1 00:00:01,800 --> 00:00:03,280 BBC Four Collections - 2 00:00:03,280 --> 00:00:06,520 specially chosen programmes from the BBC archive. 3 00:00:11,240 --> 00:00:13,880 She is a siren and a temptress. 4 00:00:13,880 --> 00:00:20,080 Full lips, dark, melancholy eyes, pools to drown in. 5 00:00:20,080 --> 00:00:23,400 Long, luxuriant tresses of hair, which she 6 00:00:23,400 --> 00:00:26,480 winds like her beauty around the hearts of her victims. 7 00:00:27,640 --> 00:00:30,040 She knows the secrets of the damned. 8 00:00:30,040 --> 00:00:32,880 She is as mysterious as the ocean is deep. 9 00:00:35,600 --> 00:00:39,800 The beautiful but dangerous woman, the belle dame sans merci, 10 00:00:39,800 --> 00:00:43,280 enthralled the 19th-century imagination. 11 00:00:43,280 --> 00:00:47,280 But her enduring image was fixed for ever by one man, 12 00:00:47,280 --> 00:00:51,200 a Pre-Raphaelite artist and poet, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. 13 00:00:52,320 --> 00:00:55,680 In creating image after image of his perfect woman, 14 00:00:55,680 --> 00:01:00,240 he reinvented the ideal of female beauty for an entire generation. 15 00:01:02,280 --> 00:01:06,240 But the key to Rossetti lies in the compulsions that drove him. 16 00:01:06,240 --> 00:01:10,840 Behind the art was a man plagued by drugs and alcohol, 17 00:01:10,840 --> 00:01:13,880 by failed loves and mental depression. 18 00:01:13,880 --> 00:01:17,520 And almost paralysed by the fear of criticism. 19 00:01:17,520 --> 00:01:19,800 Convinced that he'd failed as a painter, 20 00:01:19,800 --> 00:01:22,600 but determined to achieve immortality as a poet, 21 00:01:22,600 --> 00:01:25,800 he actually dug his own wife's corpse out of 22 00:01:25,800 --> 00:01:30,120 this grave in Highgate Cemetery, to retrieve a manuscript 23 00:01:30,120 --> 00:01:34,200 of verses which he'd buried with her in a fit of grief-stricken passion. 24 00:01:35,600 --> 00:01:39,280 With that act of grizzly exhumation began the last act 25 00:01:39,280 --> 00:01:44,360 of his tragedy, a classic 19th-century tale of love and death. 26 00:01:59,040 --> 00:02:01,840 Rossetti hated showing his work in public and since his death 27 00:02:01,840 --> 00:02:03,480 in 1882, there have been 28 00:02:03,480 --> 00:02:06,480 surprisingly few exhibitions of his work. 29 00:02:06,480 --> 00:02:09,880 This show at the Walker Gallery in Liverpool is the first major 30 00:02:09,880 --> 00:02:12,200 reappraisal for more than a generation. 31 00:02:16,280 --> 00:02:18,600 Every picture tells a psychological story, 32 00:02:18,600 --> 00:02:21,880 and taken together, Rossetti's works amount to a journey through 33 00:02:21,880 --> 00:02:27,200 his life, an intimate glimpse of his loves, desires and anxieties. 34 00:02:31,720 --> 00:02:35,040 At the heart of it all are images of the three women who 35 00:02:35,040 --> 00:02:37,040 dominated his life. 36 00:02:37,040 --> 00:02:40,600 The wife whose early death would haunt him to his own grave. 37 00:02:40,600 --> 00:02:44,680 The prostitute who first awoke him to the pleasures of the flesh. 38 00:02:44,680 --> 00:02:49,120 And the forbidden lover who inspired his last words of poetry 39 00:02:49,120 --> 00:02:50,680 and his last painting. 40 00:02:53,280 --> 00:02:55,000 Aaargh! 41 00:02:55,000 --> 00:02:58,000 Rossetti lived through revolutionary times. 42 00:02:58,000 --> 00:03:01,320 His father was an Italian literary scholar and political radical 43 00:03:01,320 --> 00:03:06,280 who fled his homeland after a failed uprising in 1820. 44 00:03:08,720 --> 00:03:13,640 Named after the Italian poet, Dante Gabriel Rossetti was born in London. 45 00:03:13,640 --> 00:03:18,120 A shy, bookish child, he immersed himself in Arthurian legends 46 00:03:18,120 --> 00:03:20,240 and medieval poetry. 47 00:03:20,240 --> 00:03:21,880 He was the child of a father 48 00:03:21,880 --> 00:03:26,400 who was in exile and who was intending to return 49 00:03:26,400 --> 00:03:29,440 and take his family with him. 50 00:03:29,440 --> 00:03:34,280 And the whole family kind of lived their lives in expectation of 51 00:03:34,280 --> 00:03:37,840 returning to Italy and making a new, a different life there. 52 00:03:37,840 --> 00:03:43,640 Rossetti was caught up in that youthful idealism of 1848 53 00:03:43,640 --> 00:03:47,320 and the democratic revolutions across Europe. 