Beige walls, beige wood, beige carpet. The almost monochrome décor in the first room of The Rossettis at London’s Tate Britain is so reminiscent of a high-end Indian restaurant that the absence of canned music is startling in itself. I was half-expecting a smiling man in a Nehru jacket to ask me if I had a reservation, before being suddenly and overwhelmingly distracted by the sole splash of colour at its centre.
Christina Rossetti sits on her bed, awoken from sleep with her knees drawn away from her brother Michael. His feet are aflame, and he points a lily branch at her belly while a small white bird hovers nearby. It looks so familiar, and yet so fresh. Ecce ancilla Domini, their artist-sibling Gabriel intoned with its title. From somewhere deep in my soul the response bubbled up unbidden: fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum.
The accompanying notes proclaim that the Rossettis – or at least Gabriel, Christina and Elizabeth Siddall, who married Gabriel in 1860 before dying tragically young – “experimented with everything – art, life and love”. Not only that: Elizabeth died of a laudanum overdose in 1862. Grief-stricken, Gabriel buried her with most of his unpublished poems before later digging her up again to retrieve them.
Later he became obsessed with painting beautiful women in a variety of poses; in a less-Freudian vein he also acquired exotic pets and trained a toucan to ride a llama around his dinner-table. Christina was the least eccentric of them all, and her poetry won the hearts of her generation and its successors. Her carols have endured the best, among them In the Bleak Midwinter – a perennial favourite, which is quoted on a wall.
But their artistic works were (at least initially) not as unconventional as we might like to believe. There is a familiarity to much of it, because although their styles and methods may have been innovative they drew on tried and tested motifs even if they expressed them in new and ingenious ways. You only have to glance at Gabriel and Elizabeth’s Sir Galahad and the Holy Grail, for example, to realise that it’s a rendering of the Agony in the Garden.
Religious imagery abounds, both implicitly and explicitly. The exhibition and its sumptuous accompanying catalogue traces the Rossettis’ exploratory journeys through word and image, with a welcome emphasis on the women and the world that they saw and interpreted. Quite rightly the curators note that Victorian society was one in which “fallen women” were shunned, but where exploitative sex was readily available.
Themes of fall and redemption are never very far away – the worthy Christina also worked in a women’s refuge – but more fantastical imagery also emerges. Most obviously the latter attaches itself to Gabriel and Elizabeth’s illustrations of Arthurian legends with their evocation of chaste and courtly love. Inevitably the former influences the more straightforwardly religious pieces, of which there are plenty.
They range from the overt to the abstract. Early on Christina appears again as Our Lady, in Gabriel’s The Girlhood of Mary Virgin of 1849. Their mother Frances, cast as St Anne, teaches her daughter needlepoint while St Joachim tends to a portentous vine. Its creator was only 20 at the time, and his namesake appears as a small angel with a lily; a haloed dove hovering outside prefigures the Annunciation by some, but not many, years.
Meanwhile, pen and ink sketches that draw out each last gasp of meaning from their subject could hardly be more different, like St John Comforting the Virgin at the Foot of the Cross (1858). Elizabeth drew on his spontaneous style for her Last Farewell Before Crucifixion of about the same year. It was part of a sequence of scenes from the life of the Virgin Mary, and we know it better announced as “The Fourth Station: Jesus Meets His Blessed Mother.”
The irony in all this is that Gabriel’s religion, such as he had any at all, was at best unconventional. That said, he was hugely influenced by Raphael (the enfant terrible of the Catholic Renaissance) and Dante Alighieri. Dante’s Divine Comedy sends up the Italian society of his day in a journey through hell, purgatory and heaven while he searches for his lost love, Gabriel soon became Dante Gabriel, as he grieved for Elizabeth: his Beatrice.
At the same time a developing Victorian obsession with medievalism spurred on the production of work that any mud-spattered serf might have recognised from the walls of his parish church: depictions of St Catherine, St Cecilia and St George; of the Madonna and Child; of angels in various guises. These pave the way for the stunning “poetic portraits” of the group’s later years: “where words question images and images question words”.
More simply put, the aesthetic movement into which Gabriel led his family circle in the 1860s was both transformative and transfigurative. Working-class women were transported into “fantasies of femininity” – and how. Renditions of Lilith and the palm-bearing Sybil are unabashedly sensual in their composition; pouting lips and come-hither looks proliferate. And yet these women seem so real – perhaps more so than their earlier counterparts.
Christina’s poems that accompany them also step up; no favourite hymns are here. “Of Adam’s first wife, Lilith, it is told / (The witch he loved before the gift of Eve,) / That, ere the snake’s, her sweet tongue could deceive, / And her enchanted hair was the first gold.” It’s a very far cry from Love Came Down at Christmas, to be sure. Colours, words, and style combine – this is the Rossettis at their most creative.
Because it is at the Tate an obsession with the sins of the fathers lingers; Elizabeth Siddall kills herself with laudanum not through any exercise of her own free will, but because opiates were “encouraged by the British Empire”. Similarly the appearance of a black sitter in The Beloved draws predictable curatorial censure; that said, a corresponding catalogue chapter written by Chiedza Mhondoro seems well-considered and helpful.
It must be said that the last room, which seeks to assess (briefly) how the Rossettis’ “individuality and social defiance inspire radical writers and artists to this day” seems a bit forced. The final picture in the exhibition – Sunil Gupta’s Untitled #2, in which two men kiss – is there because it “draws on the intensity of Gabriel’s colour palette, as well as his use of expressive hands and interlocking figures.”
Well, maybe so; maybe not. Either way, as it unfolds – simultaneously old and new, ancient and modern, comforting and challenging, daring and familiar – The Rossettis demonstrates that there is far more to this remarkably creative group than Christmas cards and gift-shop poems. It is an exhilarating tour de force, full of beauty, which deserves serious scrutiny from expert and amateur alike.
The Rossettis is at Tate Britain until 24 September
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