Rossetti, A Nineteenth Century Dandy, 1839 (aged 11)
When we think of dandies we think of late
nineteenth century Oscar Wilde but the the earliest dandy was
Beau Brummell (1778-1840).
“no profession other than elegance… no other status, but that of cultivating the idea of beauty in their own persons The dandy must aspire to be sublime without interruption; he must live and sleep before a mirror. “ Baudelaire
Richard Dighton, Beau Brummell 1805
Dante Gabriel Rossetti also dressed to create a self-image. It is said he wore black, the colour of evening wear, even during the day and his clothes were shabby even though he could afford conventional middle-class clothes. He was cultivating the look of the bohemian, unconventional life. He was constructing the appearance of an artist. Rossetti was unconventional – he kept a menagerie of animals such as wombats, peacocks, monkeys, armadillos, gazelles, a kangaroo and a large black bull. He was also one of the first to collect blue and white Japanese and Chinese china and he ran an unconventional house where meals could be made at any time on an old stove.
In his 1849 story for The Germ called ‘Hand
and Soul‘ he tells the story of an artist whose soul appears before him in the form of a woman and she asks him to paint her. It is the story of beauty and being true to yourself.
“Beauty is a mixture of the eternal and the transitory – the eternal is the abstraction of the particular — the particular is made up of the fashions, morals and passions of the age.” Baudelaire
Max Beerbohm, Dante Gabriel Rossetti in his back garden, 1922. We see Rossetti sketching Fanny Cornforth and clockwise from Rossetti – J. M. Whistler, A. C. Swinburne, Theodore Watts-Dunton, W. M. Rossetti, William Morris, William Bell Scott, William Holman Hunt, John Ruskin and Fanny Cornforth, Sir Edward Burne Jones presents a flower to a kangeroo. Christina Rossetti, Sir John Everett Millais, Thomas Woolner and F. G. Stephens are missing.
See J. Rosenfeld, The Pre-Raphaelite ‘brotherhood’ and group identity in Victorian Britain.
A famous dandy, Baudelaire, commented that the dandies had “no profession other than
elegance…no other status but that of cultivating the idea of beauty in their own persons….The dandy must aspire to be sublime without interruption; he must live and sleep before a mirror.”
The Baudelairian dandy or flaneur is an urban phenomenon, a man who has all the experiences of city life but steps back from involvement and watches himself watching, this is known as dedoublement. Baudelaire also wore black perhaps representing separation, elegance and aloofness. It is a reaction to the grimness and regularity of life. Examples are Manet and Constantin Guys.
Eli Adams Adams in ‘Dandies and Desert Saints’ (1995) descibes such self-fashioning as “the technology of the self”. In the 19th century money becomes related not to land but to what one can earn oneself. One has to create oneself, to create value. It was the century of the professional.
See Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art, Herbert Sussman(1995). In the 19th century self-fashioned men were breaking with past traditions.
Rossetti dresses shabbily perhaps to avoid class distinctions by avoiding distinctions in dress. He could afford to dress well but chose to dress down. Men in a position of display raises questions of sexuality which were expressed in exaggerated form by Oscar Wilde. Rossetti is (or presents himself as) a bohemian, classless artist, a Romantic artistic genius.
Baudelaire said “life is a masquerade”. The carnival turns everything upside down.
Thomas Carlyle wrote a book called Sartor Resartus (literally the tailor retailored) about someone writing about the author of a history of clothes called Diogenes Teufelsdrockh (literally “God-born Devil shit”). The book is just a sack of paper but it claims to be about the philosophy of clothes. Carlyle is making the point that we go on surface appearance and we are
endlessly signalling to each other but all we ever see is the sign.
Aesthetic Pre-Raphaelitism – was it a reaction or a development? The conventional view is that it was:
- Erotic, rather than didactic
- Atmospheric, rather than narrative
- Literary, rather than contemporary
Edgar Allen Poe was the key figure as he influenced Rossetti, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Swinburne and Morris. He argued that our inner life, our mental and emotional disturbances were a valid subject for art. In Morris’ poem The Defence of Guinevere he argues that love is more important than money or convention and she loved Lancelot but not Arthur.
Read Bullen, The Pre-Raphaelite Body, for a detailed description of the relationship between the artists and their female companions and wives.
William Morris, La Belle Iseult, 1858
The inspiration for this painting was Thomas Malory’s ‘Morte d’Arthur’ (1485), in which Guinevere’s adulterous love for Sir Lancelot is one of the central themes. The model is Jane Burden who became Morris’s wife in 1859, and also appears in Rossetti’s ‘Proserpine’ displayed nearby. She was ‘discovered’ by Morris and Rossetti when they were working together on the Oxford Union murals, the subject matter for which was also taken from Malory. The painting is essentially a portrait of her in medieval dress. It is a splendid expression of the intense medieval style prevailing in Rossetti’s circle in the late 1850s, with its emphasis on pattern and historical detail. This is Morris’s only completed oil painting. Display caption from Tate Britain.