54 00:03:47,320 --> 00:03:49,240 And it was, I think, 55 00:03:49,240 --> 00:03:51,080 the failure of that revolution in Italy 56 00:03:51,080 --> 00:03:55,680 that dashed all the hopes 57 00:03:55,680 --> 00:03:58,800 of returning to the country of his origin 58 00:03:58,800 --> 00:04:04,000 and caused Rossetti to turn right away from politics 59 00:04:04,000 --> 00:04:07,680 and the modern world and return to a fictive, 60 00:04:07,680 --> 00:04:10,360 imaginative world that is not this one. 61 00:04:16,880 --> 00:04:19,240 But to express his imagination in paint, 62 00:04:19,240 --> 00:04:21,160 Rossetti had to learn the rules. 63 00:04:21,160 --> 00:04:24,600 He went to the Royal Academy, but soon rebelled. 64 00:04:24,600 --> 00:04:28,080 The idea of a training that involved years of copying ancient statues 65 00:04:28,080 --> 00:04:30,000 filled him with horror. 66 00:04:31,240 --> 00:04:34,240 He joined forces with fellow students William Holman Hunt 67 00:04:34,240 --> 00:04:37,680 and John Everett Millais, who would go on with Rossetti to form 68 00:04:37,680 --> 00:04:41,280 a brotherhood, a Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. 69 00:04:41,280 --> 00:04:43,680 Like knights of the Round Table, they had their code 70 00:04:43,680 --> 00:04:46,840 of honour which they wrote down in the form of a manifesto. 71 00:04:46,840 --> 00:04:50,560 Goal number one, to have genuine ideas to express. 72 00:04:50,560 --> 00:04:53,120 Goal two, to study nature attentively. 73 00:04:53,120 --> 00:04:56,520 Goal three, to sympathise with what is heartfelt, 74 00:04:56,520 --> 00:04:59,240 serious and direct in previous art. 75 00:04:59,240 --> 00:05:02,880 And goal number four, most indispensible of all, 76 00:05:02,880 --> 00:05:06,040 to produce thoroughly good paintings and statues. 77 00:05:06,040 --> 00:05:07,480 Easier said than done. 78 00:05:09,880 --> 00:05:13,320 Their touchstone was art from before the time of Raphael. 79 00:05:13,320 --> 00:05:16,680 The clear lines of Florentine fresco painting. 80 00:05:16,680 --> 00:05:19,560 The jewel-like colours of early Flemish art. 81 00:05:25,440 --> 00:05:30,400 And this, Ecce Ancilla Domini, Behold The Handmaiden Of The Lord, 82 00:05:30,400 --> 00:05:33,200 was Rossetti's first attempt to show his audience what 83 00:05:33,200 --> 00:05:36,560 he thought a Pre-Raphaelite painting should look like. 84 00:05:36,560 --> 00:05:39,720 It's a cross between Van Eyck and Botticelli. 85 00:05:39,720 --> 00:05:43,000 Very thin paint, sparely applied 86 00:05:43,000 --> 00:05:47,040 and with a pious subject reflecting the idealism of the group. 87 00:05:47,040 --> 00:05:48,880 It's an annunciation scene. 88 00:05:48,880 --> 00:05:53,840 Gabriel - in fact, Rossetti's brother, William - is arriving to 89 00:05:53,840 --> 00:05:58,000 announce to the Virgin Mary that she will indeed be the Mother of God. 90 00:05:58,000 --> 00:06:02,880 And he holds this symbolic lily stem, pointing it at her womb. 91 00:06:02,880 --> 00:06:08,320 The Virgin, the girl, she stares at this lily with 92 00:06:08,320 --> 00:06:12,920 a kind of mixture of fear and compulsion, almost a kind of terror. 93 00:06:12,920 --> 00:06:18,120 There's something very strange about this claustrophobic interior 94 00:06:18,120 --> 00:06:20,680 with its Victorian sick bed atmosphere. 95 00:06:20,680 --> 00:06:23,480 She's a tubercular maiden, she looks ill, 96 00:06:23,480 --> 00:06:27,360 she shrinks away from the annunciate angel. 97 00:06:27,360 --> 00:06:31,200 And what I've never noticed before was that Rossetti's made 98 00:06:31,200 --> 00:06:34,960 her hair - and he is the great Victorian painter of hair - 99 00:06:34,960 --> 00:06:39,480 he's made her hair into a kind of seismograph of her uneasiness. 100 00:06:39,480 --> 00:06:41,200 It flickers electrically. 101 00:06:41,200 --> 00:06:44,680 There are strange little strands going here, there and everywhere. 102 00:06:44,680 --> 00:06:48,880 It seems to dramatise some kind of deep-seated uneasiness, 103 00:06:48,880 --> 00:06:52,760 some kind of fear, perhaps fear of the sexual act. 104 00:06:52,760 --> 00:06:57,120 In his poetry of the time, Rossetti was forever idealising women, 105 00:06:57,120 --> 00:07:00,320 but in is relationships with women at the time, he seems to have 106 00:07:00,320 --> 00:07:04,160 had great difficulty in actually expressing himself physically. 107 00:07:04,160 --> 00:07:07,240 So I think of it as the very first picture, 108 00:07:07,240 --> 00:07:10,480 if you like, in his career that is a psychodrama in art. 109 00:07:12,920 --> 00:07:16,080 But the critics didn't like Pre-Raphaelite painting. 