Entre modernité et traditions : transgressions à l’anglaise

« Enfin il me fit part de son motif : il avait imaginé les femmes très différentes de ma personne, et, parce que mon corps lui déplut dés la nuit de noces en ce 10 avril, il ne fit jamais de moi sa femme », écrivit Euphemia Gray à son père.

John Everett Millais, L’ordre de libération, 1746, 1852 – 1853

Huile sur toile, 102,9 x 73,7, Tate Britain, Londres

La période victorienne recèle d’anecdotes croustillantes qui mettent en scène des femmes et leur soif de liberté. Malgré les essais d’universitaires sur les soins féminins qui récusent l’utilisation de crèmes et produits dépilatoires, force est de constater que la stricte éducation des aristocrates et bourgeoises était bel et bien influencée par les canons esthétiques de l’époque. Le combat d’Effie Gray pour l’obtention de son divorce du critique John Ruskin est à ce titre emblématique. S’il est attesté que le mariage ne fut jamais consommé, plusieurs sources spéculent sur la raison profonde de l’amateur d’art : lors de la nuit de noce, la découverte des poils pubiens de son épouse l’aurait vivement écoeuré. La série Desperate Romantics nous présente une scène au cours de laquelle Effie, bouleversée, surprend son mari à observer avec fascination les dessins érotiques de Turner. Après leurs cinq ans de mariage, le véritable motif de Ruskin est demeuré un mystère mais il n’a cessé de répandre cette vision contemporaine des victoriens chastes prônant la vertu féminine. Nommé en effet exécuteur testamentaire à la mort de Turner, il rassembla le legs du génie romantique : environ 400 aquarelles figuraient ainsi dans la collection Ruskin. Reste à savoir si le critique a véritablement été à l’origine de la destruction des dessins érotiques du Maître[1].

Joseph Mallord William Turner, Etude de figures érotiques, vers 1805

Aquarelle et crayon graphite sur papier, 27,4 x 37,5 cm

Tate Britain, Londres

Ruskin présenta sa femme à Millais qui accompagna le couple lors de son voyage en Ecosse de 1853. C’est à partir de ce moment que Millais réalisa esquisses et dessins d’Effie. Les séances de pose pour Millais constituèrent un prélude à la liaison entre l’artiste et son modèle, toujours mariée à Ruskin. Paradoxalement, elle incarna la femme fidèle d’un rebelle écossais qui avait été remis en liberté après son séjour en prison dans L’Ordre de libération. Heureusement, Effie parvint à remporter l’annulation du mariage. Elle continua à poser pour Millais qu’elle épousa ensuite. Elle eut 8 enfants avec lui.

John Singer Sargent, Madame X, 1884

Huile sur toile, 208,6 x 109,9 cm

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Un changement d’attitude envers les femmes s’opère vers la fin des années 1880, après la mort du Prince Albert. Les britanniques se mettent alors à imiter les françaises de la Belle Epoque. La liberté relative des cocottes captive ces londoniennes à la mode qu’on désignera sous le nom de "professional beauties". Le pastelliste Frank Miles (1852 – 1891) réalisait des portraits de ces femmes de qualité, arbitres du style et de la mode. Parmi les noms les plus illustres sont : Mary Cornwallis-West[2], Virgine Amélie Gautreau[3] et Lillie Langtry[4]. Pour la première fois, on identifiait ces personnalités dont on pouvait apercevoir les effigies sur les vitrines des magasins de Fleet Street. L’ancêtre de la pin-up[5] était né.

Sur le plan artistique, les échanges entre la Grande-Bretagne et le continent ne sont pas en reste, quoique décriés par les français. Monet et Pissarro se réfugient à Londres pendant la guerre franco-prussienne de 1870. Il en résultera des vues de Big Ben et du Parlement, des séries avec les ponts (Charing Cross, Waterloo…) pour sujet. Séduits par les paysages de Constable et Turner, les français s’enthousiasment pour les reflets miroitants de la Tamise, les gares et la banlieue de Londres. Si la vue du Havre d’Impression, soleil levant marque le coup d’envoi de la première exposition impressionniste, en réalité, c’était à Londres que le courant avait vu le jour.

Claude Monet, La Tamise à Westminster, vers 1871

Huile sur toile, 47 x 73 cm, National Gallery, Londres

La même année, Frederick Leighton accueille Daubigny dans son atelier. Si les peintres français peinent à se faire connaître en Grande-Bretagne, les anglais en revanche ne négligent pas l’influence des maîtres du continent : beaucoup viennent à Paris pour s’en inspirer. Alma-Tadema partage avec Gérôme le goût pour les sources antiques, Leighton s’inspire de Bouguereau et Ingres, l’olympien Edward Poynter (1836 – 1919) étudie sous l’égide du néoclassique Charles Gleyre. Dans son atelier, il rencontre Whistler.

En 1895, Robert de la Sizeranne compare, non sans fierté : « nous avons une notion plus claire de l’école de Phidias ou de l’art des Pharaons que la peinture anglaise – qui est à deux heures de la France et qui est vivante ». En effet, la révolution picturale qui bouleverse la Grande-Bretagne ne trouve que peu d’échos sur le continent. Mais la réciproque est aussi vraie : il faudra atteindre la fin des années 1880 pour que l’impressionnisme pénètre Londres et ses alentours. Ces deux nations modernes jouissent d’une avant-garde esthétique aux motivations diamétralement opposées. Si peintres et aquarellistes partagent le refus des normes académiques, la modernité française est synonyme de bouleversements tant bien sur le plan thématique que technique. A l’inverse, les préraphaélites et décadents anglais désirent rompre avec les enseignements de la Royal Academy (qui promeut un art jugé obsolète et frivole) en recherchant les sources d’influence dans un passé lointain et fantasmé.

Edward Poynter, La Grotte aux nymphes de la tempête, 1902

Huile sur toile, 145,9 x 110,4 cm
Norfolk Hermitage Museum, Virginie

C’est ce qu’Ernest Chesneau tente de résumer en publiant en 1882 une étude française inédite sur l’histoire de l’art britannique, tout en récusant l’absence d’innovation matérielle. Grossière erreur : les préraphaélites, également adeptes de l ‘exercice en plein air, enduisaient au préalable leur toiles d’un vernis blanc, laissé humide pour appliquer la peinture au pinceau très fin et rendre les couleurs plus brillantes.

