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Artist or Maker: Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882)

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Notes: THE PROPERTY OF A GENTLEMAN

This beautiful drawing of 1875 is a new discovery, featuring in neither the older literature nor in Virginia Surtees' catalogue raisonné of the artist's work (1971). It never seems to have been exhibited, and its provenance until recent times is unknown. All we can say is that Rossetti appears to have sold it or given it away since it was not in his studio sale, held at Christie's in May 1883, a year after his death.

Whatever its history, the drawing is in spectacularly good condition. The frame and mount are clearly original, and the unbroken tape on the back suggests that the sheet has not been removed since the day it was put in, presumably during the artist's lifetime.

The status and purpose of the drawing are as mysterious as its fortunes. Rossetti has inscribed it at lower left 'Desdemona. Sing Willow Willow!', and it is natural to assume that it is a study for Desdemona's Death-Song, an important composition that he was planning to paint at the time. The picture was to illustrate Othello, Act IV, Scene 3, and to show the heroine preparing for bed on the fatal night when her husband smothered her in a fit of uncontrollable jealousy. Depressed by his groundless accusations of infidelity, she sings the so-called Willow Song that she has learnt as a child from a servant who had been deserted by her lover:

The poor soul sat sighing by a sycamore tree,
Sing all a green willow;
Her hand on her bosom, her head on her knee,
Sing willow, willow, willow.

Some eight studies for the picture are known or recorded (Surtees 254 A-G and I), including the handsome composition drawing in black chalk, formerly in the Getty Collection, that was sold in these Rooms a year ago and has since found its way into the National Gallery, Washington (fig. 2). Whether the studies indicate the whole design or relate only to the figure of Desdemona (full-length or head), they show her seated on her bed, a stool, or even the floor, leaning towards the left. Her long hair is being dressed by her maid, Emilia. She herself holds a mirror listlessly in her left hand, while a comb and a necklace are seen in a box beside her. On the wall behind hang a scimitar and buckler, a reference to her husband's military prowess, and to the left a curtain billows into the room, hinting symbolically at the impending tragedy. The crucifix on an altar to the right, a candle burning before it, seems to anticipate Othello's question when he comes to murder her: 'Have you prayed tonight?... I would not kill thy unprepared spirit.'

As early as March 1872 Rossetti had offered to paint this subject for the Liverpool shipowner F.R. Leyland, one of his wealthiest and most loyal patrons (fig. 3). Leyland had been creating a sumptuous Aesthetic interior at his London house, 22 Queen's Gate, since 1868, and was to go on to commission an even more grandiose scheme when he moved to another Knightsbridge address, 49 Prince's Gate, in 1874. The musical theme of the proposed picture was highly appropriate since it not only reflected the Aesthetic notion that, as Walter Pater was to write five years later, 'all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music', but was a compliment to Leyland's personal devotion to music and his skill as an amateur pianist. 'I am quite resolved', Rossetti told him, 'as to painting the Desdemona's Death Song, and this would form a splendid centre for other musical pictures in your drawing rooms. Shall I view the matter in this way for you? The Desdemona will shortly be commenced... The figures would come of a moderate life-size, without interfering with its conveniently taking place over your piano.'

Despite the appropriateness of the subject in relation to Leyland and Rossetti's evident enthusiasm for carrying it out, the picture hung fire and was still unfinished at the artist's death a decade later.
All we have are the preparatory drawings, generally dated between about 1870 and 1881, and a head of Desdemona in oil on canvas, formerly in the possession of the late Professor Fredeman, who was given it by Rossetti's niece (Surtees 254 H). This appears to be the only surviving fragment of the unfinished canvas that, according to H.C. Marillier in his Rossetti monograph of 1899, was finally begun in 1878, a full six years after the overtures to Leyland. Many of Rossetti's later works suffered a similar fate, especially the more complex compositions like this one, which were too taxing to carry through to fruition in his current state of mental and physical decline. Desdemona's Death-Song illustrates the point with particular poignancy, being mentioned in a letter that Rossetti dictated to his sister Christina during his last illness at Birchington-on Sea; the recipient was F.G. Stephens, once a fellow member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood but now for many years art critic on the Athenaeum. 'In reply to your enquiry as to a subject picture', Rossetti wrote, 'I designed and began painting lately a good-sized picture of Desdemona singing the Willow Song while Emilia dresses her hair. I cannot say in (my) present state of health when I might be able to carry it on. But it is not yet in a sufficiently advanced state to show. I have made a black and white design for it, but rather a rough one. When finished it will certainly be one of my best and most attractive things.' The letter was written on 28th March 1882. Within a fortnight he was dead.