110 00:07:16,080 --> 00:07:19,440 Perhaps with Rossetti's Childhood Of The Virgin in mind, 111 00:07:19,440 --> 00:07:23,240 one writer ridiculed their "reproductions of saints 112 00:07:23,240 --> 00:07:25,760 "squeezed out perfectly flat." 113 00:07:25,760 --> 00:07:28,960 And Charles Dickens mockingly proposed 114 00:07:28,960 --> 00:07:33,560 a Pre-Galileo society of those refusing to revolve around the sun. 115 00:07:34,800 --> 00:07:36,200 Rossetti took criticism badly, 116 00:07:36,200 --> 00:07:40,760 and at the age of 22, he gave up exhibiting. 117 00:07:40,760 --> 00:07:44,200 Yet while he was paralysed, all around him was changing. 118 00:07:47,120 --> 00:07:50,440 Britain was on a fast track to industrial revolution, 119 00:07:50,440 --> 00:07:54,200 its economy growing at a steam-propelled pace. 120 00:07:54,200 --> 00:07:57,600 Rossetti was happy to sell his work to rich industrialists, 121 00:07:57,600 --> 00:08:02,520 but was morally opposed to their world of factories and workhouses. 122 00:08:02,520 --> 00:08:07,400 In art, if not reality, he did battle with the forces of progress. 123 00:08:09,360 --> 00:08:12,800 I have a sequence where he challenges the Industrial Revolution 124 00:08:12,800 --> 00:08:17,160 on a penny farthing bicycle, and sleighs the dragon of industry. 125 00:08:22,240 --> 00:08:25,240 I think both he and the rest of the Brotherhood, 126 00:08:25,240 --> 00:08:29,160 they were certainly against industrialisation and mechanisation. 127 00:08:30,480 --> 00:08:33,000 Like many a sensitive Victorian, Rossetti turned 128 00:08:33,000 --> 00:08:37,080 away from the smoke and speeding change to a time that seemed 129 00:08:37,080 --> 00:08:41,320 more coloured by idealism - the Middle Ages. 130 00:08:41,320 --> 00:08:44,600 Certainly Rossetti seemed happier in his dream world. 131 00:08:44,600 --> 00:08:48,680 It was a dream world both he and the other Pre-Raphaelite brethren 132 00:08:48,680 --> 00:08:50,440 were reconstructing. 133 00:08:52,880 --> 00:08:56,320 He returned repeatedly to a story from the poetry of his medieval 134 00:08:56,320 --> 00:09:01,440 namesake, the tale of Dante and Beatrice and their ideal love. 135 00:09:02,640 --> 00:09:05,960 And Rossetti found his own Beatrice in the artist's model 136 00:09:05,960 --> 00:09:09,320 Elizabeth Siddal, a woman whose face would haunt 137 00:09:09,320 --> 00:09:11,760 so many of his pictures, and his life. 138 00:09:15,080 --> 00:09:17,040 Lizzie Siddal was a stunner, 139 00:09:17,040 --> 00:09:19,640 the Pre-Raphaelite word for a beautiful woman. 140 00:09:19,640 --> 00:09:22,480 She'd been spotted working in a hat shop. 141 00:09:22,480 --> 00:09:25,400 Flattered by their attention, she happily agreed to model 142 00:09:25,400 --> 00:09:30,640 for the Brotherhood, famously lying in a cold bath for Millais' Ophelia. 143 00:09:30,640 --> 00:09:33,720 This had done nothing for her already fragile health. 144 00:09:34,840 --> 00:09:37,680 But Lizzie became especially close to Rossetti, 145 00:09:37,680 --> 00:09:40,720 eventually sitting for no-one else but him. 146 00:09:40,720 --> 00:09:42,840 He said later that when he first met her 147 00:09:42,840 --> 00:09:45,280 he felt his destiny was defined. 148 00:09:46,920 --> 00:09:49,960 Lizzie would often visit Rossetti secretly at his new studio 149 00:09:49,960 --> 00:09:52,800 in Blackfriars, just north of the bridge. 150 00:09:54,160 --> 00:09:56,000 Living at Blackfriars, Rossetti found 151 00:09:56,000 --> 00:09:59,640 himself at the epicentre of a rapidly expanding city. 152 00:09:59,640 --> 00:10:02,080 Just north lay Smithfield Market, 153 00:10:02,080 --> 00:10:05,000 which supplied the growing population with meat. 154 00:10:05,000 --> 00:10:07,520 To the west lay the seat of government, 155 00:10:07,520 --> 00:10:09,280 the brand-new Houses of Parliament, 156 00:10:09,280 --> 00:10:11,640 built in the latest neo-Gothic style, 157 00:10:11,640 --> 00:10:16,120 while to the east were the thriving docks of Victorian London, ferrying 158 00:10:16,120 --> 00:10:20,920 goods and passengers to and from the furthest flung parts of the globe. 159 00:10:20,920 --> 00:10:25,120 But Rossetti turned away from this world of change and progress 160 00:10:25,120 --> 00:10:29,760 and withdrew behind closed doors with his lady Lizzie to draw 161 00:10:29,760 --> 00:10:30,800 and to paint. 162 00:10:35,480 --> 00:10:38,840 He drew her obsessively, creating the closest thing in British 163 00:10:38,840 --> 00:10:43,480 art to a cycle of love poetry. A series of intimate drawings, 164 00:10:43,480 --> 00:10:46,960 the equivalent to love sonnets, at once passionate 165 00:10:46,960 --> 00:10:48,880 and deeply coloured by artifice. 