Grâce aux féministes et autres spécialistes qui se passionnent pour l’art anglais et la représentation des femmes depuis les années 1970, nous redécouvrons petit à petit des œuvres acclamées de leurs temps, puis oubliées, parfois considérées comme perdues ou détruites car accusées de mauvais goût. Peu de périodes ont autant souffert des exigences du public et de la pression du marché : ainsi, l’on voit parfois réapparaître ces tableaux qui ont finalement peu changé de propriétaires. Le producteur de télévision américain Allen Funt fait ainsi figure de pionnier en la matière en amassant une importante collection d’Alma-Tadema. En Grande-Bretagne, c’est le compositeur de comédies musicales Andrew Lloyd Weber qui depuis sa jeunesse a préservé des chefs d’œuvre d’artistes méconnus. Enfin, l’un des plus grand collectionneurs du monde, le mexicain Juan Antonio Perez Simon, possède un nombre significatif de peintures victoriennes qu’il a prêté pour l’exposition itinérante A Victorian Obsession, remaniée en France sous le nom de Désirs & Volupté.

Plus récemment, les marchands d’art et musées ont bénéficié de la crise économique pour acheter tableaux, dessins et esquisses. Plusieurs galeries spécialisées dans la peinture victorienne ont vu le jour dans le quartier de Mayfair, à Londres, mais aussi aux Etats-Unis et au Canada. Il reste encore beaucoup à faire. Même les plus récentes expositions sur le sujet n’adoptent pas véritablement de position transgressive mais plutôt une technique commerciale attractive afin de susciter l’intérêt du public français pour une production visuelle qui commence tout juste à être appréciée Outre-Manche.

Elizabeth Adela Stanhope Forbes, Femme nue à genoux

Crayon et sanguine, 19 x 27,6 cm

Nous attendons en effet de nouvelles recherches et accrochages qui ébranleraient la sensibilité de certains spectateurs pour que ceux-ci s’aperçoivent que le nu par exemple, accepté dans la peinture académique ou figurant dans le sujet d’inspiration féérique, n’a pas sa place dans la scène de genre, tout en se rendant compte des avancées de la période victorienne en matière de considérations sur la sexualité. Les attitudes de conservateurs et universitaires ont bien changé depuis l’époque où on croyait les victoriens prudes à l’extrême. La réalité est plus complexe. L’ostentation de la chair féminine obsédait littéralement les contemporains. Parce que les français raillaient les artistes britanniques, incapables, selon eux, de réaliser des tableaux inspirés de la tradition classique, les victoriens ont su faire accéder un nouveau type de langage pictural au rang d’art officiel. En 1862, l’Art Journal définit la touche anglaise en termes d’élégance, de sobriété et d’empathie avec le sujet représenté. Il serait temps que la France accepte cette vision d’un art qui, de son temps, a su se distinguer par son respect des convenances, mais aussi par son aspect subversif…

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[1] Toute une polémique s’est développée autour de l’éventuelle destruction de ces esquisses. Selon les biographies de Ruskin et Turner publiées au début des années 2000, le collectionneur les aurait brûlés en 1858 pour ne pas ternir la réputation de l’artiste. L’évaluation de certains de ces dessins en 2005 par le conservateur de la Tate et spécialiste de Turner Ian Warrell aurait permis d’affirmer le contraire. Pour aller plus loin, voir l’article du Guardian sur http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2004/dec/31/arts.artsnews

[2] Mary Cornwallis-West (1858 – 1920) ou « Patsy » était l’une des maîtresses d’Edouard le fils de Victoria et Prince de Galles. Mary fut célèbre pour avoir usé de son influence sur son amant pour arranger les mariages de ses enfants issus de son union légitime avec des membres de l’aristocratie anglaise. En 1915, elle se lia avec un soldat estropié de plusieurs années son cadet. Un scandale éclata lorsqu’elle tenta d’obtenir la promotion ce dernier.

[3] Madame Pierre Gontreau (1859 – 1915) posa pour le fameux Madame X de Sargent qui indigna la critique au Salon parisien de 1884 (voir notre article sur le portrait pour plus d’informations à ce sujet). Originaire de la Nouvelle Orléans, Virginie s’installa à Paris dès l’âge de huit ans. Pour l’entretient de ses cheveux et renforcer son teint pâle, elle employait du henné et de la poudre à base d’huile de lavande.

[4] Lilly Langtry (1853 – 1929), surnommée « Jersey Lilly » en raison de ses origines anglo-normandes était une actrice réputée pour sa beauté et ses amants célèbres.

[5] La pin-up est une femme figurant sur des photographies ou illustrations bon marché qu’on accrochait sur les murs. Les modèles adoptaient une pose aguicheuse, symboles d’érotisme régulièrement remis au goût du jour.

The visual persistence of Tennyson's "Lady of Shalott"

After the publication of the Moxon edition of Tennyson’s poems in 1857, art critic John Ruskin wrote a letter to the author, who had complained about unfaithful Pre-Raphaelite illustrations of his ballad ‘The Lady of Shalott’. John Ruskin pointed out that: ‘Many of the plates are very noble things, though not (…) illustrations of your poems. I believe, in fact, that good pictures never can be; they are always another poem, subordinate but wholly different from the poet’s conception, and serve chiefly to show the reader how variously the same verses may affect various minds’.

‘The Lady of Shalott’ tells the story of a lady locked up in a tower on an island, secluded from Camelot. She is cursed to weave on a tapestry reflections she sees from the outside in a mirror. The Lady is forbidden to look at the exterior, otherwise she is to die. One day, she sees Sir Lancelot’s reflection, falls in love with him so cannot help but look across the window. Knowing she is doomed, the Lady gets on a barge and floats down towards Camelot, singing her last song. When she arrives, dead, Lancelot barely notices her, only commenting on her beauty.

Lord Alfred Tennyson’s poems were extremely popular during the Victorian era: after Wordsworth’s death in 1850, he was appointed Poet Laureate by the Queen until 1892. During his life and after his death, Tennyson’s ballads - especially ‘The Lady of Shalott’ and ‘Elaine’ - were over-represented at the summer exhibitions of the Royal Academy. John William Waterhouse (1849 – 1917) produced three versions of ‘The Lady of Shalott’, depicting different moments in the poem. As opposed to Pre-Raphaelite painters illustrating the Moxon edition, little is known about Waterhouse’s biography and personality; studies about his work are relatively scarce. How one can explain that this painting is so iconic and that ‘The Lady of Shalott’ became a recurrent subject-matter in nineteenth century British art?

John William Waterhouse, The Lady of Shalott, 1888
Oil on canvas, 153 x 200 cm
Tate Britain

The visual impact of Tennyson’s ballad partly accounts for the growing interest in representing The Lady of Shalott on canvas. The poetic and chronological structure functions in terms of tableaux: the ballad is divided in four parts, each recording another step in the course of the storyline, like paragraphs in prose. Part I describes the setting. Part II is about the Lady and her curse, while the third part registers the breaking of the spell. In the last part, the main protagonist puts an end to her life. The various sections reach a climax before ending up on the chorus ‘The Lady of Shalott’: ‘She knows not what the ‘curse’ may be/ And so she weaveth steadily/ And little other care hath she/ The Lady of Shalott’.