Tristan and Iseult were the great lovers of l’Morte d’Arthur, second only to Lancelot and Guinevere. Iseult, after drinking a love potion, dies of a broken heart for Tristan. It is an adulterous affair as she had to marry Mark, Tristan’s uncle.
Morris married Jane Burden (1839-1914) in 1859. Is Iseult looking in the mirror or at the manuscript? Is the manuscript a ‘romance’ or a biblical text? Do the oranges signify fruitfulness, luxury or reference the Arnolfini Marriage? How does she look as she dresses after rising from the bed in which presumably she slept with Tristan? Is she contrite or determined is she pensive or concerned? Are they lotus flowers on her dress (an ancient Hindu symbol of enlightenment) and pomegranates (symbol of fertility and good luck but also through Persephone trickery, temptation and imprisonment) on the table cloth?
The conventional view is the painting is erotic, atmospheric and literary
compared with:
Holman Hunt, The Awakening Conscience, 1853
The conventional view is that this is a didactic, contemporary narrative. Both paintings are ambiguous.
Literary spaces such as Morris’s medieval space (although it is not historical medieval as it is based on a fable) were regarded as real by the Aesthetic Pre-Raphaelites in the sense of showing us a higher form of reality. “An inner standing point” as Rossetti called it which permits artists to enter the world of the work created. This enables art to reflect on it own process of construction. Therefore Rossetti is not merely mannered but politically engaged and his portraits of women illuminate what Marx called “commodity fetishism”. It is an exploration of Victorian psychic dramas. It is the end point of Romantic subjectivity – the reliance on the artist’s own eye and sensibility.
The Victorians were concerned with death and immortality but an artist creates immortality through his or her work. The art will last and immortalize the artist. Rather than the ‘soul’ of religion we have the psyche or imagination of the artist.
We have taken it into our heads that to write a poem simply for the poem’s sake […] and to acknowledge such to have been our design, would be to confess ourselves radically wanting in the true poetic dignity and force: — but the simple fact is that would we but permit ourselves to look into our own souls we should immediately there discover that under the sun there neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified, more supremely noble, than this very poem, this poem per se, this poem which is a poem and nothing more, this poem written solely for the poem’s sake.
Edgar Allan Poe “The Poetic Principle”
“A poem written solely for the poem’s sake” is a statement that lies at the heart of the Aesthetes vision. Poe equated the intellect with truth, taste with beauty and morality with duty.
Swinburne picked up this ideas but put art first. Although Baudelaire makes a case for beauty’s transcendence Swinburne does not associate art with any other dimension, he argues for “beauty for beauty’s sake.”
‘a poets business is to write good verses, and by no means to redeem the age and remould society’ Swinburne Review of Baudelaire’s Fleur de Mal 1857, 1862
Lord Leighton, A Girl With a Basket of Fruit, 1863
Colour disassociates painting as colour is about indulgence and pleasure, “bawd colour” as it was called in the 19th century. Ruskin is seduced by Veronese’s colour.
The “special integrity of the creative artist dedicated to art alone”, Prettejohn.
Rossetti, Lady Lilith, 1863-73
The mirror as a metaphor for autonomy and self-sufficiency, thus reflecting art’s of self-sufficiency reflected in its own beauty. The canvas is talked of as a mirror and the painting as the mirror of the artist.
“A figure for the autonomy of art, sufficient in its own beauty” Prettejohn.
‘the centre of discourse lies not in the response of male sexuality to female attractiveness, but in the ambiguous, fantasmagoric, and troubling responses within the libido itself” Bullen of Jenny.
Bibliography
- T Carlyle, Sartor Resartus 1834
- D. Rossetti, Hand & Soul 1849W. Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance 1873
- R Bullen, The Pre-Raphaelite Body: Fear and Desire in Painting, Poetry, and Criticism, (Oxford 1998),
- E. Prettejohn, Beauty and Art 1750—2000 (Oxford 2005), Ruskin, Swinburne, Pater
- E. Prettejohn, Art for Art’s Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting
- Eli Adams Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Manhood (Cornell University Press, 1995)
- Sussman, Victorian Masculinities, (Cambridge University Press, 1995), Pater chapter
- E Wilson, Bohemians: The Glamorous Outcasts (Tauris 2003)
- J Rosenfeld, ‘The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’ and group identity in Victorian Britain’, Artistic Brotherhoods in the Nineteenth Century, (Ashgate, 2000)
- Dakers, C., The Holland Park Circle: Artists and Victorian Society, London: Yale University Press, 1999
- D. Peters Corbett, The World in Paint: Modern Art and Visuality in England 1848-1914 (Manchester, 2004) In Our Time – Beauty BBC
- E. Prettejohn ed. After the Pre-Raphaelites: Art and Aestheticism in Victorian England, Manchester University Press and Rutgers University Press, 1999.
- W. Gaunt, The Aesthetic Adventure (London, 1945)
- R. Spencer, The Aesthetic Movement (London, 1972)
- I. Small, ed. The Aesthetes: A Sourcebook (London, 1979)
(These are notes of a course given at Birkbeck College by Carol Jacobi in 2006/2007)