166 00:10:52,040 --> 00:10:55,080 Blackfriars Bridge was also the setting for Found, 167 00:10:55,080 --> 00:10:57,400 his only attempt to paint modern life. 168 00:10:58,800 --> 00:11:02,200 The Victorian fashion for moralising scenes lay behind 169 00:11:02,200 --> 00:11:04,720 his choice of this uncongenial subject. 170 00:11:04,720 --> 00:11:09,160 A prostitute confronted by her love, a humble farmer who tries to 171 00:11:09,160 --> 00:11:12,240 shepherd her back into the fold of society. 172 00:11:12,240 --> 00:11:15,280 Rossetti threw himself into the project with vigour, 173 00:11:15,280 --> 00:11:18,120 even travelling to Chiswick to find himself an appropriately 174 00:11:18,120 --> 00:11:20,520 rustic piece of wall to paint from nature. 175 00:11:21,560 --> 00:11:23,440 But his enthusiasm soon waned 176 00:11:23,440 --> 00:11:27,160 and in the end, the painting remains unfinished. 177 00:11:27,160 --> 00:11:29,760 No more really than a coloured drawing. 178 00:11:29,760 --> 00:11:31,960 I think it's a significant failure, 179 00:11:31,960 --> 00:11:36,880 an emblem of Rossetti's inability or reluctance to engage with 180 00:11:36,880 --> 00:11:39,000 the urban realities of the great city 181 00:11:39,000 --> 00:11:40,880 that he found himself living in. 182 00:11:40,880 --> 00:11:42,440 He said so as much himself. 183 00:11:42,440 --> 00:11:46,600 He said, "I'm thoroughly indisposed to ameliorate anybody's 184 00:11:46,600 --> 00:11:48,680 "condition by means of pictures." 185 00:11:53,360 --> 00:11:58,920 Rossetti's art was no help to a poor prostitute, but his hard cash was. 186 00:11:58,920 --> 00:12:00,880 One night he was out walking in central London 187 00:12:00,880 --> 00:12:04,720 when his attention was grabbed by someone flicking peanuts at him. 188 00:12:04,720 --> 00:12:06,480 It was a street walker, 189 00:12:06,480 --> 00:12:10,840 a stunning prostitute by the name of Fanny Cornforth. 190 00:12:10,840 --> 00:12:13,240 Rossetti immediately asked her to model for him. 191 00:12:13,240 --> 00:12:15,880 She agreed and soon after, they'd begun 192 00:12:15,880 --> 00:12:17,880 an intimate sexual relationship. 193 00:12:19,160 --> 00:12:20,880 It was an awakening for Rossetti. 194 00:12:20,880 --> 00:12:23,600 Carnal knowledge changed him and his art. 195 00:12:23,600 --> 00:12:27,000 His poetry became more explicit, more erotic, 196 00:12:27,000 --> 00:12:29,600 phallic symbols began to appear. 197 00:12:29,600 --> 00:12:32,440 But whereas his paintings of Lizzie Siddal had been 198 00:12:32,440 --> 00:12:34,880 the effusions of courtly love, 199 00:12:34,880 --> 00:12:39,480 his portraits of Fanny Cornforth were frankly sensual. 200 00:12:39,480 --> 00:12:42,840 He'd learnt another principle of art, one that had never quite 201 00:12:42,840 --> 00:12:47,000 made it onto the Pre-Raphaelite list - sex sells. 202 00:12:49,800 --> 00:12:52,920 "The mouth that has been kissed loses not its freshness, 203 00:12:52,920 --> 00:12:55,320 "still it renews itself as does the moon." 204 00:12:56,360 --> 00:12:59,960 Rossetti wrote those lines on the back of Bocca Baciata, 205 00:12:59,960 --> 00:13:05,440 based on an old Italian tale about a spectacularly promiscuous beauty. 206 00:13:05,440 --> 00:13:07,760 There's no hint of moral condemnation 207 00:13:07,760 --> 00:13:11,240 in this depiction of Fanny, playing the part to perfection. 208 00:13:11,240 --> 00:13:15,080 And there's no trace of the art of Pre-Raphael, either. 209 00:13:15,080 --> 00:13:18,560 From now on, Rossetti looked to the sensuality of the Venetian 210 00:13:18,560 --> 00:13:23,160 high Renaissance, conjuring the sheen and colour of flesh and blood. 211 00:13:25,400 --> 00:13:29,040 Despite his infatuation with Fanny, Lizzie Siddal was still at 212 00:13:29,040 --> 00:13:31,160 the heart of Rossetti's life. 213 00:13:31,160 --> 00:13:34,560 When her health got so bad that only the opiate laudanum 214 00:13:34,560 --> 00:13:38,880 could dull the pain, he became overwhelmed with pity and guilt. 215 00:13:39,960 --> 00:13:42,000 They married in 1860. 216 00:13:42,000 --> 00:13:46,040 Just a year later, their first and only child was stillborn. 217 00:13:48,480 --> 00:13:54,720 That loss of his daughter haunted Rossetti for the rest of his life. 218 00:13:54,720 --> 00:14:00,080 Later in life he would hear noises in the house, 219 00:14:00,080 --> 00:14:03,920 outside the door of the room, 220 00:14:03,920 --> 00:14:06,080 and believe, 221 00:14:06,080 --> 00:14:09,760 fervently believe, that these were the footsteps, the ghostly 222 00:14:09,760 --> 00:14:14,360 footsteps of his lost daughter at the age she would be then. 223 00:14:14,360 --> 00:14:18,840 So I think those sorrows went very deep into Rossetti's soul. 224 00:14:22,120 --> 00:14:26,960 But most of all, it destroyed Lizzie, and one night in 1862, 225 00:14:26,960 --> 00:14:30,320 Rossetti returned home to find her in a coma from laudanum. 