The boat scene follows the climax of the plot, when the Lady breaks her spell: ‘And down the river’s dim expanse (…) Did she look to Camelot. And at the closing of the day/ She loosed the chain and down she lay’. Besides, setting the scene just before nightfall suggests that it is the twilight of the Lady’s life. It also provides readers with a partial glimpse of the Lady’s appearance, while she is never characterised in physical terms otherwise, there she adopts a ‘glassy countenance’, and her dress is described as ‘snowy white’. On the whole, the scene functions in terms of contrasts, between interior/ exterior, contemplation/ action, her austere existence/ the tapestry’s colourful designs. This thematical complexity embodied a challenge for visual artists who had to juxtapose these elements in a single image.Each stanza is built the same way. It contains nine lines with an aaaabcccb rhyme scheme. The simplicity of the rhymes evokes an ancient tale, a device reinforced by the use of linguistic archaisms. The anaphoric final line of each stanza provokes an impression of falling rhythm; the alternation between stressed and unstressed syllables enhances the story’s musical quality. Rather than being strictly narrative, each stanza might be regarded as a static panel. In the first part, the setting conveys a pastoral, idyllic atmosphere. The poet displays intensity of detail, using the lexical field of nature, bringing out plants, trees and flowers. Tennyson highlights this visual dimension by resorting to metaphors and figures of speech: the polyptotom ‘reapers, reaping’ conjures up the cyclical status of nature, reproduced onto the tapestry (‘there she weaves by night and day’). The integration of a visual form of art in the poem provided artists with rich material to depict key instants from the story.

Tennyson’s ballad became increasingly popular after its publication. He was careful to tune his works to the sensibilities of his audience. Even though Tennyson’s poetry meant to be didactic, the absence of a clear message left the boat scene open to interpretation. It problematised the relationship between fiction and reality in parabolic terms: earlier on, the narrator implies that the Lady is satisfied with her situation, that she does not want to face reality because it is equated with pain and death; some images of her tapestry portray burials for she has seen funeral processions passing by the window. The moment when the Lady goes out of the tower represents her first contact with the outside, whereas she used to be compelled to gaze at reflections of the exterior. She accepts to experience love and death, and so to live as a mortal being. In a way, Tennyson reconfigured Plato’s myth of the cave for a Victorian audience. The combination of naturalistic details and supernatural elements increases the story’s imaginative potential; it enabled artists to create ambiguity between realistic handling of the subject and some sense of fantasy. Mystery comes from the unknown nature of the curse. Besides, the unnamed Lady seems endowed with magical powers, she is thought to be ‘a fairy’. 

John William Waterhouse, The Lady of Shalott
1894, oil on canvas, 142 x 86 cm
Leeds City Art Gallery 

Tennyson’s fame in the 1850s coincided with the development of literary illustration. New techniques for reproducing paintings, like wood engraving, were made cheaper and more accessible. These were made as mass-produced commercial items, while fine art in oils appealed predominantly to connoisseurs or wealthy collectors. Middle-class patrons were supposed to decipher literary references, even though quotations were not attached to artworks. Artists – especially Royal Academicians such as Waterhouse – deliberately required their well-educated viewers to recognise the initial source, to satisfy their learning. But instead of producing a piece for a specific individual, even fine artists were painting for an anonymous audience. Their pictures could be seen in a review, printed on a journal, through an engraving, or in a public exhibition. The importance of the original diminished since reproduction was progressively more lucrative than the price obtained for the initial painting. The recuperation of ‘The Lady of Shalott’ by popular culture was vividly criticised by Tennyson: ‘Why am I popular?’ he wrote to his friend William Allingham, ‘I don’t write very vulgarly’.

Tennyson’s reluctance to be identified with the masses – despite the fact his publications in gift books or periodicals boosted his income – revealed his concerns about the material form his poetry took. Artists’ responses to the poem could be highly personal, as shown in Hunt’s oil version of his Moxon illustration. The poet had chastised this depiction of the Lady, whose hair flowing upwards made her appear as a wild, sensuous woman. Tennyson disliked illustration as a genre, not just because it connected his poetry to the marketplace, but also because representations were increasingly independent from the initial source. Paintings of the ballad were indeed physically detached from the verse, unlike illustrations.

The boat scene started to be popular in the late nineteenth century only. Waterhouse’s use of large format and pyramidal composition strike the viewer’s attention. Unlike any representation of the boat scene, the lady is sitting. The image works like a text, from the left, to the right: the stern’s curve is joined to the stairs leading to the tower, where the Lady had formerly been imprisoned, and the tapestry’s colourful designs recall the Lady’s past life. Waterhouse took up elements of previous drawings absent from the text: the lantern and the three candles on the prow – two of them being already out – suggesting her imminent doom. The obscure handling of the background provokes an impression of depth; it also indicates the Lady’s journey to the world of the dead.The topic attracted Pre-Raphaelite artists on account of its spiritual nobility, nostalgic atmosphere, and the theme of unrequited love. They preferred the inexplicit ballad to Tennyson’s Idylls of the King: its interpretation was not straightforward. William Holman Hunt (1827 – 1910), Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828 – 1882) and John Everett Millais (1829 – 1896) had already represented young women on the verge of dying. It is then not surprising that many artists decided to depict the apex of the plot, summarized in the anaphora: ‘she left the web/ she left the loom/ she made three paces through the room’. These lines were the most well-known of the poem, and what readers remembered from it, because it enclosed the dramatic intensity of the story. 

William Holman Hunt, The Lady of Shalott
1886-1905, oil on canvas, 143,7 x 186 cm
Wadsworth Athaneum

For Hunt, concerned about the morality of his pictures, the breaking of the spell symbolised a moment of revelation. His awareness of painting’s temporal restrictions is displayed through the combination of two instants: the picture shows the Lady looking at Lancelot and the web flowing. Waterhouse’s depiction of the spell breaking is remarkable for the lady’s intense gaze, directed at the viewer. He painted the ‘I’m half-sick of shadows’ scene too, just before the Lady sees Lancelot. It allowed him to represent a woman at a window, a theme popularised by the Pre-Raphaelites, whose erotic appeal was suggested through the pose, releasing her muscles from hours of weaving.

Stylistically, Waterhouse’s Lady of Shalott was at the crossroads of various traditions. Waterhouse reconfigured history painting by adapting it to the Victorians’ passion for subject-matter. Victorian audiences were extremely demanding about the authenticity of the model’s action, its role in the painting. In The Lady of Shalott, the emphasis is on the model’s individuality, pose and expression. The realism of the scene is rendered through naturalistic treatment of detail and diverse textures: her eyes are swollen because of crying, her finely delineated features contrast with the softer treatment of her hair. Waterhouse does not idealise his model; she is not particularly beautiful. Art critic F.G. Stephens disliked the woman’s ‘commonplace’ look, a term that often used for Pre-Raphaelite models.

