curtained windows, the heavy hangings around the dark oak four-poster bed reflected Gabriel’s inner state.  While the rest of the house glowed with colours, imagination, brilliant objects as did his portraits, here were the dark, depressed thoughts with which Gabriel lay down to his slumbers and to which he awoke. 

Rossetti now turned to becoming an avid collector.

Blue Porcelain:

One of Rossetti’s most obsessive and passionately acquired collections was for blue porcelain.  When living with Lizzie, he had begun with standard willow pattern pieces.  (Intriguingly, the willow pattern design appears to have originated in England based on a tragic Chinese love story and then adapted by the Chinese for their designs.)  Then Gabriel began to collect beautiful pieces of ware from Nanking.  This particular porcelain, painted with greater precision and detail and with finer glazes, was considered superior to the Canton china.  China produced a great deal of the blue and white ware in the 18/19^th century when it became highly popular both in the States and in Europe. The exquisite blue colour was derived from Persian Cobalt, exported to China and used to make bowls, ginger jars, vases, plates and so on.  The craze for this blue found its way to Europe, where it took hold in Parisian circles.  One can imagine how it might appeal to the artistic society: something about this colour draws us to it all the time, spiritual, sky, heaven, purity, calm and peaceful.  Certainly, something needed in the rather zany household of Rossetti and his friends.

His great rival in collecting was the artist Whistler who lived close by.  They tried to outdo one another by buying up choice pieces from antique shops, the Oriental warehouse in Regent Street and abroad.  ‘My pots now baffle description altogether. Come and see them!’ said the exultant Rossetti to his friend Ford Madox Brown.  Whistler was said to eat his heart out with envy if Gabriel secured a particularly splendid piece.  And no doubt vice-versa as well!

The Zoo

His other famous collection was of varied animals, which he kept in his garden.  The garden flourished in a wild state, left as Nature intended for the ‘survival of the fittest.’ In it roamed peacocks, whose irritating noise kept neighbours awake and indeed resulted in Lord Cadogan inserting a clause into the lease of Tudor House forbidding that these birds be kept in the garden. Other inmates of this scatterbrained zoo were a deerhound, a barn owl, rabbits, dormice, hedgehogs, wombats of which Gabriel was particularly fond, lizards, salamanders, parrots armadillos and a kangaroo.  A fierce zebu (an Indian bull) was also brought in which turned out to be so ungovernable, chasing Gabriel into the house and almost uprooting the tree to which it had been tethered, that it was promptly resold.   The animals were mainly kept in specially built cages but unfortunately, Rossetti was as ignorantly neglectful of these myriad pets as he was of the women in his life. Many ate one another, burrowed their way out of the garden or simply died from lack of adequate nutrition and care.  One of the armadillos was said to have turned up in a neighbour’s kitchen much to the horror of the cook.

There was even talk of buying a lion, gorilla or an elephant. Not a garden for the dainty to enter!  Thankfully this didn’t happen.

Images of Jane Morris

Gabriel’s studio also reflected his desire to collect.   He collected feminine beauty in the form of first Lizzie, his Beatrice, then later with his compulsive longing to possess Jane, the wife of his friend William Morris.   He could not quite do so (though it is generally assumed they were lovers (perhaps not physically however) but he possessed her as his muse and model’  Her image looked out on all sides of his studio, the place where he could indeed possess his loved ladies, stacked against the walls, sketches and drawings, paintings and photographs.  Rossetti was searching all his life for this inner muse, his anima figure and felt that she eluded him, as do all writers, musicians and artists for we can never really capture this inner being in flesh and blood.  Both Lizzie and Jane became beauties in his portraits though neither was especially handsome and even slightly masculine in their looks.   Dark haired Jane seemed to reflect the Italian genes far more.  

