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She is a siren and a temptress.
Full lips, dark, melancholy eyes, pools to drown in.
Long, luxuriant tresses of hair, which she
winds like her beauty around the hearts of her victims.
She knows the secrets of the damned.
She is as mysterious as the ocean is deep.
The beautiful but dangerous woman, the belle dame sans merci,
enthralled the 19th-century imagination.
But her enduring image was fixed for ever by one man,
a Pre-Raphaelite artist and poet, Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
In creating image after image of his perfect woman,
he reinvented the ideal of female beauty for an entire generation.
But the key to Rossetti lies in the compulsions that drove him.
Behind the art was a man plagued by drugs and alcohol,
by failed loves and mental depression.
And almost paralysed by the fear of criticism.
Convinced that he'd failed as a painter,
but determined to achieve immortality as a poet,
he actually dug his own wife's corpse out of
this grave in Highgate Cemetery, to retrieve a manuscript
of verses which he'd buried with her in a fit of grief-stricken passion.
With that act of grizzly exhumation began the last act
of his tragedy, a classic 19th-century tale of love and death.
Rossetti hated showing his work in public and since his death
in 1882, there have been
surprisingly few exhibitions of his work.
This show at the Walker Gallery in Liverpool is the first major
reappraisal for more than a generation.
Every picture tells a psychological story,
and taken together, Rossetti's works amount to a journey through
his life, an intimate glimpse of his loves, desires and anxieties.
At the heart of it all are images of the three women who
dominated his life.
The wife whose early death would haunt him to his own grave.
The prostitute who first awoke him to the pleasures of the flesh.
And the forbidden lover who inspired his last words of poetry
and his last painting.
Aaargh!
Rossetti lived through revolutionary times.
His father was an Italian literary scholar and political radical
who fled his homeland after a failed uprising in 1820.
Named after the Italian poet, Dante Gabriel Rossetti was born in London.
A shy, bookish child, he immersed himself in Arthurian legends
and medieval poetry.
He was the child of a father
who was in exile and who was intending to return
and take his family with him.
And the whole family kind of lived their lives in expectation of
returning to Italy and making a new, a different life there.
Rossetti was caught up in that youthful idealism of 1848
and the democratic revolutions across Europe.
And it was, I think,
the failure of that revolution in Italy
that dashed all the hopes
of returning to the country of his origin
and caused Rossetti to turn right away from politics
and the modern world and return to a fictive,
imaginative world that is not this one.
But to express his imagination in paint,
Rossetti had to learn the rules.
He went to the Royal Academy, but soon rebelled.
The idea of a training that involved years of copying ancient statues
filled him with horror.
He joined forces with fellow students William Holman Hunt
and John Everett Millais, who would go on with Rossetti to form
a brotherhood, a Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
Like knights of the Round Table, they had their code
of honour which they wrote down in the form of a manifesto.
Goal number one, to have genuine ideas to express.
Goal two, to study nature attentively.
Goal three, to sympathise with what is heartfelt,
serious and direct in previous art.
And goal number four, most indispensible of all,
to produce thoroughly good paintings and statues.
Easier said than done.
Their touchstone was art from before the time of Raphael.
The clear lines of Florentine fresco painting.
The jewel-like colours of early Flemish art.
And this, Ecce Ancilla Domini, Behold The Handmaiden Of The Lord,
was Rossetti's first attempt to show his audience what
he thought a Pre-Raphaelite painting should look like.
It's a cross between Van Eyck and Botticelli.
Very thin paint, sparely applied
and with a pious subject reflecting the idealism of the group.
It's an annunciation scene.
Gabriel - in fact, Rossetti's brother, William - is arriving to
announce to the Virgin Mary that she will indeed be the Mother of God.
And he holds this symbolic lily stem, pointing it at her womb.
The Virgin, the girl, she stares at this lily with
a kind of mixture of fear and compulsion, almost a kind of terror.