226 00:14:31,360 --> 00:14:33,720 Suicide or not, she never woke up. 227 00:14:35,720 --> 00:14:39,760 At her funeral, beneath her hair, the hair Rossetti had drawn 228 00:14:39,760 --> 00:14:41,720 so many times, he placed 229 00:14:41,720 --> 00:14:46,160 the manuscript of his poems which he now felt were his finest works. 230 00:14:46,160 --> 00:14:49,600 It was a romantic gesture which he would come to regret. 231 00:14:55,880 --> 00:14:58,480 Rossetti felt he could no longer live in Blackfriars - 232 00:14:58,480 --> 00:15:03,520 too many painful memories - so he moved to a large house in Chelsea. 233 00:15:03,520 --> 00:15:06,400 He began to suffer from insomnia and night terrors, 234 00:15:06,400 --> 00:15:08,720 which would dog him to the end of his life. 235 00:15:10,200 --> 00:15:13,200 Perhaps to assuage the grief of having lost both wife 236 00:15:13,200 --> 00:15:17,120 and daughter in such a short space of time, he created a weird 237 00:15:17,120 --> 00:15:21,320 surrogate family in the form of a vast menagerie of exotic animals. 238 00:15:23,200 --> 00:15:26,960 As well as a Pomeranian puppy named Punch, Rossetti acquired 239 00:15:26,960 --> 00:15:29,480 an Irish deerhound called Wolf, 240 00:15:29,480 --> 00:15:32,400 dormice, rabbits, wombats, 241 00:15:32,400 --> 00:15:38,520 peacocks, armadillos, kangaroos, an African bull or zebu, 242 00:15:38,520 --> 00:15:41,960 and a pair of ungulated grass parakeets. 243 00:15:41,960 --> 00:15:45,760 Red in tooth and claw, the animals regularly escaped to cause havoc 244 00:15:45,760 --> 00:15:50,160 in the neighbours' gardens and, just as often, killed and ate each other. 245 00:15:50,160 --> 00:15:53,680 Yet somehow, in this atmosphere halfway between a hothouse 246 00:15:53,680 --> 00:15:56,320 and a madhouse, Rossetti continued to paint. 247 00:15:58,240 --> 00:16:01,360 Rossetti resumed his relationship with Fanny Cornforth, 248 00:16:01,360 --> 00:16:04,400 taking her on as housekeeper-cum-lover. 249 00:16:04,400 --> 00:16:08,200 He painted vigorously, if a little repetitively, in his new, 250 00:16:08,200 --> 00:16:12,920 sensual style, creating take after take of the beautiful woman. 251 00:16:14,880 --> 00:16:19,040 Rossetti was entranced above all by her fine head of hair. 252 00:16:19,040 --> 00:16:21,480 Loose hair signified loose morals. 253 00:16:24,800 --> 00:16:29,800 The sexual suggestiveness of these pictures to the Victorian eye 254 00:16:29,800 --> 00:16:31,720 can't easily be overstated. 255 00:16:31,720 --> 00:16:35,880 They sold like hotcakes - maybe that should be cheesecake - 256 00:16:35,880 --> 00:16:38,200 but Rossetti became plagued by doubts. 257 00:16:40,240 --> 00:16:44,160 In a dark moment, Rossetti said that to be a painter is just 258 00:16:44,160 --> 00:16:48,000 the same as to be a whore and there are signs that he increasingly 259 00:16:48,000 --> 00:16:52,720 feared that he was prostituting his own talents for commercial gain. 260 00:16:52,720 --> 00:16:56,320 Perhaps that's another reason why Found, that picture of a whore 261 00:16:56,320 --> 00:17:00,720 who refuses to mend her ways, ended up unfinished on his easel. 262 00:17:00,720 --> 00:17:05,320 It was too close to the bone, an allegory of his own predicament. 263 00:17:11,200 --> 00:17:13,840 I think the picture that takes us closest to Rossetti's 264 00:17:13,840 --> 00:17:19,800 true feelings is Beata Beatrix, his solemn memorial to his wife, 265 00:17:19,800 --> 00:17:22,560 showing Lizzie as the poet Dante's Beatrice, 266 00:17:22,560 --> 00:17:26,200 being mystically transported from earth to heaven. 267 00:17:26,200 --> 00:17:29,080 But just as in his Annunciation, Rossetti turned 268 00:17:29,080 --> 00:17:33,320 it into a kind of psycho-sexual confession, displacing 269 00:17:33,320 --> 00:17:37,800 Dante's religious symbolism with his own idiosyncratic imagery. 270 00:17:39,080 --> 00:17:43,840 A haloed red dove, like but unlike the traditional dove of 271 00:17:43,840 --> 00:17:47,280 the Holy Spirit, drops the poppy of sleep, and opium, 272 00:17:47,280 --> 00:17:49,960 the laudanum that killed her, into Lizzie's hands. 273 00:17:51,600 --> 00:17:55,880 Her eyes are closed, suggesting a state poised between deathly 274 00:17:55,880 --> 00:17:58,800 ecstasy and drug-induced hallucination. 