Jane as Blanzifiore (Snowdrop)
ArtMagick

Gabriel did move into Kelmscott with Jane and William later in life but it was never his home as such, rather reflected the taste of Jane and William and their family.   He kept the tenancy of Tudor House till he died.  By then the animals were long gone, the garden totally overgrown and Rossetti a complete wreck.  Fanny Cornforth remained faithful to him all his life but she was never a great love of his, rather a person with whom he could relax, feel comfortable and cared for knowing she truly loved him.  It is always good to feel loved.   However, the mores of the times prevailed and Fanny was not considered a suitable person to attend his funeral and kept away.  In April, 1882, Rossetti died on Easter Day, aged 54, at Birchington-on-Sea, Kent, his last and temporary home.

photo of Jane Morris (Rossetti archive.org)

Main Sources:

Dante Gabriel Rossetti Painter and Poet by Jan Morris Weidenfield and Nicholson, London.   To my mind one of the best accounts of his life.

http://preraphaelitesisterhood.com

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, An Illustrated Memorial of His Art and Life

http://www.rossettiarchive.org/docs/nd497.r8.m33.rad.html

Blanzifiore (Snowdrops) by Dante Gabriel Rossetti :: artmagick.com

http://www.artmagick.com

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In Love with a dream: Thomas Hardy and his wife Emma

Beeny Cliff, Cornwall

O, the opal and the sapphire of that wandering western sea,

And the woman riding high above with bright hair flapping free

The woman whom I loved so and who loyally loved me.

Beeny Cliff

Thomas Hardy is one of our greatest British novelists.  He has a style and voice that is unique and distinctive and thus hard for academics to analyze and classify.  I like that.  Dry, dusty minds do so love to pigeon hole, compare, criticise and reduce all to components and parts.  It takes the delight of reading away.  Hardy wrote from his heart and soul, a man of great feeling yet who refused to run away from life’s realities.  That is what makes his work so individual and special.  His intense and abiding love for Nature, reflected in his poetry, and the often exquisite descriptions in his prose are not of the Wordsworthian mystical variety.  Rather he saw Nature red in tooth and claw as well as in her shimmering illusory beauty.  Mother Nature, the great and mysterious Feminine, Maya, was his real love, the true love of his life.  And this ultimate love became peculiarly wrapped up in the strange relationship he had with his wife, Emma.

Hardy's birthplace

Hardy considered himself as poet first and foremost.  Born in the little hamlet of Upper Bockhampton in Dorset in 1840, he was the son of a stonemason and a fiddler.  His education finished at the age of sixteen when he became apprenticed to James Hicks, a local architecht.  He showed promise in this work, winning prizes which ultimately took him to work in London, a place for which he had no great affinity. Country born and bred, he set his novels in rural scenes and small towns, creating his own landscapes which derived from an inner landscape of his own, a place set in earlier years when his father would have been a young lad.  The world of his father had already begun to change rapidly as the Victorian society, in all its glory and onward march into  industrialisation, modernisation, and expansion, ploughed over society as men once ploughed over the heavy fields.  He felt the heart and soul was being ripped from the land and from the men who worked it.  Despite the grinding poverty he saw around him, he realised that comradeship and the simple joys of country life were fast disappearing as more and more workers migrated to the factories and cities.

Sturminster Newton

Hardy could be said to be a nostalgic writer.  I think many writers are.  Even Dickens set his characters in an earlier period of his life and the two men had in common a sense of the injustices of society, Dickens with urban life and Hardy with rural life.  Dorset was one of the most backward of all the English counties but was a place of unparelled beauty, still fairly untouched or changed, still lovely.  The rolling countryside of Hardy’s youth became the setting for his novels. He called this imaginary place Wessex, after the old Anglo Saxon kingdom which had once covered the area of southwest England.  Hardy drew up maps and gave different names to real places in those counties and to this day the area is called ‘Hardy’s Wessex’.  

It was while Hardy was in St Juliot in Cornwall in 1870 , busy with restoring the old church there, that he met Emma Lavinia Gifford.  It was with her in mind that he wrote A Pair of Blue Eyes.  She was said to be a real beauty then with her vivid blue eyes, long auburn ringlets and rosy cheeks.  Her nature was girlish, cheerful, lively, unrestrained and delightful.  Quite a contrast to the small, slender, uncertain, highly sensitive Thomas with his romantic tendency to depressions and gloom over life. Hardy felt Emma’s vibrant magic and expressed it in this extract from a poem written when he returned to London.