There's something very strange about this claustrophobic interior
with its Victorian sick bed atmosphere.
She's a tubercular maiden, she looks ill,
she shrinks away from the annunciate angel.
And what I've never noticed before was that Rossetti's made
her hair - and he is the great Victorian painter of hair -
he's made her hair into a kind of seismograph of her uneasiness.
It flickers electrically.
There are strange little strands going here, there and everywhere.
It seems to dramatise some kind of deep-seated uneasiness,
some kind of fear, perhaps fear of the sexual act.
In his poetry of the time, Rossetti was forever idealising women,
but in is relationships with women at the time, he seems to have
had great difficulty in actually expressing himself physically.
So I think of it as the very first picture,
if you like, in his career that is a psychodrama in art.
But the critics didn't like Pre-Raphaelite painting.
Perhaps with Rossetti's Childhood Of The Virgin in mind,
one writer ridiculed their "reproductions of saints
"squeezed out perfectly flat."
And Charles Dickens mockingly proposed
a Pre-Galileo society of those refusing to revolve around the sun.
Rossetti took criticism badly,
and at the age of 22, he gave up exhibiting.
Yet while he was paralysed, all around him was changing.
Britain was on a fast track to industrial revolution,
its economy growing at a steam-propelled pace.
Rossetti was happy to sell his work to rich industrialists,
but was morally opposed to their world of factories and workhouses.
In art, if not reality, he did battle with the forces of progress.
I have a sequence where he challenges the Industrial Revolution
on a penny farthing bicycle, and sleighs the dragon of industry.
I think both he and the rest of the Brotherhood,
they were certainly against industrialisation and mechanisation.
Like many a sensitive Victorian, Rossetti turned
away from the smoke and speeding change to a time that seemed
more coloured by idealism - the Middle Ages.
Certainly Rossetti seemed happier in his dream world.
It was a dream world both he and the other Pre-Raphaelite brethren
were reconstructing.
He returned repeatedly to a story from the poetry of his medieval
namesake, the tale of Dante and Beatrice and their ideal love.
And Rossetti found his own Beatrice in the artist's model
Elizabeth Siddal, a woman whose face would haunt
so many of his pictures, and his life.
Lizzie Siddal was a stunner,
the Pre-Raphaelite word for a beautiful woman.
She'd been spotted working in a hat shop.
Flattered by their attention, she happily agreed to model
for the Brotherhood, famously lying in a cold bath for Millais' Ophelia.
This had done nothing for her already fragile health.
But Lizzie became especially close to Rossetti,
eventually sitting for no-one else but him.
He said later that when he first met her
he felt his destiny was defined.
Lizzie would often visit Rossetti secretly at his new studio
in Blackfriars, just north of the bridge.
Living at Blackfriars, Rossetti found
himself at the epicentre of a rapidly expanding city.
Just north lay Smithfield Market,
which supplied the growing population with meat.
To the west lay the seat of government,
the brand-new Houses of Parliament,
built in the latest neo-Gothic style,
while to the east were the thriving docks of Victorian London, ferrying
goods and passengers to and from the furthest flung parts of the globe.
But Rossetti turned away from this world of change and progress
and withdrew behind closed doors with his lady Lizzie to draw
and to paint.
He drew her obsessively, creating the closest thing in British
art to a cycle of love poetry. A series of intimate drawings,
the equivalent to love sonnets, at once passionate
and deeply coloured by artifice.
Blackfriars Bridge was also the setting for Found,
his only attempt to paint modern life.
The Victorian fashion for moralising scenes lay behind
his choice of this uncongenial subject.
A prostitute confronted by her love, a humble farmer who tries to
shepherd her back into the fold of society.
Rossetti threw himself into the project with vigour,
even travelling to Chiswick to find himself an appropriately
rustic piece of wall to paint from nature.
But his enthusiasm soon waned
and in the end, the painting remains unfinished.
No more really than a coloured drawing.