Though initially against the Royal Academy, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had progressively been institutionalised as a national school. The choice of literary sources (Shakespeare, Arthurian legends, Tennyson), British models and locations enabled the Brotherhood’s works to belong to cultural heritage. Their choice of subject-matter was constantly re-defined by late Victorian artists who freed themselves from the Brotherhood’s formal doctrines. Waterhouse’s emotionally charged themes, dense compositions and rich colour palette explain why he was said to belong to a third Pre-Raphaelite generation.

The Lady of Shalott embodied a turning point in Waterhouse’s career. Of all his recurrent themes, the Lady of Shalott, along with Ophelia and Miranda, were the British heroines he represented at least twice. It precluded Waterhouse’s shift to English literature and medieval romance. Since then, Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Frederic Leighton’s influence had led him to interpret scenes derived from Ancient history or Greco-Latin mythology. Waterhouse’s other medieval subjects were inspired by the works of Romantic poets, such as Tennyson (Saint Cecilia), Keats (La Belle Dame sans Merci), all of them focussing on the tragic destiny of female characters. The Victorians perceived Arthurian legends as a powerful model of  nationalism. Queen Victoria herself declared medievalism of public importance, she revitalised the Camelot court as a promise of order and civilisation. It provided Britons with a certain code of behaviour; its element of escapism symbolised an alternate set of values against the rise of materialism and secularisation. It stood for a meaningful, spiritual standard of stability. John Atkinson Grimshaw (1836 – 1893) on the other hand, reinforced the morbid aspect of the narrative by setting the scene at twilight, a device  making the ominous shape of the boat stand out against the reddish blood background.

John Atkinson Grimshaw, The Lady of Shalott, 1878
Oil on canvas, private collection

Even if Waterhouse’s lady appeared more physically mature, all characters embodied the medieval ideal of the fair maiden. Symbolically, her white dress alluded to purity. She was represented as a martyr in swoon that Tennyson called ‘the highest type of woman’, whose ‘loss’ was to be regretted. ‘The Lady of Shalott’ typified a transposition of the chivalric ideal of courtly love favoured by the Victorians, with the difference that the male role was less significant, despite his responsibility in the Lady’s death. Tennyson re-adapted the theme of courtly love by emphasising the Lady’s loneliness, her passion seeming platonic and secret, devoid of physicality. Paradoxically, the boat scene on canvas looks sensual and transcendent, reversing the traditional pattern of the knight’s devotion to his Lady: she abandons herself entirely to love.

In many respects, Waterhouse’s Lady of Shalott is a typical British subject-matter. The model may look ordinary, but the artist was careful to depict an English beauty. During the Victorian era, scientists and ethnologists investigated about Celtic physical traits. It was believed that pale skin, auburn or Venetian blonde hair were their characteristic features; scientists actually debated whether the Arthurians were red-head Celts or very fair Anglo-Saxons. The Lady’s features can be perceived as a combination of the Celtic and the Anglo-Saxon looks. Waterhouse reinforced Celtic authenticity through the Lady’s dress and accessories (girdle, necklace, tiara), appealing to the Victorian taste for costume drama. By elaborating on the original source, Waterhouse reinterpreted the poem’s feeling of medievalism, while Tennyson’s medieval imagery was only conveyed through the location of the island and language. 

Many art critics praised Waterhouse’s painting for its poetic aspect, because of its ability to convey a certain atmosphere. Waterhouse selected the moment within the incident to hold the viewer in contemplation. Though less dramatic than Hunt’s or Waterhouse’s 1894 version, the 1888 picture froze a moment of transition: from the inside of the tower to the outside world, from love’s desperation to death. Rather than being strictly narrative, The Lady of Shalott was supposed to express a mood of melancholy through graceful forms, tonal harmony and evocative autumnal hues.

Waterhouse sought to address in The Lady of Shalott contemporary debates about the role of the artist in society and questions about women’s condition. The ballad interrogated the relationship between the artist – a weaver – and reality, the artist’s contact with the outside materialising in destruction. If Tennyson implied that the true artist should keep away from the outside, Waterhouse’s painting re-adapted the issue of problematic creativity. Tennyson described the setting as an idyllic utopia, whereas Waterhouse’s landscape is a reflection of the Lady’s inner state of mind, hence its gloomy aspect.With the addition of meaningful symbols – lantern, tapestry, candles, crucifix – the Lady became the artistic agent of her death: in Waterhouse’s painting she fashions her funeral as a work of art. The 1888 version showed the main protagonist as a beautiful figure to be looked at, but the Lady faces the spectator’s gaze too. Waterhouse exposed the metamorphosis of the Lady from artist to woman by enhancing her physicality. The draperies reveal the Lady’s breast and belly, alluding to sensuality and potential fertility, whereas Tennyson’s Lady is presented as an unattainable, pure character. 

John William Waterhouse, I Am Half-Sick of Shadows
1915, oil on canvas, 100 x 74 cm
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto 

In the Victorian era, the most popular form of modern moral subjects was the representation of the fallen woman, who fell from grace by losing her innocence. The expression came to be closely associated with the loss of a woman’s virginity. The fallen woman often featured as a red-head because of her biblical association with prostitute Mary Magdalene. The subject combined conflicting notions of femininity, such as innocence/ experience, virgin/ whore, redemption/ responsibility, at a time when the “woman’s question” was raised in social terms. The Victorians regarded the domestic, married woman as the epitome of respectability whose role was to preserve the purity of the home, whereas the prostitute or the adulteress was conceived in terms of deviance.

The Lady’s face in fact displays a strange combination of the childlike and the erotic, between sexual awakening and religious revelation. Desire is fashioned both as liberation and destruction. Waterhouse reconfigured the traditional Renaissance association between sensual ecstasy and spiritual rapture to infuse it with some decadent sensibility. The Lady’s pose in Waterhouse’s painting expresses both abandon and terror. The scene stands for a transition from one state – innocence – to another – sexual knowledge – a theme Waterhouse readapted countless times in his later paintings. The Lady of Shalott blends the fair maiden ideal with the prototype of the femme fatale. This picture discloses Symbolist touches through its decadent figure embodying the fears and desires of the male gaze. The topic attracted late nineteenth century artists because of the sensuality aroused by the Lady’s recumbent yet beautiful body.     Moreover, the association between woman and water increases the picture’s sense of mystery. The drowning woman motif evoked the mythological tradition of the dead driven to the Underworld by boatswain Charon. The Lady of Shalott provided Waterhouse with a decadent theme that delineated the parallel between the aquatic element and female curves.

