ROSSETTI, Dante Gabriel

A Sea-Spell was painted for Rossetti’s patron Frederick Leyland, a ship magnate who owned a large number of paintings by the artist. Rossetti first planned to illustrate lines from Coleridge’s poem Kubla Khan - “A damsel with a dulcimer / In a vision once I saw” - but the subject was ultimately derived from his own poem, inscribed on the frame that he designed. The musician’s “lashing fingers weave the sweet-strung spell” of the siren, a mythological figure whose voice lures sailors to their deaths.

Although sirens were traditionally described as women with the bodies or heads of birds, Rossetti’s enchantress retains her human form. The artist evokes all of the senses in his lushly claustrophobic canvas; the siren’s dreamy mien suggests that she, too, has been bewitched by the music and by the fragrance of the surrounding flowers. The subject of the dangerous woman, or “femme fatale,” flourished in the nineteenth century.

Rossetti’s inspiration was Dante’s La Vita Nuova (The New Life), which explores the Italian poet’s idealised love for Beatrice and her premature death. As an omen of death, a bird drops a white poppy between her open hands. In the background the ghostly Dante gazes towards the figure of Love. Rossetti viewed this as a memorial to his wife and the model for Beatrice, Elizabeth Siddall, who had died in 1862. Rossetti had buried the manuscripts of his unpublished poems including On the Vita Nuova of Dante with his wife but, in a macabre twist, retrieved and published them in 1870.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti was one of the three important painters of the group of young artists who, weary of the conventions of history painting and genre imagery , had come together in 1848 to form the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He chose in 1850 to offer his painting representing an Annunciation or Ecce Ancilla Domini! to the National Institution (which unlike the Royal Academy, did not have a jury. This was one of the pre-Raphaelites’ boldest attempts to revolutionize iconography by means of an unusual setting (the Virgin is on a bed rather than at her prie-dieu) and above all by means of a symbolic treatment of colour, with a predominance of White as the sign of virginity and a small number of notes of primary colours (blue, associated with the Virgin, the red of Christ’s blood, and a faintly coppery yellow-gold in the Virgin’s auburn hair. The work was unfavourably received, with the critics complaining that it was too full of ideas and in fact constituted more a symbol of virginity and femininity than a religious representation.

The painting is signed and dated “DGR March 1850”.

Members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, rejecting the constraints of convention, turned to nature and studied ‘the primitives’ including Fra Angelico, whom they admired for the grace and sweetness of his work. In 1853, Rossetti portrayed the friar painting the Virgin and Child, a theme inspired by Vasari.

The alternate title of the painting is The Lady of Pity.

Rossetti was particularly interested in colour harmonies, such as the Venetian yellows tempered with red and green of Monna Vanna, which Rossetti painted in 1866. A sumptuous echo of Raphael’s Portrait of Joan of Aragon, Monna Vanna is built up of many circles, emphasizing its fullness - in the dress, the hair, the fan, the jewelry, the necklace, and even the pot of roses in the background.

Rossetti was a poet as well as an artist. His poem “The Blessed Damozel” was first composed in 1847, when he was nineteen, and he continued to revise it until just before his death. William Graham, one of the artist’s most faithful patrons, commissioned a painting of its subject in 1871. The poem uses archaic language to describe the damozel, or damsel, leaning out of heaven - “the rampart of God’s house” - to behold her earthbound lover. The painting takes the form of a Renaissance altarpiece, with the damozel as a surrogate for the Virgin Mary.

Graham, an avid collector of early Renaissance paintings, suggested that he add the predella (the panel or step traditionally found below the main part of an altarpiece) with the reclining lover in a terrestrial landscape. The two-part frame, designed by the artist, emphasizes the separation between heaven and earth - the “gold bar” described in the poem.