Dante Rossetti, Pre-Raphaelitism, and the Morris Circle

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• Dante Rossetti, Pre-Raphaelitism, and the Morris Circle
• Florence Boos (bio)

Dante G. Rossetti and Pre-Raphaelitism

The year 2022 was a banner year for articles placing Dante Rossetti’s poetry in relation to the sister arts of music and painting. Several of these have been conveniently gathered in a special issue of the Journal of Victorian Culture (27, no. 2 [2022]), with an introduction by Michael Allis. In his “Roundtable: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Music: Introduction,” Allis lists more than a dozen settings of Rossetti’s poems by composers from 1893 to 1928, including Claude Debussy’s La damoiselle élue, Wilberfoss Owst’s “The White Ship,” and Vaughan Williams’s song sequence The House of Life. He argues that musical imagery is pervasive throughout Rossetti’s art and poetry, as critics have identified its lack of temporality and heightened sensuality with late-century aestheticism, noted the presence of exotic instruments throughout his paintings, and identified the sonorous repetitions of his lines and phrases as inherently musical. Observing that Rossetti’s oeuvre, and music itself, is inherently interdisciplinary, Allis concludes with the hope that an understanding of the musical aspects of Rossetti’s practice will further the exploration of music’s contribution to “the rich interdisciplinary potential of Victorian studies in general” (p. 186).

The succeeding articles confirm this promise. In “Blessed Damozel(s): Ekphrastic Perspectives on Rossetti’s Poem and Painting,” George Kennasay suggests that although many artistic works of the past depict music, “the traffic is not equal” (p. 187), and fewer poems are represented in graphic art or, until the twentieth century, have inspired paintings also interpreted in music. After reviewing the title poem’s revision history (there were four versions) and contemporary reception, he notes artistic renderings by Edward Burne-Jones and Byam Shaw (Kennasay describes the latter’s 1906 illustrations as “both gaudy and banal,” p. 190), then explores Rossetti’s two paintings of the subject in 1877 and 1881 (the latter still in process shortly before his death). Both paintings thus belong to a later phase of Pre-Raphaelite art, “placing more emphasis on imagined ideas than on naturalism—an aesthetic that shades into symbolism” (p. 191); moreover, the poem’s use of concrete detail in a context of unstructured space and temporal ambiguity is a poetic equivalent of “the clear [End Page 389] physical detail of the painting . . . combined with its relative lack of perspective” (p. 192).

At this point Kennasay turns to the many musical settings of the poem, ranging from the now-lost 1886 score of Orton Bradley and Claude Debussy’s still-performed 1888 La damoiselle èlue to Julia Harrison’s 1928 Damozel, written for performance by women’s choirs; a useful accompanying chart documents sixteen such compositions (including two merely orchestral pieces), excluding Debussy’s. These vary widely in their ethos and tonalities: Debussy, for example, minimizes the poem’s narrative structure and elides its speaker; Arnold Bax includes the entire poem in a highly dramatic, Wagnerian setting; Charlotte Fanning, Lady Ramsay, creates an operatic drama, in which the use of different stanzas sung simultaneously recreates the viewer’s experience of the painting in grasping its various elements simultaneously (p. 204). Omitting or selecting aspects of the poem can create entirely opposite effects, from an achieved sense of heavenly union (Reginald Clarke) to a recognition of eternal separation (Fritz Hart). In his conclusion, Kennasay suggests that “there are degrees of ‘ekphrasticness’ where music is concerned,” and that (in line with modern reception theory), “when two works together stand in an ekphrastic relationship, there is the potential for each to redefine the other” (p. 214).

In “Musical Experience in the Bower: D. G. Rossetti, Listening, and Space,” Marte Stinis identifies a continuing feature of Rossetti’s painting (and, to a lesser extent, his poetry) in the representations of a bower, a visual space enabling Rossetti to explore the commonalities between music and painting through its suggestions of “ideas of immersion, artistic correspondences, and the abstracting of colour and form” (p. 236). Observing that music provided advantages absent from painting, including “the ability to unfold over time, and the unique relationship of performativity between listener and musical piece” (p. 237), she...