It is probably already clear that to fit our drawing into this scenario presents serious problems. All the other drawings associated with the picture, whether they survive or are merely described in the Rossetti studio sale catalogue, seem to conform to the composition illustrated here (fig. 2). Our study, in sharp contrast, shows the model turned to the right, and, far from leaning tensely forward, reclining languidly in a chair. Nor are there any of the narrative elements that characterise the other drawings: the figure of Emilia, the heroine's long hair, the mirror in her hand, and so on.

To identify the drawing as a study for the painting we would have to accept that in 1875, three years after Rossetti had told Leyland that the picture would 'shortly be commenced', he was radically revising the conception or at least considering a very different solution, a conclusion that not one of the other drawings supports. Apparently, moreover, his image of the heroine was still so vague at this date that he could think of nothing else for her to do than toy with a piece of material that presumably just happened to be to hand.

There is also a more fundamental difficulty. The pose adopted in our drawing is undoubtedly more graceful than that found in the others, and perhaps even more natural for someone expressing her woes in song. But grace and naturalism were not the qualities that Rossetti was currently keen to stress in his treatment of Shakespearian subjects. Not surprisingly for someone whose roots lay deep in the Romantic movement, he had drawn inspiration from Shakespeare throughout his career. Moreover, being an essentially autobiographical artist, he had consistently mined Shakespeare for metaphors for his own obsessions. In a series of early works illustrating Hamlet, the play's themes of rejection and betrayal had mirrored his own tortured relationship with Miss Siddal, whose features he had often given to his portrayals of Ophelia. Similarly, Mariana, a painting of 1870 (Aberdeen), uses an incident from Measure for Measure to comment obscurely on the tensions that existed between himself and Jane and William Morris. As for Desdemona's Death-Song, conceived a year or two later, its dark forboding seems to project some of the personal agony, a lethal concoction of paranoia, drug-addiction and physical deterioration, that increasingly clouded his existence and was to kill him prematurely at the age of fifty-three in 1882.

Seen in this context, it seems highly unlikely that Rossetti would consider revising his composition in favour of the gentler and more elegant interpretation implied by our drawing. We might well wish he had, since there is undoubtedly an element of awkwardness and strain in the other drawings that we do not find in ours; but this would be to misunderstand the fundamental direction that his art was taking at this late stage of its development. In fact in this very year, 1875, Shakespeare was his source for an even more neurotic and angst-laden design. The Death of Lady Macbeth, which again progressed no further than drawings, shows the guilt-ridden queen expiring amid demented waiting-women and monks frenziedly invoking heavenly intercession. Not since Fuseli had anyone brought such a degree of intensity and mannerism to a Shakespearian subject.

If the mood of the drawing seems alien in this context, so does its physical appearance. Rossetti's later studies for his paintings tend to be on a larger scale, and, since he was apparently unable to obtain big enough sheets of the duck-egg-blue paper he favoured, they are often on two sheets, joined. The Getty drawing we sold last year was of this type (fig. 2); so are two existing studies for the figure of Desdemona, one in the Birmingham Art Gallery (Surtees 254 D; illustrated pl. 381), the other in the Lloyd Webber Collection (exh. Pre-Raphaelite and Other Masters, Royal Academy, London, 2003, no. 17, illustrated in catalogue). Our drawing, on the other hand, is comparatively small in scale, fitting onto a single imperial-sized sheet. It is also more carefully finished than these studies, especially as regards the head, and whereas they are in black chalk only, a mixture of black, red and grey chalk is employed here to create a more vivid and lifelike effect.

Last but not least, there is the question of the model. Both Jane Morris and Marie Stillman have been associated with Desdemona's Death-Song, but the sitter in our drawing is undoubtedly another of Rossetti's favourite models, Alexa Wilding (fig. 4).