Sophie Anderson, The Lily Maid of Astolat, 1870
Oil on canvas, 158,4 x 240,7 cm
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

The fact that the Lady was perceived as weak and delicate can entice us to regard the scene as the locus of male dominance, symbolising desires for feminine passivity. In that sense, the Lady serves as a fetishistic commodity. The fulfilment of the Lady’s destiny can only be accomplished in death since she is guilty of sexual awakening. Her desire cannot be but auto-destructive. The Lady’s madness becomes the agent of her redemption through transcendence. Her death accounts for her heroic qualities. It is worth mentioning that these paintings were directed at a predominantly male audience. Still, the Lady might also be viewed as the independent ‘New Woman’ controlling her destiny, looking almost ominous. She is active in the weaving of her own story which outcome is self-sacrifice. The Victorians recognised the Lady as making choices like a man would, refusing to act passively.

The preservation of The Lady of Shalott as a powerful image is made possible thanks to the timelessness of the setting and story. Its pictorial force comes from this ability to reconcile high culture and popular subcultures, by appealing to well-learned viewers who enjoy Tennyson’s ballad and spectators who do not need to know the poem to appreciate the picture. Even though she is fully clothed, the Lady might have encouraged fantasy in the Victorian subconscious without forcing the viewer to stare at a completely nude figure: for the Victorians, who saw little flesh in daily life, the suggestion of the Lady’s curves through her draperies was highly erotic. Nowadays, the picture’s fame might be explained by its contrast with explicit erotica available on demand. The Lady of Shalott displays a fantasy of romance rather than banal sexuality. The Lady’s radical dissociation from any social context and her incarceration in a tower for reasons unknown enticed artists and viewers to draw diverse interpretations from it. The ambiguous conception of femininity, its paradox between the Lady’s self-fulfilment and submissive attitudes account for its charms. Eventually, Waterhouse’s choice of subject-matter overcame the literary knowledge of the average viewer, its force lying in its dramatic simplicity and appealing mood.

Bibliography

Cheshire, Jim, ed. Tennyson Transformed: Alfred Lord Tennyson and Visual Culture, exhibition catalogue. Farnham: Lund Humphries, 2009

Dijkstra, Bram. Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986

Hobson, Anthony. J.W. Waterhouse. London: Phaidon Press, 1989

Landlow, George P. Ladies of Shalott, a Victorian Masterpiece and its Contexts, exhibition catalogue. Providence, Rhode Island: Library of Congress, Brown University, 1985

Laurent, Béatrice. Sleeping Beauties in Victorian Britain: Cultural, Literary and Artistic Explorations of a Myth. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2015

Pollock, Griselda. Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity, and the Histories of Art. London and New York: Routledge, 2003

Poulson, Christine. The Quest for the Grail: Arthurian Legend in British Art (1840 -1920). Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1999

Psomiades, Kathy Alexis. Beauty’s Body: Femininity and Representation in British Aestheticism. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1997

Ruskin, John. Works of John Ruskin, vol.36. Eds. E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, London: G. Allen, 1909

Sinfield, Alan. Alfred Tennyson. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986

Tennyson, Alfred. Idylls of the King. London: Penguin Classics, 1989

---. The Charge of the Light Brigade and Other Poems. Ed. Stanley Appelbaum Mineola, New York: Dover Thrift Editions, 1992

Trippi, Peter. J.W. Waterhouse. London: Phaidon Press, 2005

---. J.W. Waterhouse (1849 – 1917), The Modern Pre-Raphaelite, exhibition catalogue. London: Royal Academy Publications, 2009

Reclaiming female agency with Elizabeth Prettejohn

From Harvard University, American art historian Elizabeth Prettejohn is one of the major researchers on painting of the Victorian era. She exclusively confided in the latest developments about the core of the matter.

Les Carnets de Viviane: How did you get interested in the art of the Victorian era?

Elizabeth Prettejohn: I did my first degree at Harvard University and at that point I was most interested in nineteenth-century American art. When I came to London to do the Master’s degree at the Courtauld Institute of Art, I thought that I would be in England only for a short period and that I should therefore take advantage of the opportunity to study British art. That was in 1985 and I have never gone back to America – and am still studying Victorian art! I suppose, therefore, that you could say that my interest had an element of chance or serendipity about it. However, I was also fascinated by a problem that I encountered, and didn’t understand: British Victorian art had a very low reputation at the Courtauld, the principal British institution for the study of the history of art. It had an even lower reputation in the States; I had scarcely encountered it at all in my undergraduate course at Harvard, even though the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard had an excellent collection of Victorian artworks. I wanted to understand why this thriving period of art production had such a low academic and scholarly status; that motivated me to embark on studying it. Since I still don’t understand why that is so – I am still studying Victorian art.

Albert Moore, Juin flamboyant, 1885
Huile sur toile, 47 x 47 cm
Musée d'Art de Ponce, Porto Rico

LCdVV: When and how did you feel the representation of women was a key issue for specialists who research the period?

E.P.: From the first moment I began to study the period, it was obvious that the representation of women was an important endeavour for Victorian artists and the Victorian artworld. In my early work I was most interested in the artists of the Aesthetic Movement (Leighton, Rossetti, Whistler, Burne-Jones, Moore, Solomon, Watts); later I became interested in the Pre-Raphaelite circle – for all of these artists, the representation of the female figure was a crucial intellectual and aesthetic issue. However, the scholarship on that issue was generally weak and unenterprising; much of it was very biographical or anecdotal in character and focussed on the lives and loves of the women in Pre-Raphaelite or Aesthetic circles.

LCdVV: How would you place your work in relation to feminist and gender studies, notably those by Jan Marsh and Griselda Pollock? Do you think it is appropriate to dedicate studies only to female artists and models?

E.P.: I particularly admire the work of Deborah Cherry and Griselda Pollock, whose groundbreaking article of 1984 on Elizabeth Siddall really changed the field. Since then, other scholars have done extremely valuable work in bringing to attention a wider range of women artists; a particularly important example was the exhibition Pre-Raphaelite Women Artists, curated by Jan Marsh and Pamela Gerrish Nunn in 1998. However, the research done so far merely scratches the surface. Not only are there – quite literally – hundreds of Victorian women artists who remain unexplored in the scholarly literature; the existing studies even of the most famous of them (Siddall, Evelyn De Morgan, Joanna Boyce Wells, Marie Spartali Stillman) are very limited and tend to concentrate on the most basic issues about women’s position in the Victorian world. I feel strongly that scholars both of women artists (and models) and of Victorian art in general (including male artists) need much more sophisticated analytical methods for evaluating the aesthetic characteristics of works of art if we are to break new ground in writing the history of Victorian art. That history should include both male and female artists and models. Indeed, the male model is an area of great interest on which there has been astonishingly little research.

LCdVV: The relationship between some painters and their female models is quite problematic. How would you characterise it? Idealist? Misogynistic? Realistic? Stereotypical?