275 00:18:03,440 --> 00:18:07,680 Yet it remained a picture, an image, Rossetti was never comfortable with. 276 00:18:08,960 --> 00:18:12,760 Rossetti said that an artist often hates his own best work 277 00:18:12,760 --> 00:18:17,120 in the same way as envious souls hate the great works of others. 278 00:18:17,120 --> 00:18:18,280 It's a perpetual reproof. 279 00:18:18,280 --> 00:18:22,040 And I wonder if he had Beata Beatrix, 280 00:18:22,040 --> 00:18:25,760 the still centre of his life and career, perhaps the best picture 281 00:18:25,760 --> 00:18:29,680 he ever painted, in mind when he made that remark. 282 00:18:29,680 --> 00:18:33,480 And as if to sully its purity, he painted numerous inferior 283 00:18:33,480 --> 00:18:35,920 versions of it for his private patrons. 284 00:18:38,200 --> 00:18:41,560 Even Rossetti's oldest supporters felt he'd betrayed his own 285 00:18:41,560 --> 00:18:45,400 Romantic ideals with his endless variants on the sexy stunner. 286 00:18:45,400 --> 00:18:48,360 The critic John Ruskin said these new paintings 287 00:18:48,360 --> 00:18:51,520 were as coarse as the prostitute who modelled for them. 288 00:18:54,680 --> 00:18:56,880 Rossetti's insomnia worsened. 289 00:18:56,880 --> 00:19:00,960 Having been a teetotaller up until now, he turned to whisky to 290 00:19:00,960 --> 00:19:04,280 take away the taste of his prescribed sedative, chloral. 291 00:19:05,400 --> 00:19:11,240 In the late 1860s, he began to suffer severely with disturbed vision 292 00:19:11,240 --> 00:19:15,040 and he felt that he wouldn't be able to paint any more. 293 00:19:16,720 --> 00:19:22,000 And therefore he wanted to try at immortality through his poetry. 294 00:19:22,000 --> 00:19:25,760 He had been collecting his poems together and writing new ones 295 00:19:25,760 --> 00:19:27,560 and revising. 296 00:19:27,560 --> 00:19:33,520 And indeed he had got a full collection of verse ready, 297 00:19:33,520 --> 00:19:37,280 and that was the one that was sacrificed in Lizzie's coffin. 298 00:19:37,280 --> 00:19:40,520 It was practically ready for publication, 299 00:19:40,520 --> 00:19:42,040 so it was a big sacrifice. 300 00:19:43,360 --> 00:19:45,680 He wrestled with himself, but finally, 301 00:19:45,680 --> 00:19:47,640 consumed by literary ambition, 302 00:19:47,640 --> 00:19:51,120 he sought legal permission to have his wife exhumed. 303 00:19:51,120 --> 00:19:56,640 On 5th October 1869, hired men dug up the grave 304 00:19:56,640 --> 00:19:58,440 and retrieved the precious book. 305 00:20:03,120 --> 00:20:05,640 Once the manuscript had been exhumed from the coffin, 306 00:20:05,640 --> 00:20:07,760 it was scraped clean of putrefaction 307 00:20:07,760 --> 00:20:10,120 and placed in disinfectant for two weeks, 308 00:20:10,120 --> 00:20:12,560 before being handed to Rossetti, 309 00:20:12,560 --> 00:20:16,040 who got on with the job of transcribing the verses. 310 00:20:16,040 --> 00:20:20,320 The pages were worm-eaten and the stench, despite the disinfectant, 311 00:20:20,320 --> 00:20:22,520 was said to be unbearable. 312 00:20:22,520 --> 00:20:24,840 But soon the dirty deed was done. 313 00:20:24,840 --> 00:20:28,120 Rossetti felt justified. As far as he was concerned, 314 00:20:28,120 --> 00:20:30,360 his creative salvation was at hand. 315 00:20:32,400 --> 00:20:34,880 Spurred on by the retrieval of his poems, 316 00:20:34,880 --> 00:20:38,440 Rossetti wrote a mass of new verse in his quest for fame, 317 00:20:38,440 --> 00:20:40,480 some of it daringly erotic, 318 00:20:40,480 --> 00:20:43,680 inspired by the new woman in his life, Janey Morris, 319 00:20:43,680 --> 00:20:46,640 wife of his best friend, the artist William Morris. 320 00:20:47,680 --> 00:20:50,440 Rossetti's love life, as ever, was complicated. 321 00:20:53,720 --> 00:20:56,520 He really couldn't get the muse and the stunner together 322 00:20:56,520 --> 00:20:57,720 in his erotic life. 323 00:20:57,720 --> 00:21:00,360 He couldn't get his sexual life together at all, 324 00:21:00,360 --> 00:21:06,240 but what it did do is, I think, to enable him to understand desire. 325 00:21:06,240 --> 00:21:10,560 It enabled him to experience the erotic in a way I think 326 00:21:10,560 --> 00:21:15,080 that very few people of his generation really did. 327 00:21:15,080 --> 00:21:18,240 It seems to me that what's important about him 328 00:21:18,240 --> 00:21:22,160 is that capacity to open up erotic experience seriously, 329 00:21:22,160 --> 00:21:24,440 not just express some kind of... 330 00:21:25,920 --> 00:21:27,160 ..tumultuous feeling. 