Emma Gifford

When I came back from Lyonesse

With magic in my eyes

None managed to surmise

What meant my godlike gloriousness

When I came back from Lyonesse

With magic in my eyes.

During the four year period of their courtship Hardy seldom visited Emma in Cornwall but she never appeared to complain or look elsewhere.  The pair eventually married in1874.  Almost at once, Hardy felt trapped by marriage as if romance could no longer exist and all the excitement of courtship was over.  Despite many happy years in their early days, he was to say in 1895 that ‘a bad marriage is one of the direst things on earth and one of the cruellest.’  Emma over time changed from the carefree, slightly wild young woman of her youth, the girl, who with her hair streaming in the wind,  rode her horse across the cliff tops to the disapproval of local folk.  She became plump and ordinary-looking, even dowdy, as if no longer taking trouble and could no longer match some of the beauties Hardy encountered while in London enjoying his fame and fortune.   

Hardy at the time of meeting Emma

Opposite natures often match well, like magnets poles, drawing one another together, but there have to be some things in common.  Unfortunately, these two were alike in ways that clashed because they rivalled one another.  That which first drew them together - a love of books, poetry, beauty of nature and a longing to express their feelings in some creative way - ultimately pushed them apart.  If Emma had borne children, it may have helped to channel some of her creative longings into life’s pleasant mundanities.  But this did not come about and she remained emotionally unfulfilled in every way.  This led to her wish to express herself through her own writing and poetry and she did publish some poetry but often at her own expense and without any encouragement. Her poetry was strange and had a mystical bent to it.  Later on in life she said, ‘I have it all here but I have not the power of expressing it’.  With encouragement she may have learnt to express it but Hardy considered her pretensions as a writer as a ‘painful delusion’.   My impression is she had a more universal view of life than Hardy who rested mainly in the human world and whose ardent love of Nature was poetic but at the same time open eyed with a realistic view.  His early faith was, like many others of the time, dissolved by Darwin’s theories.  He found it hard to reconcile the traditional Christian God with the suffering and pain he saw around him and he believed more and more in a malign and uncompromising Fate against which human beings struggled to exist and function. If he had a God it was the stern and uncompromising Jehovah and he was Job.   Emma, however, saw stranger visions that fled beyond the earthy existence.  But they were just as valid: here is one of her published poems.

In misery swirled

Is this one-moon whirled,

But there’s no sorrow or darkness there

In that mighty Planet where

There is no night.

Ten moons ever revolving

All matters its long years resolving

To sweetness and light.

Ten Moons

Emma claimed that she helped her husband considerably with ideas and suggestions when writing his first novels.  Yet there was never any mention of her or acknowledgment in any of his books.  He seemed to take her totally for granted. 

Emma in later life

Why did she change, why did marriage fail her as much as it did Thomas?  He often declared his existence to be a prison . . . why, when he was free to go where he would, often fleeing to his London apartment?  The sense of imprisonment was of his own making. He admired and flirted with several beauties when in London, extolling their writing, dancing with them and enjoying their company.  Meanwhile back home, neglected, ignored, Emma was always there, like a good mother figure while he played the errant son who was always away or else locked in his study with his writings, his despair and depressions.  He was the typical ‘puer aeternus,’ a figure studied and written about by the psychologist, Carl Jung.  The idealistic, creative man who never quite grows up inside no matter how old he may be in years.  He remains a Peter Pan who wants his Wendy there forever caring for him.  Such a man is always attached to The Great Mother or Mother Nature, the eternal Feminine principle.  Marriage is indeed a prison for such a man because it means responsibility, sharing, compromise, loss of total individuality through forming one from two - which is what marriage should be about.  Such a man never ‘feels’ married but always wants to feel life still has creative and sexual possibilities.  