E.P: I consider women models to be equivalent in importance to artists as collaborators in the creation of works of art. Relationships between any two people can be problematic; I am not sure that relationships between painters and models have a special status in this respect. Certainly it would be impossible to generalise by using the terms you are suggesting. Indeed, it is a stereotype to describe the relationship between Victorian artists and their models as ‘misogynistic’ (for example). Take these different cases: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Jane Morris; Julia Margaret Cameron and Alfred Tennyson; John Singer Sargent and Ellen Terry; Ford Madox Brown and Emma Hill; John Everett Millais and John Ruskin; Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Laura Epps Alma-Tadema. Any of those relationships may have been problematic; all of them were also inspirational and productive.

LCdVV: Can you tell us more about the role of women in the production and reception of Victorian art? Suzanne Fagence Cooper, for instance, asserts it was definitely ‘not passive’.

I agree with Suzanne. I believe that female models were co-creators of the works of art in which they appeared, and thoroughly active agents in the production of such works. Women were also important actors in the art world as critics (Elizabeth Eastlake, Anna Jameson, Emilia Dilke, Alice Meynell, and many others), as art theorists (George Eliot, Vernon Lee), as patrons (too many to list), and no doubt in a variety of other roles.

LCdVV: Please mention some fundamental names of female artists, models and patrons.

E.P: I have mentioned several of the more familiar names already. There are many more whose work as artists, models, and patrons deserves attention but who have been lost from view. Among my favourite artists of the period are Laura Epps Alma-Tadema, Sophie Anderson, Kate Bunce, Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale, Christiana Herringham, Mabel Nicholson, Annie Swynnerton, Marianne Stokes, Phoebe Traquair, Ethel Walker, Henrietta Ward. I suspect that, had she lived beyond the age of 30, Joanna Boyce Wells would have been among the great artists of the nineteenth century (that is, among all artists, male or female).

LCdVV: Were there any recent groundbreaking exhibitions on the topic?

E.P: I have referred above to the exhibition of 1998, Pre-Raphaelite Women Artists, and it is disappointing that there have been no equivalently revelatory exhibitions in this area in the seventeen years since then. There have been some smaller ventures – for example, the interesting show on Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale in Liverpool (2012, curated by Pamela Gerrish Nunn), the exhibition on Evelyn De Morgan at Blackwell, the Arts and Crafts house in the Lake District, this summer (2015), and the online exhibition curated by my colleague Katie Tyreman Herrington, Three Graces: Victorian Women, Visual Art, and Exchange (on Aglaia Coronio, Maria Zambaco, and Marie Spartali Stillman. It would be good to see a more ambitious exhibition.

LCdVV: Do you think there is still research to do? How could scholars improve the situation?

E.P: Yes, emphatically: everything is still to be done. Although I have been critical of the work of the first generation of feminist scholars, for writings that could sometimes lack nuance and sophistication, they had two virtues: they worked hard and believed wholeheartedly in their cause. The scholars of today would do well to follow their example in these two crucial respects.

Rossetti and the religion of female beauty

Venus Verticordia (detail) 1868
Oil on canvas
Russell-Cotes Arts Gallery Museum
Bournemouth, UK

‘Most people admire (Rossetti’s paintings) very much (…) –but (they are) still more remarkable for gross sensuality of a revolting kind’[1] wrote William Holman Hunt (1827-1910), commenting on Rossetti’s change of style during the 1860s. This statement seems all the more surprising since Hunt is known as the former ‘Brother’ of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), who was also part of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Nevertheless, Hunt’s criticism emphasises the peculiarity of Rossetti’s art and his overt eroticism. Rossetti’s late style is characterized by an obsession for portraits of female figures. Rossetti’s female representations celebrate two particular artistic types, from the ‘fair maidens’ to the ‘femmes fatales’.

The ‘fair maiden’ refers to the medieval ideal of courteous love, the maiden being a faithful lady endowed with magical powers. The knight must revere her and accomplish heroic deeds in order to become her sweetheart. In visual arts and in medieval poetry, ‘fair’ may allude to light complexion and hair.

A femme fatale, on the other hand, is an alluring, seductive woman ensnaring her lover thanks to the irresistible desire she is able to convey. She uses her physical attributes to entrap him. The great amount of fascination she exerted on 19^th century artists made her a stock character in literature and art. Accordingly, Rossetti painted different ranges of fair maidens and femmes fatales by depicting well-known heroines, his favourites being Beatrice, Queen Guenevere and Greco-Roman goddesses. Still, he also drew his inspiration from contemporary life and his models, who were either his friends or lovers. We shall then try to identify if there is a specific Rossettian style as related to femininity, by stressing how the artist combines these types of ideal, sometimes within the same painting. 

Raphael, Madonna and Child, 1505
Oil on wood, 44 x 59,5 cm,
National Gallery of Art, Washington

The Victorian ideal of beauty relied on two dimensions: artistic and social norms. Artistic canons derived from what students from the Royal Academy of London were taught: the imitation of High Renaissance Old Masters. This type of emulation was particularly favoured by Sir Joshua Reynols (1723-1792), founder of the Royal Academy of the Arts. R.A. students learned to paint according to the laws of perspective, from the essays by Alberti and Italian theoricians, to balance their hierarchised compositions with chiaroscuro and elegance of line. This had an impact on their models’ depiction: they seemed idealised, despite the ‘reality’ of the sitters. Raphael’s Mother and Child, for instance, was the epitome of the masterpiece that R.A. students sought to copy: the Virgin has this particular remote gaze one finds in other High Renaissance paintings (see Michelangelo or Da Vinci’s representations of the same biblical character), and the typical inclined pose of the head. Hair is tied up, the shape of the face is perfectly oval, and her features are neatly balanced: the nose stands right in the middle of her face, and the mouth is located exactly half-way between the line of the nose end and the line of the chin.

Richard Regrave, The Governess, 1844
Oil on canvas, 71,1 x 91,5 cm
Victoria and Albert Museum

Rossetti and his fellow members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood criticised this artistic tradition for they thought that the depictions of their contemporaries were stereotyped imitations of those ideals, depriving the models of their authenticity. The Victorian ideals of feminine beauty privileged petite women with tied up, brown hair, and lady-like, submissive attitudes. Such representations could be found in the drawings of popular magazines such as Punch, but it was also immortalised by contemporary genre artists. In The Governess, Richard Redgrave (1804-1888) emphasises the submission of the main character with her lowering gaze. She epitomises the perfect Victorian woman, with her black dress and her delicate looks.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Paolo and Francesca da Rimini, 1855
Watercolour on paper, 25,4 x 59,5 cm
Tate Britain

Rossetti’s women, on the other hand, differ from the Renaissance Madonnas or the Victorian ideal of meekness. They are characterised by flowing hair, large eyes and heavy eyelids, Greek-like noses and full lips. He enhances the fleshy parts of the models like the medieval poets focusing on one particular part of the woman’s body, creating blasons. In Bocca Baciata, the mouth is indeed the main interest of the painting, as is indicated in the title. Almost at the centre of the picture, it attracts the viewer on account of its glowing red colour, contrasting with the paleness of the face. Red hair is another distinctive feature of Rossetti’s style. In this picture, the painter represents Fanny Cornforth (1835-1906) – Rossetti’s housekeeper and mistress - who actually had blond hair.