Unlike Elizabeth Siddal, Fanny Cornforth or Jane Morris, Alexa Wilding played no part in Rossetti's emotional life, but she sat to him regularly in the 1860s and 1870s and appears in an astonishing number of major works of this period, from Venus Verticordia of 1864-8 (Russell-Cotes Art Gallery, Bournemouth) to The Blessed Damozel of 1875-8 (Fogg Museum of Art, Harvard). 'Miss Wilding's was a lovely face,' wrote Rossetti's assistant Henry Treffry Dunn, 'beautifully moulded in every feature, full of quiescent, soft, mystical repose that suited some of his conceptions admirably, but without any variety of expression. She sat like the Sphinx waiting to be questioned and with always a vague reply in return; about the last girl, one would think, to have the makings of an actress in her; and yet to be that was her ambition.' Dunn also noticed that 'she had a deep well of affection within her seemingly placid exterior.' When Rossetti died at Birchington-on-Sea on Easter Day 1882, she was 'one of the few... who journeyed down... when she could ill afford it so that she might place a wreath on (his) grave.'

Although we do not know when Alexa Wilding was born, she seems to have been in her late twenties or early thirties when she began modelling for Rossetti in the mid-1860s. At that time she was letting her hair fall in two loops on either side of her forehead, and she was still wearing it in this way in the early 1870s, as we see in such works of the period as The Bower Meadow of 1872 (Manchester; see fig. 5) or La Ghirlandata of 1873 (Guildhall Art Gallery, London). However, by 1874-5, when she was probably about forty, she had had the two sweeps of hair crimped with the aid of tongs or curling papers, so that they stuck out in frizzy projections. They appear thus in La Bella Mano (fig. 6), a picture commissioned by the marchand amateur Murray Marks in February 1875 and painted during the ensuing months.

Our drawing, which also dates from this year, must be more or less contemporary. Here again we see Wilding's new hair-style, while she seems to be wearing the very same chemise that she wears in a full-scale study for this painting (Surtees 240 A; illustrated pl. 342). The study was almost complete by 30th April 1875, when Rossetti sold it to Marks for £120.

Or perhaps our sheet is a few months later. In mid-October 1875, beset by illness, depression and debts, Rossetti left his house in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, to live for nine months at Aldwick Lodge, Bognor, hoping that the bracing sea air would benefit his health and spirits. Various friends and relations visited him, including Alexa Wilding, who arrived on 3rd November and left again on 14th. She may have been glad to get away as the house had been battered by storms, and on 13th November a gale uprooted an elm tree on the lawn, an incident that Rossetti's morbid imagination interpreted as an omen of impending doom.

Wilding had come to sit for The Blessed Damozel (Fogg Museum of Art, Harvard), a picture that the faithful William Graham had commissioned as long ago as 1871 and was not to receive until 1878. She appears there wearing her former coiffure, the long loops of hair trailing across her temples, but since there are studies of her for this painting that long pre-date her visit to Bognor, this does not imply that she had reverted to the previous fashion and that our drawing could not have been executed during her ten-day stay. On the contrary, there is an important detail which suggests that this may have been precisely when the drawing was made. The chair, which is of a fairly conventional Victorian type, does not seem to feature in any of the visual records of the interior of Cheyne Walk. But it could well have been among the furnishings of Aldwick Lodge.

In the light of all these considerations, stylistic, technical and biographical, it seems safe to say that the drawing is not a study for Desdemona's Death-Song, but an independent work bearing only the most tangential relationship to the planned painting. It seems likely that it started life as no more than a record that Rossetti was inspired to make when his model spontaneously assumed an attractive pose, perhaps on one of those days in Bognor when, as he complained, it was impossible to paint by the poor light resulting from the stormy weather and the windows that had each been fitted with 'a sort of hood'. When the drawing was complete, we may suppose it struck him that the attitude was appropriate to Desdemona singing her Willow Song, a theme, after all, that was currently looming large in his imagination; and from there it was but a step to add the relevant inscription. Perhaps he was not unmotivated by the thought that a literary tag would make the drawing more marketable at a time when his finances were in a particularly parlous condition.

We are grateful to Virginia Surtees for the opportunity to discuss this interesting and unusual drawing.

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