I think it's a significant failure,
an emblem of Rossetti's inability or reluctance to engage with
the urban realities of the great city
that he found himself living in.
He said so as much himself.
He said, "I'm thoroughly indisposed to ameliorate anybody's
"condition by means of pictures."
Rossetti's art was no help to a poor prostitute, but his hard cash was.
One night he was out walking in central London
when his attention was grabbed by someone flicking peanuts at him.
It was a street walker,
a stunning prostitute by the name of Fanny Cornforth.
Rossetti immediately asked her to model for him.
She agreed and soon after, they'd begun
an intimate sexual relationship.
It was an awakening for Rossetti.
Carnal knowledge changed him and his art.
His poetry became more explicit, more erotic,
phallic symbols began to appear.
But whereas his paintings of Lizzie Siddal had been
the effusions of courtly love,
his portraits of Fanny Cornforth were frankly sensual.
He'd learnt another principle of art, one that had never quite
made it onto the Pre-Raphaelite list - sex sells.
"The mouth that has been kissed loses not its freshness,
"still it renews itself as does the moon."
Rossetti wrote those lines on the back of Bocca Baciata,
based on an old Italian tale about a spectacularly promiscuous beauty.
There's no hint of moral condemnation
in this depiction of Fanny, playing the part to perfection.
And there's no trace of the art of Pre-Raphael, either.
From now on, Rossetti looked to the sensuality of the Venetian
high Renaissance, conjuring the sheen and colour of flesh and blood.
Despite his infatuation with Fanny, Lizzie Siddal was still at
the heart of Rossetti's life.
When her health got so bad that only the opiate laudanum
could dull the pain, he became overwhelmed with pity and guilt.
They married in 1860.
Just a year later, their first and only child was stillborn.
That loss of his daughter haunted Rossetti for the rest of his life.
Later in life he would hear noises in the house,
outside the door of the room,
and believe,
fervently believe, that these were the footsteps, the ghostly
footsteps of his lost daughter at the age she would be then.
So I think those sorrows went very deep into Rossetti's soul.
But most of all, it destroyed Lizzie, and one night in 1862,
Rossetti returned home to find her in a coma from laudanum.
Suicide or not, she never woke up.
At her funeral, beneath her hair, the hair Rossetti had drawn
so many times, he placed
the manuscript of his poems which he now felt were his finest works.
It was a romantic gesture which he would come to regret.
Rossetti felt he could no longer live in Blackfriars -
too many painful memories - so he moved to a large house in Chelsea.
He began to suffer from insomnia and night terrors,
which would dog him to the end of his life.
Perhaps to assuage the grief of having lost both wife
and daughter in such a short space of time, he created a weird
surrogate family in the form of a vast menagerie of exotic animals.
As well as a Pomeranian puppy named Punch, Rossetti acquired
an Irish deerhound called Wolf,
dormice, rabbits, wombats,
peacocks, armadillos, kangaroos, an African bull or zebu,
and a pair of ungulated grass parakeets.
Red in tooth and claw, the animals regularly escaped to cause havoc
in the neighbours' gardens and, just as often, killed and ate each other.
Yet somehow, in this atmosphere halfway between a hothouse
and a madhouse, Rossetti continued to paint.
Rossetti resumed his relationship with Fanny Cornforth,
taking her on as housekeeper-cum-lover.
He painted vigorously, if a little repetitively, in his new,
sensual style, creating take after take of the beautiful woman.
Rossetti was entranced above all by her fine head of hair.
Loose hair signified loose morals.
The sexual suggestiveness of these pictures to the Victorian eye
can't easily be overstated.
They sold like hotcakes - maybe that should be cheesecake -
but Rossetti became plagued by doubts.
In a dark moment, Rossetti said that to be a painter is just
the same as to be a whore and there are signs that he increasingly
feared that he was prostituting his own talents for commercial gain.