From descriptions of Emma’s character, we get the impression that she was herself a ‘puella’ the female equivalent of Peter Pan.  I suspect she was no more entranced by marriage than her husband but would never have admitted it.  She felt equally trapped though in a different way.  There was a conventional streak to her that made her react with outrage when he wrote in Jude the Obscure that ‘Fewer women like marriage than you suppose . . . they enter into it for . . . the social advantages it gains them.’  The fact was that Emma came from a far higher social background than Hardy and had gone against her beloved father’s wishes in marrying him.  She had in fact ‘lowered’ herself by the standards of the time.  Plus, it was belittling to her to publicly rant about marriage and constantly praise and adore other women as Hardy did.  Scarcely surprising that she tried hard to have Jude the Obscure banned.  In fact, so adverse was reaction to this book that Hardy decided to give up writing novels and concentrate on poetry instead.  It is now considered one of his greatest works.

Hardy was not an easy man to be married to; he was very private with a distaste for prolonged intimacy of any kind, even in marriage. Was he simply a romantic dreamer for whom Woman would forever be an ideal rather than a creature of flesh and blood?   He was a complex man; a realist on one hand and an idealist on the other and very self-centred and hyper-sensitive. Emma was not the right woman to deal with this complexity for she had a longing to be someone in her own right which in that day and age was never to be fulfilled.  She eventually withdrew entirely into her own space literally and symbolically, a room in the attic where she became prey to varied ailments and complaints such as fatigue, shingles, pains, rheumatism and indigestion, all signs of depression, nervous and emotional stress.  On 25^th November 1912 she took to her bed and a couple of morning later, Hardy was asked to come up to her which he did with ill grace, weary of such summons.  Within five minutes she was dead.

After her sudden death, reading her diaries and charmingly written memories of their early happiness, Hardy now found himself strangely lonely.  She had always been there in the background of his life, the equivalent of Gabriel Oakes while he played the flighty Bathsheba.  She was the mother figure who sustained him without his even realising the fact.  But, ah!...now he no longer had the real woman, his heart and soul could dwell forever on the dream, the romance, on his ideal view of the Feminine and Nature…the girl with streaming auburn hair on her horse against the blue of the Cornish sea.  The real person could never live up to that glorious lost romantic vision.  Thus when Emma Gifford Hardy died, she came to life again in all her youthful charm and beauty and his old love welled up in him.  He then wrote wonderful love poems about Emma from her death until the end of his days, even though he remarried later.  On his own death in 1928 his heart was put near her grave at Stinsford Churchyard while his ashes were taken to Poets Corner in Westminster Abbey.

Marsland, Cornwall

In many ways, we can draw parallells with the feelings Dante Gabriel Rossetti had for Lizzie Siddal.  They loved one another madly but as time went on, Rossetti began to ignore the woman who was once his great love and inspiration, though he did at least encourage her artistic endeavours.  After Lizzie’s untimely death, he, like Hardy, felt immense remorse and drew several strange paintings in which she became his muse again, his beloved anima,  Beata Beatrice.  He had always identified with his hero, Dante Alighieri, who loved and wrote about Beatrice, a beautiful girl who had died young and left him forever longing for the unnattainable vision.  Women loved more in death than in life.  In the same way, Hardy painted Emma in poetic pictures of love and longing.  He took a pilgrimage to Cornwall and revisited all the places that they had explored when in love and wrote with poignant sadness over a lost time when life was sharp and vivid, coloured by intense feelings, every minute detail remembered, a time never to return.  His poems are amongst his best work and speak so eloquently of that aching longing for love in every one of us, that something indefinable which no human being can ever really fulfil.

What if still in chasmal beauty looms that wild weird western shore,

The woman now is – elsewhere - whom the ambling pony bore,

And knows not nor cares for Beeny, and will laugh there never more.

Everyone seems to have an Opinion on Life, Love and Art

And why are we all so different in our opinions? One's man's meat is another man's poison ...so very true. Well, any vegan will tell you that. But when it comes to Life, Love and Art, we all act like vegans versus meat-eaters! We all have strong inclinatiosn and tastes, natures and opinions but for some strange reason, hate every elses and condsider our own take the only opinion worth knowing!.

