International studio (35.1908)

HE NEW ROSSETTI WATER
COLOR IN THE METROPOLI-
TAN MUSEUM
BY ELISABETH LUTHER CARY
Every one familiar with Rossetti’s life knows
with what enthusiasm he welcomed the Flemish
Primitives on his memorable visit to Bruges and
Ghent while he was still more or less a novice
in the art of painting and keener, so far as
his letters show, in his dislikes of famous masters
than in his likings. It was promptly affirmed, how-
ever, in the abounding slang of his ebullient youth,
that both Memling and van Eyck were “ stunners ”
and intricate little poems filled with lovely imagery
were written on their works. There is nothing
remarkable in this effect upon a sensitive and
romantic mind of such a painting as, for example,
the Mystic Lamb of the van Eycks, concerning
which a quarter of a century later Fromentin wrote:
“ The mind can pause here perpetually, dream here
forever, without penetrating the depths of what it
expresses or what it evokes. The eye in the same
way can delight itself therein, without exhausting
the extraordinary wealth of the pleasure it causes
or the instruction it conveys to us.” The school of
the Primitives seems to have been the only class of
painting that exercised a decipherable influence
upon Rossetti’s own painting, from which even this
influence early was withdrawn. That it ever ex-
isted is, indeed, a moot point with the most in-
structed of his critics.
Putting aside problems of cause and effect there
are, in any case, certain resemblances between
Rossetti’s first pictures, some of which were painted
before the visit to Belgium, and the beautiful art
that represents the youth of the Flemish school.
There is the same delicate attention to reality in
the drawing and the same tendency to naive dis-
tortions that leave the essential truth unharmed,
there is the same profusion of rich detail, and the
use of charming patterns to enhance the various
accessories, there is the same sense of mystic life in
the fine tender types, the hint of saintliness mingled
with great beauties of contour and features. Espe-

cially there is an exquisite timidity of touch, a re-
spect for the material and a close anxiety of obser-
vation of almost religious intensity. As Fromentin
truly says, this is the history of youth, the youth of
a race, an individual or a school of painting: first
the intimate searching of the spirit of the subject,
the grave innocent sincerity, the cautious execution,
and then with riper knowledge and riper feeling a
greater nonchalance in rendering, a fuller, richer,
coarser manner, an absence of fear, a cessation of
awe. With Rossetti the characteristics both of his
youth and of his maturity were extremely empha-
sized. What showed dimly in others burned in
him with an ardent light. His youth was more
divinely young than that of the average boy, and
his maturity came suddenly to full flower like a
tropical plant. So, at least, his art would indicate.
By the time we reach the sixties in considering his
works in chronological sequence we find few traces
of the cloistered spirit characteristic of the great
Primitives. To the casual eye Rossetti’s pictures
have by this time become sumptuous and magnif-
icent, losing that touch of austerity which gave a
refinement of charm to his early Annunciation, to
his Childhood of Mary Virgin, to his Dante com-
positions, and which clung tenaciously to the
exquisite Found kept unfinished by him until the
end of his life. Anything like thorough considera-
tion, however, reveals the unity that held the com-
positions of his first period together with those of
all but his latest years. The Metropolitan Museum
recently has acquired one of two water-color re-
plicas of his Lady Lilith, the oil version of which
belongs to the year 1864. It is the only picture
representing him in the Museum, and beautiful as
it is—rich and sparkling in color and graceful in
design—it demonstrates the need of knowing
Rossetti’s work on many sides before attempting
to classify and judge it. No one seeing this, and
unfamiliar with other examples of his painting,
would, for instance, think of him as a master of
grave, almost somber harmonies. The Museum
Lilith, which was painted in 1867, and was formerly
owned by a Mr. Coltart, of Liverpool, is brilliant
with shallow color. Mr. Robert Ross, in The


cxxv