Perhaps that's another reason why Found, that picture of a whore
who refuses to mend her ways, ended up unfinished on his easel.
It was too close to the bone, an allegory of his own predicament.
I think the picture that takes us closest to Rossetti's
true feelings is Beata Beatrix, his solemn memorial to his wife,
showing Lizzie as the poet Dante's Beatrice,
being mystically transported from earth to heaven.
But just as in his Annunciation, Rossetti turned
it into a kind of psycho-sexual confession, displacing
Dante's religious symbolism with his own idiosyncratic imagery.
A haloed red dove, like but unlike the traditional dove of
the Holy Spirit, drops the poppy of sleep, and opium,
the laudanum that killed her, into Lizzie's hands.
Her eyes are closed, suggesting a state poised between deathly
ecstasy and drug-induced hallucination.
Yet it remained a picture, an image, Rossetti was never comfortable with.
Rossetti said that an artist often hates his own best work
in the same way as envious souls hate the great works of others.
It's a perpetual reproof.
And I wonder if he had Beata Beatrix,
the still centre of his life and career, perhaps the best picture
he ever painted, in mind when he made that remark.
And as if to sully its purity, he painted numerous inferior
versions of it for his private patrons.
Even Rossetti's oldest supporters felt he'd betrayed his own
Romantic ideals with his endless variants on the sexy stunner.
The critic John Ruskin said these new paintings
were as coarse as the prostitute who modelled for them.
Rossetti's insomnia worsened.
Having been a teetotaller up until now, he turned to whisky to
take away the taste of his prescribed sedative, chloral.
In the late 1860s, he began to suffer severely with disturbed vision
and he felt that he wouldn't be able to paint any more.
And therefore he wanted to try at immortality through his poetry.
He had been collecting his poems together and writing new ones
and revising.
And indeed he had got a full collection of verse ready,
and that was the one that was sacrificed in Lizzie's coffin.
It was practically ready for publication,
so it was a big sacrifice.
He wrestled with himself, but finally,
consumed by literary ambition,
he sought legal permission to have his wife exhumed.
On 5th October 1869, hired men dug up the grave
and retrieved the precious book.
Once the manuscript had been exhumed from the coffin,
it was scraped clean of putrefaction
and placed in disinfectant for two weeks,
before being handed to Rossetti,
who got on with the job of transcribing the verses.
The pages were worm-eaten and the stench, despite the disinfectant,
was said to be unbearable.
But soon the dirty deed was done.
Rossetti felt justified. As far as he was concerned,
his creative salvation was at hand.
Spurred on by the retrieval of his poems,
Rossetti wrote a mass of new verse in his quest for fame,
some of it daringly erotic,
inspired by the new woman in his life, Janey Morris,
wife of his best friend, the artist William Morris.
Rossetti's love life, as ever, was complicated.
He really couldn't get the muse and the stunner together
in his erotic life.
He couldn't get his sexual life together at all,
but what it did do is, I think, to enable him to understand desire.
It enabled him to experience the erotic in a way I think
that very few people of his generation really did.
It seems to me that what's important about him
is that capacity to open up erotic experience seriously,
not just express some kind of...
..tumultuous feeling.
This hour be her sweet body all my song -
Now the same heartbeat blends her gaze with mine -
One parted fire
Love's silent countersign:
Her arms lie wide open
Throbbing with their throng of confluent pulses
Bare and fair and strong:
And her deep-freighted lips expect me now
Amidst the clustering hair that shrines her brow
Five kisses broad
Her neck
Ten kisses long.
Rossetti was writing about
a century which was opening itself up to the erotic, to sexuality,
to, concurrently with that,
commodity culture, where the primacy of tasting, of touching,
of feeling things,
of feeling things, surfaces,
was acutely important.
He was a poet
writing for a new modern identity.
Rossetti hoped that his poems, published in 1870,
would make his name live for ever,
but the critics - James Buchanan in particular -
were not impressed.