John Everett Millais, Ophelia (detail)
1852, Tate Britain

It was Elizabeth Siddal (1829-1862), Rossetti’s wife, model and pupil, who made red hair popular in the bohemian artistic circles of the time[1]. From his early drawings of her to the representations of other, fleshier women, Rossetti's style evolved. In the triptych above, Lizzie’s features are delicate and sensuous yet childlike. This childlike aspect also appears in other pictures of the P.R.B, especially in Millais’ painting. Still, the striking red hair motif in Rossetti's early depictions of Lizzie and later representations of other "femmes fatales" with Lizzie’s hair reveal the blurring of the fair maiden ideal and the seductress within certain pictures. In Dante's Dream, Rossetti’s last oil on canvas, the painter had intially intended to depict Beatrice as Elizabeth Siddal. The lady is presented on her deathbed, her reclining attitude showing her in a position of weakness. Later on, when Rossetti decided to complete his painting, he modified Beatrice’s features to make her look more like Jane Morris, his main lover during the 1870s, after his wife had died.

Dante's Dream, 1871
Oil on canvas, 211 x 317
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

In Bocca Baciata, there still is that element of ethereality to be found in early paintings; the common feature of Rossetti’s portraits during the 1860s is the vacant stare of the models, who seem to avoid looking directly at the viewer. This trait pervades the pictures with an impression of melancholy, as if Rossetti created a poetic language that suited to the mood of the sitter: women are represented in a self-contained world, oblivious of any other exterior element. Lizzie’s depictions however possess a morbid dimension. The P.R.B and especially Rossetti re-adapt the traditional depiction of the red-head figure who was usually associated to traitors -such as Judas- and prostitutes - such as Mary Magdalene.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Bocca Baciata, 1859
Oil on panel, 32 x 27 cm
Boston Museum of Fine Arts

Rossetti’s pictures were deemed as provocative, since he endowed the beauty of unconventional heroines with nobleness and seduction. Firstly, he was careful to not to choose professional models so the pictures could look more spontaneous. Lizzie Siddal, Jane Morris, Fanny Cornforth and Alexa Wielding, apart from being acquainted to the artist, were all from lower-class background than his. If Elizabeth Siddal was remarkable thanks to her size, hair and eyes, Jane Morris was described as a quiet person with a ‘dark and pale’ face, and a ‘Ionian Greek’ mien[1].

Rossetti’s women appear as tall and massive on his portraits: the models almost fills the whole picture, leaving little space for the setting. At a time when feminist groups started to gather to claim the same rights as men, Rossetti’s representations of women might have constituted an echo to this ‘New Woman’ type, which embodied a threat to political and social life[1]. In many pictures, Rossetti’s sitters might be regarded as frightening creatures: in Monna Vanna, the cold stare of the protagonist and the glass heart around her neck show her as a merciless figure.

Monna Vanna, 1866
Oil on canvas, 88,9 x 86,4 cm
Tate Britain

The sensuality of the portraits is so conspicuous that it appeared as shocking to contemporary viewers. Rossetti enhanced the erogenous parts of the female body such as the mouth, shoulders, and hands[1].  William Holman Hunt was not the only one to be appalled by Rossetti’s women. In 1871 Scottish writer Robert Buchanan wrote an article about Rossetti, entitled The Fleshly School of Poetry: Mr D.G. Rossetti, condemning the artist for his ‘weary wasting, yet exquisite sensuality; nothing virile, nothing tender, nothing completely sane; a superfluity of extreme sensibility’.

By celebrating the beauty of women that Rossetti actually knew, his portraits subtly mingle reality and fantasy, creating complex ideals and myths around these fascinating figures. Rossetti worked with what he called ‘stunners’, that is, women who caught his attention and were able to fascinate him, seduce and frighten him at the same time. This type of female beauty was described as a ‘union of strange and puissant physical loveliness with depth and remoteness of gaze’[3]. Throughout Pre-Raphaelite literature, the stories of these stunners have been mythified: successively, how he met and drew them, and the complex nature of his relationships to them. This explains how art critics and biographers still are fascinated with Rossetti’s love affairs that he incorporated in his portraits, sometimes, the artist is even described as a saviour figure, rescuing these women from their low-life condition. Besides, let us not forget that, during the Victorian era, modelling was regarded as being a type of work situated only a little above prostitution. Women who embraced this career made quite a bold choice: they could expose themselves to the criticism of friends and contemporaries. This might explain why Rossetti was always careful not to paint his sitters in the nude tradition, except in Ligeia Siren and Venus Verticordia.

Found! 1853
Oil on canvas, 91,4 x 78,7 cm
Delaware Art Museum

Innovating with a highly personal style enabled Rossetti to re-interpret the traditional genres of religious and history painting. He then mixes various genres by combining portraits with literary or modern-life inspirations. For instance, his depictions of the fallen woman can be regarded as representations of the Modern Eve. Such is the case with Found!, displaying Fanny Cornforth in the role of the prostitute. Just as in Rossetti’s poem of the same name, she is recognized by her former lover and shrinks out of shame before him. The pose is unconventional for it is very awkward: her body is twisted from the neck to the knees, and the line of the body contrasts the line of the arms, directed towards the male protagonist. The impression of uneasiness is reinforced by her expression, with her closed eyes and half-open mouth, almost shown in profile.

Fanny Cornforth seemed to be the perfect figure to embody the modern-life prostitute, while Elizabeth Siddal was cast as the medieval queen and Jane Morris as the evil temptress. Alexa Wielding, on the other hand, was often chosen to represent the courtesan or the enigmatic sorceress. As a contrast to Fanny Cornforth, Alexa Wielding, whom Rossetti noticed while walking in the Strand in 1865, was chosen to embody more ethereal figures, on account of her refined face. When Rossetti painted Lady Lillith, Fanny initially sat for the picture, but the artist substituted her features for those of Alexa, since the owner of the painting, Frederick Leyland, considered the original too earthly[1]. 

Proserpine, 1874
Oil on canvas
61 x 125, 1 cm
Tate Britain

As a result, Rossetti cast his friends and lovers as heroines suiting their personalities. The fleshiness and sensuality of the characters, overwhelmed by a dreamy quality, thus pervades Rossetti’s pictures. For the artist, physical and spiritual types of love were intertwined. This dimension is particularly relevant in the depictions of Jane Morris, which become increasingly physical over the 1870s. In Proserpine, the Greek line of the nose, the lips and the shape of the eyes are clearly delineated, yet Jane Morris embodied an unattainable Goddess who is doomed to live in the Underworld. The dark undertones is heightened through the cold hues of the painting, which are present through the mass of brown hair and the blue-green dress. Significantly, Rossetti returned to oils in the 1860s, after painting exclusively in watercolour or gouache during the 1850s. Oils enabled him to insist on the physicality of his models. The body of Jane Morris was so massive that it even appeared as masculine, especially in the representation of her shoulders and neck. Rossetti could thus re-adapt the androgynous canon of Greek statues. 

