Lot 92 : Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882)
Auction Location: United Kingdom - 2003
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Description:
Regina Cordium: a portrait of Mrs Aldam Heaton signed with monogram, inscribed and dated 'WOODBANK/NOV.1861' (lower right) and further inscribed 'Regina Cordium' (below) and 'EMH 1861' in a heart (upper right) oil on panel 103/4 x 8 5/8 in. (27.4 x 21.7 cm.) PROVENANCE The sitter and her husband. By descent to their elder daughter, Winifred, Mrs Sydney Pawling, by 1923. Claud Heaton Pawling by 1929. By descent to Mrs L.D. Jackson, the great-granddaughter of the sitter, by 1971; sold Christie's, London, 5 June 1981, lot 41 (unsold); re-offered, Christie's, London, 26 March 1982, lot 86, when acquired by the present owner. LITERATURE H.C. Marillier, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: An Illustrated Memorial of his Art and Life, London, 1899, pp. 108, 242 (no. 105). O. Doughty, A Victorian Romantic: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 2nd. ed., Oxford, 1960, pp. 289, 292. O. Doughty and J.R. Wahl, Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Oxford, 1965-7, vol. 2, pp. 423-4. V. Surtees, The Paintings and Drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Catalogue Raisonn‚, Oxford, 1971, vol. 1, p. 81, no. 129. V. Surtees, Sublime and Instructive, London, 1972, p. 235. M. Kelly, Highlights from the Forbes Magazine Galleries, New York, 1985, p. 87, illus. S. Casteras, 'Rossetti's Embowered Females in Art...', Nineteenth Century Studies, vol. 2, 1988, pp. 39, 41, illus. P. Mitchell and L. Roberts, Frameworks: Form, Function and Ornament in European Portrait Frames, London, 19, p. 370, pl. 286. M. Kelly, Highlights from the Forbes Magazine Galleries, New York, 1985, p. 87, illus. EXHIBITION London, Burlington Fine Art Club, Pictures, Drawings, Designs and Studies by the late Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1883, no. 48, lent by J.A. Heaton. London, Tate Gallery, Paintings and Drawings of the 1860 Period, 1923, no. 31, lent by Mrs S. Pawling. London, Royal Academy, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Painter and Poet, 1973, no. 301, lent by Mrs L.D. Jackson. The Heatherley School of Fine Art: 150th Anniversary Exhibition, 1996, no. 20. The Victorian Imagination, 1998, no. 18. NOTES The picture is a fanciful portrait of Mrs John Aldam Heaton. She was born Ellen Morley, so the initials EMH at upper right may represent both her maiden and married names. Her husband was an interior decorator, and when the picture was painted they were living at 'Woodbank', Harden, near Bingley in Yorkshire. Rossetti had recently designed a stained-glass window for the house, made by the newly-established Morris firm and showing Mrs Heaton as a sort of patron saint, haloed, heavily draped, and holding a model of 'Woodbank' in her right hand (Surtees, no. 323, pl. 401). The Heatons left the house in 1876, moving to London where Aldam set up as a designer of furniture and wallpaper and went into partnership with Norman Shaw. Among his clients was John Dearman Birchall (1828-1897), a wealthy cloth manufacturer who lived at Bowden Hall at Upton St Leonards, Gloucestershire, collected blue-and-white porcelain, and intermittently patronised the Pre-Raphaelites. Heaton continued to do business with Rossetti, sometimes acting with the notorious Charles Augustus Howell or another marchand amateur, Murray Marks. According to Marillier, they later quarrelled, not surprisingly if Howell was involved. Regina Cordium ( Queen of Hearts ) is an early example of the bust-length or half-length figures of women which became the staple product of Rossetti's later career. The first work of this kind was the Bocca Baciata of 1859 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), and the following year he used the formula for a likeness of Lizzie Siddal, painted shortly before their marriage in May (fig. 1). Also entitled Regina Cordium, this was the prototype for our picture, which not only has the same title but is almost exactly the same size and repeats nearly every aspect of the composition: the pose, the hand holding a purple pansy (symbol of love and remembrance), the coral necklace with its heart pendant, the chequered background, again incorporating the heart motif, and the inscription on the parapet. Only the sitter's features are different. Presumably Heaton saw the original in Rossetti's Blackfriars studio, perhaps when calling in connection with the 'Woodside' window, realised how the image could be adapted to express his love for his own wife, and commissioned a version accordingly. The original was acquired by Ruskin, though in view of its emphatically decorative character and the reference to playing cards implied in the title, it is not surprising that he later gave it away. He was increasingly critical of the way Rossetti's art was developing and his use of medievalism for purely decorative ends. As early as 1857 we find him complaining bitterly that a medieval subject the artist was working on was 'painfully quaint and hard', with a 'mode of colour-treatment...too much like that of the Knave of Hearts'. On the back of the picture is a letter written by Rossetti to Aldam Heaton on 4 October 1861, offering to go to Yorkshire and carry out the commission. 'I could spare a fortnight which, with hard work on my part and kind abundance of sitting on Mrs Heaton's, would suffice to do the portrait if not finish the picture.' The following month he was at 'Woodbank', not only painting Mrs Heaton but drawing her daughter Winifred (Surtees 324). Meanwhile Lizzie Rossetti, the model for the original Regina Cordium, was causing her husband great anxiety. Twice, first while staying with the Morrises at Upton and then with the Madox Browns in Kentish Town, she left her hosts abruptly and returned to their apartment in Chatham Place. Rossetti was forced to write to his mother, asking her to go and take his wife some money as he knew 'there was not a hafpenny' in the house. He would be back, he added, in a week, and would then immediately return the loan out of the 50 guineas he was being paid for the portrait commission. Little did he know that Lizzie's neurotic and eccentric behaviour was the prelude to tragedy. In the early morning of 11 February 1862 she died from an overdose of laudanum, probably committing suicide. The sitter in our picture has sometimes been mistakenly identified as Ellen Heaton (1816-1894), the well-meaning, ebullient and sublimely tactless Leeds heiress who bought pictures from Rossetti and carried on a long correspondence with Ruskin. There was no blood relationship, although Ellen's brother, Dr John Heaton, was married to Aldam Heaton's sister, making him a brother-in-law of the model in Regina Cordium. Even Ruskin confused John and Aldam Heaton (see Sublime and Instructive, loc. cit.). The picture is still in its original frame, designed by Rosetti with what Ford Maddox Brown called the 'thumb-mark pattern'. Rossetti used frames of this type for a number of his smaller pictures of single female figures in the 1860s.