"There was no soul in this verse," said Buchanan,
"only body."
And what an ugly body it was.
Females who bite, scratch, scream,
bubble, munch, sweat,
writhe, wriggle, twist,
foam and, in a general way, slaver over their lovers.
There was worse to come.
He insinuated that this impure art and poetry had its wellsprings
in an impure life,
that Rossetti was an adulterer, a libertine.
The critic's shiver of disgust was almost palpable.
And as for Rossetti, he was devastated.
Not had only Buchanan destroyed his good name,
but he'd given voice to Rossetti's own worst fear about himself -
that his spiritual, idealistic side was just a mask, a sham,
and that he was nothing but a grubby little sensualist.
Rossetti expressed this himself in an extraordinary poem,
Lost Days, in which he is confronted
by all the former selves that he once was
and whom he's buried for gain.
"I am thyself - what hast thou done to me?", each one says to him,
pledging to haunt him for all eternity.
Rossetti fell into paranoia and hallucinations.
The nightmare of his poem became reality.
It was too much, and one night,
Rossetti took an overdose of laudanum.
Rossetti's suicide attempt failed
and he was nursed back to health by Janey Morris.
Their relationship became even closer.
William Morris turned a blind eye to the affair to save his marriage.
He took a joint lease with Rossetti
on a country house called Kelmscott Manor
and then promptly left the country, leaving the two lovers together.
At Kelmscott, Rossetti and Janey enjoyed one idyllic summer
and he recovered the inspiration to paint.
Particularly during the early years of their relationship,
Rossetti painted Janey Morris
as a languid, melancholic, rather passive muse.
But in reality, she was an extremely active collaborator
in her own image,
and therefore in the creation of the Rossettian femme fatale.
Unlike most Victorian women, she didn't wear hoops and stays,
but just these extraordinary long, flowing gowns.
She experimented with different poses
and she grew her hair into this amazing, thick forest
of dark, wiry curls.
Like a model with a celebrity photographer,
Janey posed for the photos that Rossetti styled,
which he then transformed into living colour.
But their relationship couldn't last.
Her young children began to ask awkward questions
about "Uncle Dante".
In 1874, she pushed him away -
away from Kelmscott and into a terminal depression.
Rossetti's patrons began to get impatient
with the dark tones of his painting
and so he tried, rather self-consciously,
to lighten the palette and to make them more cheerful.
But his heart wasn't in that all -
his heart was really in those very dark, and somewhat disturbing,
portraits of Janey.
Rossetti had always said he lived for love
and, in the end, he died for the lack of it.
In 1882, at the age of 53, racked by his addictions, he died.
Rossetti can easily come across
as a terminally nostalgic artist,
a painter mired in a fantasy vision of the past -
a typical British cul-de-sac, an artist going nowhere.
Rossetti doesn't give us perhaps what we think late 19th century art,
great late 19th century art, SHOULD give us.
He doesn't give us the transient glimpse of urban experience.
He doesn't give us what Degas or Manet or Monet give us.
He does give us something else, something very interesting -
a kind of glimpse of psychological reality,
much disguised, veiled as allegory.
But he paints a certain kind of uneasiness.
He...struggles with his own relationships,
his aspirations, his dreams, his desires,
and he finds a way of compressing them
into these strange, rich, dreamy pictures.
I think his work inaugurates a whole strain of modern art
in which painters would attempt
to merge their own personal experience
with the archetypal forms of myth.
One of the most famous exponents of that strain or form of modernism
was Picasso and, interestingly enough,
Picasso actually owned up to being influenced
by the languorous dreams of the Pre-Raphaelites and of Rossetti
when he embarked on his early work.
So although Rossetti was fixated on the past,
he was also a prophet of the future.
No-one had ever painted their own psychic autobiography
in this strange, sexy, haunting way.
Without knowing it, Rossetti had opened
a whole new world of possibilities for modern painting.