331 00:21:28,440 --> 00:21:30,760 This hour be her sweet body all my song - 332 00:21:32,240 --> 00:21:35,920 Now the same heartbeat blends her gaze with mine - 333 00:21:35,920 --> 00:21:37,480 One parted fire 334 00:21:37,480 --> 00:21:39,280 Love's silent countersign: 335 00:21:40,800 --> 00:21:42,880 Her arms lie wide open 336 00:21:42,880 --> 00:21:46,200 Throbbing with their throng of confluent pulses 337 00:21:46,200 --> 00:21:49,840 Bare and fair and strong: 338 00:21:49,840 --> 00:21:52,560 And her deep-freighted lips expect me now 339 00:21:52,560 --> 00:21:55,240 Amidst the clustering hair that shrines her brow 340 00:21:55,240 --> 00:21:57,320 Five kisses broad 341 00:21:57,320 --> 00:21:58,520 Her neck 342 00:21:58,520 --> 00:22:00,200 Ten kisses long. 343 00:22:01,320 --> 00:22:04,440 Rossetti was writing about 344 00:22:04,440 --> 00:22:10,320 a century which was opening itself up to the erotic, to sexuality, 345 00:22:10,320 --> 00:22:13,000 to, concurrently with that, 346 00:22:13,000 --> 00:22:18,360 commodity culture, where the primacy of tasting, of touching, 347 00:22:18,360 --> 00:22:20,360 of feeling things, 348 00:22:20,360 --> 00:22:22,720 of feeling things, surfaces, 349 00:22:22,720 --> 00:22:24,680 was acutely important. 350 00:22:24,680 --> 00:22:26,920 He was a poet 351 00:22:26,920 --> 00:22:30,720 writing for a new modern identity. 352 00:22:32,240 --> 00:22:35,400 Rossetti hoped that his poems, published in 1870, 353 00:22:35,400 --> 00:22:37,560 would make his name live for ever, 354 00:22:37,560 --> 00:22:40,760 but the critics - James Buchanan in particular - 355 00:22:40,760 --> 00:22:42,320 were not impressed. 356 00:22:42,320 --> 00:22:45,280 "There was no soul in this verse," said Buchanan, 357 00:22:45,280 --> 00:22:46,680 "only body." 358 00:22:46,680 --> 00:22:49,280 And what an ugly body it was. 359 00:22:49,280 --> 00:22:52,680 Females who bite, scratch, scream, 360 00:22:52,680 --> 00:22:55,280 bubble, munch, sweat, 361 00:22:55,280 --> 00:22:57,680 writhe, wriggle, twist, 362 00:22:57,680 --> 00:23:01,840 foam and, in a general way, slaver over their lovers. 363 00:23:01,840 --> 00:23:03,480 There was worse to come. 364 00:23:03,480 --> 00:23:08,280 He insinuated that this impure art and poetry had its wellsprings 365 00:23:08,280 --> 00:23:10,080 in an impure life, 366 00:23:10,080 --> 00:23:13,200 that Rossetti was an adulterer, a libertine. 367 00:23:13,200 --> 00:23:16,680 The critic's shiver of disgust was almost palpable. 368 00:23:16,680 --> 00:23:19,720 And as for Rossetti, he was devastated. 369 00:23:23,680 --> 00:23:26,480 Not had only Buchanan destroyed his good name, 370 00:23:26,480 --> 00:23:30,920 but he'd given voice to Rossetti's own worst fear about himself - 371 00:23:30,920 --> 00:23:36,440 that his spiritual, idealistic side was just a mask, a sham, 372 00:23:36,440 --> 00:23:39,480 and that he was nothing but a grubby little sensualist. 373 00:23:40,600 --> 00:23:44,000 Rossetti expressed this himself in an extraordinary poem, 374 00:23:44,000 --> 00:23:46,400 Lost Days, in which he is confronted 375 00:23:46,400 --> 00:23:49,400 by all the former selves that he once was 376 00:23:49,400 --> 00:23:51,560 and whom he's buried for gain. 377 00:23:51,560 --> 00:23:56,800 "I am thyself - what hast thou done to me?", each one says to him, 378 00:23:56,800 --> 00:23:59,840 pledging to haunt him for all eternity. 379 00:24:00,920 --> 00:24:04,520 Rossetti fell into paranoia and hallucinations. 380 00:24:04,520 --> 00:24:07,480 The nightmare of his poem became reality. 381 00:24:07,480 --> 00:24:10,200 It was too much, and one night, 382 00:24:10,200 --> 00:24:12,360 Rossetti took an overdose of laudanum. 383 00:24:19,560 --> 00:24:22,040 Rossetti's suicide attempt failed 384 00:24:22,040 --> 00:24:25,160 and he was nursed back to health by Janey Morris. 385 00:24:25,160 --> 00:24:28,120 Their relationship became even closer. 386 00:24:28,120 --> 00:24:31,960 William Morris turned a blind eye to the affair to save his marriage. 387 00:24:31,960 --> 00:24:33,760 He took a joint lease with Rossetti 388 00:24:33,760 --> 00:24:36,040 on a country house called Kelmscott Manor 389 00:24:36,040 --> 00:24:40,160 and then promptly left the country, leaving the two lovers together. 390 00:24:40,160 --> 00:24:44,960 At Kelmscott, Rossetti and Janey enjoyed one idyllic summer 391 00:24:44,960 --> 00:24:47,440 and he recovered the inspiration to paint. 