Elizabeth Siddal, on the other hand, was portrayed as more delicate and ethereal – her first representations are made through drawing and watercolour, two mediums highlighting the dreamlike dimensions of the pictures  - even if Rossetti tried to represent his wife as a noble queen. In the early 1850s, her individuality was already blurred by Rossetti’s fantasy of her as Beatrice, Dante’s lover; while Rossetti fantasised himself as the Italian poet. Lizzie’s portrait as Beatrice after her death in 1862 presents the culmination of this blurring between reality and fantasy. In Beata Beatrix, Rossetti portrays her in the traditional position of religious ecstasy (one can think of Bernini’s Saint Theresa) to immortalise her through his art. The physicality of Lizzie’s body slips away as the central protagonist is painted through a sort of haze that sets the surreal aspect of the scene into relief. Accordingly, Lizzie’s eyes are closed, transelike, while her clothes and hands are over-shadowed. The artist threw Lizzie’s face into relief by painting a golden halo around it and through a game of contrasting hues: on the whole, the character’s face attracts the viewer’s attention, for Rossetti used a lighter tone than for the rest of the painting, yet, once more, he enhances the erotic parts of her body; the shadows under the neck and near the eyelids are made more apparent, just as the dark tones of the lips. The overall effect of grace also comes from the distinctive lighter draperies standing against the darkness of the dress.

Gustave Moreau,
Tattoed Salomé (detail)
1876, oil on canvas
Gustave Moreau Museum

Grace and form are part of what is considered as the ‘moods’ of Rossetti’s female portraits. The recurrent, decorative patterns of Rossetti’s late style are distinctive features of the Aesthetic style. Aestheticism in the UK paralleled the emergence of the Symbolist movement in Europe, and it aimed at representing ‘art for art’s sake’. The choice to depict women as connected to the senses was favoured by fin-de-siècle artists, to present art as a pure sensual form[1]. Symbolists such as Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921) and Gustave Moreau (1826-1898) obsessively portrayed Femmes fatales especially when they embodied the stereotype of the fascinating Oriental character. In Moreau’s numerous versions of Salomé, the eponymous character is eroticised through her jewels, which point at the naked parts of her body.

The Beloved, 1865 - 1866
Oil on canvas, 82,5 x 76,2 cm
Tate Britain

Similarly, The Beloved presents an Oriental-like composition, in which space is built through the presence of several women, forming a whole decorative pattern. Besides, this painting is noticeable for the focus on jewels and flowers, elements that appear in many Rossettian paintings of the 1860s and 1870s. The design of women’s features, jewels and flowers produce an overall dreamy atmosphere, but the picture’s appealing to the senses is made through colour and the presence of musical instruments, which are characteristic of Aesthetic canvasses. The connection between colour and music is particularly striking in what can be considered as Rossetti’s ‘symphonies of colours’. In The Daydream, the symphony in blues and greens is created thanks to the various shades of green in the background and on the dress of Jane Morris. With the careful rendering of the draperies echoing the limbs’ movements and Jane’s eye colour, Rossetti explores diverse tones of blue, to produce a whole effect of harmony responding to the green tones of the leaves. This effect is even more poignant in La Ghirlandata. The dark greens are subtly rendered to throw the warm colours of Alexa Wilding’s hair and mouth into relief. The key of the painting lies in the contrast between the dark tones of greens and the warm oranges, yellows and reds. The artist, by catching women plunged into rêverie, meant to appeal to the viewer’s senses: sight, sound and touch.

La Ghirlandata, 1873
Oil on canvas, 124 x 85 cm
Guildhall Gallery, London

The Daydream, 1880
Oil on canvas, 158,7 x 92,7 cm
Victoria and Albert Museum

                           

                                                  

The complexity of Rossetti’s representation of female beauty lies in the multiple influences he draws from contemporary life and literature on the one hand, and in the tension between the physicality and the dreamlike quality of the portraits on the other hand. By intertwining real life and artistic issues, physical and artistic love and by depicting sensuous women, Rossetti is able to create a type of art that overcomes moral categories. Rossetti’s portraits are aimed at catching woman in an ethereal moment, thus creating a true religion of beauty. However, what may seem surprising is that this highly personal vision of the female body, that was controversial when Rossetti was still active, became quite influential to the development of the Aesthetic Movement, partly because of Rossetti’s distinctive personality and way of painting. Indeed, he was revered by Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898), and his female type influenced Burne-Jones’ work even after he died. Since Rossetti paints subjective portraits of friends or lovers cast as literary or mythical heroines, remarkable through their distinctive features, it may be fair to talk about a Rossettian artistic type, which flouted the canons of Victorian female beauty.

---

[1] In Nicoll, John. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, London: Studio Vista, Cassell and Collier Macmillan, 1975, p.125

[1] See Lucinda Hawksley, ‘The Red-Hair Model’ in Lizzie Siddal: The Tragedy of a Pre-Raphaelite Supermodel, London: Andre-Deutsch, ch.1

[1] See William Michael Rossetti about Jane Morris in Dante Gabriel Rossetti, His Family Letters with a Memoir, 1885, I, p.199: ‘Her face was at once tragic, mystic, passionate, calm, beautiful and gracious-a face for a sculptor and a face for a painter-a face not at all like that of an Englishwoman, rather of an Ionian Greek. It was not a face for that large class of English people who only take to the ‘perfect’ and not to the beautiful and the superb. Her complexion was dark and pale, her eyes a deep penetrating grey, her massive wealth of hair gorgeously rappled (…)’.

[1] ‘Instead of primarily focusing on the face and the head, Rossetti often included more of the torso (…) sensualizing to a hitherto unheard-of degree the erogenous parts of the body’. Susan P. Casteras, Pre-Raphaelites Challenges to Victorian Canons of Beauty, The Huntington Library Quaterly, vol.55, n°1, p.29

[3] F.W.H. Myers, ‘Rossetti and the Religion of Beauty’, Cornhill Magazine, February 1883, p.220

[1] Jennifer Lee, ‘The Forgotten Muse: Alexa Wilding’, The Pre-Raphaelite Society Newsletter of the United States, Number 19, Spring 2008

[1] For the connection between Rossetti and the Aesthetic movement, see Tim Barringer, ‘Pre-Raphaelites and Aesthetes’ ch.5, in Reading the Pre-Raphaelites, pp.135-155