Frankly I hate modern art. I don't understand crumpled beds and cows in formaldehyde and rubbish stuck together and I don't want to. Chiarascuro trees and seascapes and too many Madonnas with plump Christ babies can also be boring after about the 100th one. (Much as I loved Venice...there were too many Madonnas) I love paintings that make one stop and think,in which layers of meaning can be seen and felt. They need to have passion as well as beauty of detail, but even stark ugliness can be meaningful if it tells a story. The haunting themes of Goya's black paintings in the Prado, Madrid are an example. They express the artist's fear of madness and are deeply moving and haunting.

I am now going to be told how ignorant I am by hundred's of Tracy Emin afficionados. So be it. I've plenty to say in return - but in the end it is just their taste, their opinion versus mine. Who is to say which one of us is wrong? No one. Who actually lays the rules. No one and everyone. We have our own personal rules and I've outlined some of mine. I love colour, movement, a story, beautiful women and men, myths. mediaeval themes as well as classical. That's why I love the Pre-Raphaelite painters so much and I let my characters express all these personal feelings in The Crimson Bed. Some will say I have no taste at all because I love such vivid, colourful story-telling. Yet these pictures are popular, enduring, deeply loved by many men and women who have similiar imaginations to my own.

BTW, I have just read an article by Richard Dorwent written for The Telegraph 29th June 2009 on John Waterhouse for whom he has little regard it seems. He sees Waterhouse as merely pretty and lacking in the passion of the great Pre-Raphaelite masters. And it's true that Waterhouse was not a true Pre-Raph. being born while they were just in the throes of their own artistic beginnings. To some extent, I agree with this viewpoint of Dorwent's, but at the same time, I love Waterhouse because his pictures, while lacking passion perhaps, have a quality of movement and flow and femininity that has made them some of the most appealing images of the day. I chose one of his paintings The Crystal Ball for my book cover because I love the richness of colour and the thoughtful stillness of the pose.

Anyway, that's my opinion.

Case of the Disappearing Lorri

Due to losing a variety of hard drives, new computers, time spent writing, reading, travelling, playing...well, any old excuse really...I lost/forgot my blogspot and need to do a little catching up.
Research is half the fun when it comes to writing a book and my study of Dante Gabriel Rossetti has led me into some wonderful places. At the Ashmolean I was able to look at some of his work, read Lizzie Siddal's scraps of poetry and study her delicate, thoughtful drawings and paintings. At the Bodleian, I immersed myself in Holman Hunt's and John Ruskin's correspondence as well as many other intriguing Victorian letters and diaries. It's dipping into another world. And a world that is nothing like the recent BBC effort on the Pre-Raphaelites which showed them as boozing, womanizing fools. As some wit at the Pre-Raphaelite Society put it, the series should have been called 'carry on bonking up the easel'.

Poor Rossetti would have turned in his grave. He was hyper-sensitive to a degree and hated any criticism. In fact it was due to his long running altercation with a critic called Thomas Maitland (his real name was Robert Buchanan and he had attacked Rossetti before) who wrote a damning piece about him called 'The Fleshly School of Poetry'. In this lengthy, vitriolic, below the belt piece of journalism, Buchanan accused Rossetti, Swinburne and William Morris and their poetry as 'the mere fiddledeedeeing of empty heads and hollow hearts.'
Rossetti, nerves already strained by illness and tragic events,began to fall apart at this attack. Sadly, rather than ignore the matter and forget it, he was roused to such rage and vengefulness that he attacked Maitland back with a riposte entitled 'The Stealthy School of Criticism.'

Never a good idea. Eventually the whole thing blew out of proportion in Rossetti's mind and led to his increased drinking, sleeplessness and chloral taking. Yet in his youth he was a serious man, never drank at all, was scholarly and intellectual. He was not a womaniser by any means. His two great and idealised loves, Lizzie Siddal and Jane Morris, were by no means prostitutes that he or his friends had picked up from the streets nor were ever treated as such. It is so sad that modern writers feel they can twist a dead person's reputation to suit their own dramatic purposes and the expectations, attiudes and prurient curiosity of the time. But I suppose there's nothing new in that. It's just sad.

Photo of D.G. Rossetti