392 00:24:49,120 --> 00:24:51,800 Particularly during the early years of their relationship, 393 00:24:51,800 --> 00:24:53,840 Rossetti painted Janey Morris 394 00:24:53,840 --> 00:24:58,040 as a languid, melancholic, rather passive muse. 395 00:24:58,040 --> 00:25:01,160 But in reality, she was an extremely active collaborator 396 00:25:01,160 --> 00:25:02,560 in her own image, 397 00:25:02,560 --> 00:25:06,800 and therefore in the creation of the Rossettian femme fatale. 398 00:25:06,800 --> 00:25:10,360 Unlike most Victorian women, she didn't wear hoops and stays, 399 00:25:10,360 --> 00:25:14,240 but just these extraordinary long, flowing gowns. 400 00:25:14,240 --> 00:25:16,800 She experimented with different poses 401 00:25:16,800 --> 00:25:21,200 and she grew her hair into this amazing, thick forest 402 00:25:21,200 --> 00:25:23,240 of dark, wiry curls. 403 00:25:24,400 --> 00:25:26,920 Like a model with a celebrity photographer, 404 00:25:26,920 --> 00:25:30,120 Janey posed for the photos that Rossetti styled, 405 00:25:30,120 --> 00:25:33,120 which he then transformed into living colour. 406 00:25:36,000 --> 00:25:38,280 But their relationship couldn't last. 407 00:25:38,280 --> 00:25:40,920 Her young children began to ask awkward questions 408 00:25:40,920 --> 00:25:43,160 about "Uncle Dante". 409 00:25:43,160 --> 00:25:46,320 In 1874, she pushed him away - 410 00:25:46,320 --> 00:25:50,000 away from Kelmscott and into a terminal depression. 411 00:25:51,640 --> 00:25:54,760 Rossetti's patrons began to get impatient 412 00:25:54,760 --> 00:25:57,440 with the dark tones of his painting 413 00:25:57,440 --> 00:26:00,760 and so he tried, rather self-consciously, 414 00:26:00,760 --> 00:26:05,880 to lighten the palette and to make them more cheerful. 415 00:26:05,880 --> 00:26:09,000 But his heart wasn't in that all - 416 00:26:09,000 --> 00:26:12,920 his heart was really in those very dark, and somewhat disturbing, 417 00:26:12,920 --> 00:26:14,520 portraits of Janey. 418 00:26:15,680 --> 00:26:18,080 Rossetti had always said he lived for love 419 00:26:18,080 --> 00:26:21,080 and, in the end, he died for the lack of it. 420 00:26:21,080 --> 00:26:27,280 In 1882, at the age of 53, racked by his addictions, he died. 421 00:26:40,360 --> 00:26:42,640 Rossetti can easily come across 422 00:26:42,640 --> 00:26:45,000 as a terminally nostalgic artist, 423 00:26:45,000 --> 00:26:48,280 a painter mired in a fantasy vision of the past - 424 00:26:48,280 --> 00:26:53,160 a typical British cul-de-sac, an artist going nowhere. 425 00:26:53,160 --> 00:26:58,800 Rossetti doesn't give us perhaps what we think late 19th century art, 426 00:26:58,800 --> 00:27:01,360 great late 19th century art, SHOULD give us. 427 00:27:01,360 --> 00:27:05,080 He doesn't give us the transient glimpse of urban experience. 428 00:27:05,080 --> 00:27:08,280 He doesn't give us what Degas or Manet or Monet give us. 429 00:27:08,280 --> 00:27:11,200 He does give us something else, something very interesting - 430 00:27:11,200 --> 00:27:15,360 a kind of glimpse of psychological reality, 431 00:27:15,360 --> 00:27:18,160 much disguised, veiled as allegory. 432 00:27:18,160 --> 00:27:21,040 But he paints a certain kind of uneasiness. 433 00:27:21,040 --> 00:27:24,640 He...struggles with his own relationships, 434 00:27:24,640 --> 00:27:27,520 his aspirations, his dreams, his desires, 435 00:27:27,520 --> 00:27:30,560 and he finds a way of compressing them 436 00:27:30,560 --> 00:27:34,840 into these strange, rich, dreamy pictures. 437 00:27:37,920 --> 00:27:41,400 I think his work inaugurates a whole strain of modern art 438 00:27:41,400 --> 00:27:43,720 in which painters would attempt 439 00:27:43,720 --> 00:27:47,120 to merge their own personal experience 440 00:27:47,120 --> 00:27:49,960 with the archetypal forms of myth. 441 00:27:49,960 --> 00:27:54,520 One of the most famous exponents of that strain or form of modernism 442 00:27:54,520 --> 00:27:56,840 was Picasso and, interestingly enough, 443 00:27:56,840 --> 00:27:59,840 Picasso actually owned up to being influenced 444 00:27:59,840 --> 00:28:03,800 by the languorous dreams of the Pre-Raphaelites and of Rossetti 445 00:28:03,800 --> 00:28:06,400 when he embarked on his early work. 446 00:28:06,400 --> 00:28:09,560 So although Rossetti was fixated on the past, 447 00:28:09,560 --> 00:28:12,600 he was also a prophet of the future. 448 00:28:12,600 --> 00:28:15,880 No-one had ever painted their own psychic autobiography 449 00:28:15,880 --> 00:28:19,320 in this strange, sexy, haunting way. 450 00:28:19,320 --> 00:28:22,040 Without knowing it, Rossetti had opened 451 00:28:22,040 --> 00:28:25,840 a whole new world of possibilities for modern painting.