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A review of two recent exhibitions in London, Tate Britain's The Rossettis (April-September 2023; thereafter at Delaware Art Museum, October 2023-January 2024) and Evelyn De Morgan: The Gold Drawings at Leighton House (March-October 2023)

A review of the exhibition \"Max Beerbohm: The Price of Celebrity\" (October 20, 2023-January 27, 2024) at the New York Public Library

The exhibition was accompanied by a volume edited by curators Carol Jacobi and James Finch that was somewhat less favorably reviewed both by Barringer (JWMS 25, no. 3) and by Susie Beckham in Victoriographies (14, no. 1). Barringer finds that the essays, with the exception of contributions by Jan Marsh, Elizabeth Prettejohn, and Chiedza Mhondoro, exhibit “a tiresome level of generality” (p. 65), and Beckham identifies significant factual errors in biographical and art historical details. Richard Leahy’s “The Sensuous Pastoral: Vision and Text in Pre-Raphaelite Art” (chap. 5 in Literature and Image in the Long Nineteenth Century [Cambridge Scholars Press]) notes that the Pre-Raphaelite and Rossettian claim to represent nature is manifested through “sharp juxtapositions of narrative and decorative material,” a form of attention to imagined or created detail that paradoxically alienates its human subject (p. 98). In “‘I Drew It in as Simply as My Breath’: Absence, Presence, and Ideal Beauty in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Sibylla Palmifera (1866–70) ‘Double Work of Art’” (English: Journal of the English Association 72, no. 129), Nicholas Dunn-McAfee finds that most prior studies of Rossetti’s characteristic paintings-cum-poems focus on a single aspect of these dual works, eliding their complicated interrelationship.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s 1880 poem “William Blake” serves as an early example, possibly the earliest poetic example, of one such response that combines the form of the sonnet with the practice of ekphrasis as he includes a parenthetical note that reads “(To Frederick Shields, on his Sketch of Blake’s Work-Room and Death-Room, 3, Fountain Court, Strand).” Recent interest in Blake’s afterlives can also be found in scholarship, from William Blake in Twentieth-Century Art, Music and Culture, edited by Steve Clark, Tristanne Connolly, and Jason Whittaker and William Blake and the Myth of America: From the Abolitionists to the Counterculture by Linda Freedman, as well as a recent special edition of the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library. 6 The poem, which was published in The Spectacle in 2021 considers what Brady identifies as “the way [Blake’s] art gives image to uncertainty, so concretely.” Do they all reflect on canonical or quasi-canonical pieces of art and literature? TB: The Blake poem is the only poem in that series that reflects a piece of art so overtly.

The Pre-Raphaelite painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti is one of the few nineteenth-century artists to have excelled in two arts. According to his brother, Rossetti's capacity to voice his inner thoughts and feelings in both media came naturally since 'in the very essence of his mind and temperament Dante Rossetti was a poet--a poet who expressed himself in verse and in form and color'. Rossetti's double works provide an instance of reiteration of the same themes and ideas in different media, as well as an insight into his practice as a translator. The flexibility with which Dante Gabriel Rossetti switched from poetic to iconographic composition was facilitated, Laurent would suggest, by the fact that he was bilingual.

Zhang explores this slanted eye (or \"I\") and the visual gap within the Petrarchan tradition, which employs the rope of seeing to sustain a gendered structure of representation and knowledge. Originating in a courtly love tradition, the Petrarchan sonnet enacts a narcissistic and gendered logic, in which the male subject constitutes himself through representing woman as other. Natasha Distiller argues that \"Patrarchism's gendered strategies belong to a long history of theorizing about desire and its subject which confirms that subject as male, and as driven by loss, lack, and regret\". The silent or absent female beloved serves as both \"a sign and cause of lack\" for the male speaker. Mary Moore observes that, through addressing this female beloved a mirror reflecting his own power of \"imagining, re-creating, and dominating\". In this gendered structure, deixis--who speaks and who is spoken to--anchors the mirroring logic of representation and knowledge: the male-speaker addresses the female beloved and becomes knowable through representing her.

Bentley examines the design of Dante Gabriel Rossetti for The Parable of the Vineyard. At the International Exhibition held at the South Kensington Museum in 1862, Morris, Marshall, and Co mounted a promotional exhibit of the firm's furniture, embroidery, and ecclesiastical stained glass. Included in the last category were the seven panels of The Parable of the Vineyard, which Rossetti designed in July 1861 and the firm was rushing to complete early in April 1862 for the opening of the Exhibition on May 1, 2023. Despite winning a medal at the Exhibition, The Parable of the Vineyard received mixed, but, on balance, positive responses, at least for its craftsmanship. With regard to the meaning of The Parable of the Vineyard there was and remains greater agreement.

[...]its double nature as resemblance and dissemblance means an oscillation between likeness and alterity. \"5 This makes the \"meaning\" of the book's illustrations complex enough, particularly as we might properly think of the Dalziel firm's unknown wood engravers, who turned a drawing into a print and were wholly responsible for mediating its end product, as more than proxy illustrators. Since 1860, Alice Boyd had been part of an amicable menage à trois with the Pre-Raphaelite painter and poet William Bell Scott and his wife, Letitia. [...]I turn to the challenges created by the verbal to the visual, both assimilated by print but fundamentally different in kind.

In his Roundtable: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Music: Introduction, Allis lists more than a dozen settings of Rossettis poems by composers from 1893 to 1928, including Claude Debussys La damoiselle clue, Wilberfoss Owsts The White Ship, and Vaughan Williamss song sequence The House of Life. Both paintings thus belong to a later phase of Pre-Raphaelite art, placing more emphasis on imagined ideas than on naturalism-an aesthetic that shades into symbolism (p. 191); moreover, the poems use of concrete detail in a context of unstructured space and temporal ambiguity is a poetic equivalent of the clear physical detail of the painting . . . combined with its relative lack of perspective\" (P. 192). [...]Stinis finds parallels between the inward creative/receptive gaze of these paintings and what critics have elsewhere defined as the \"inner standing point\" in Rossetti's poetry, as well as anticipations of Henri Bergson's conception of multiple temporalities emanating outward from an inner consciousness. Helsinger then explores analogues in Rossetti's watercolors of the period, such as The Tune of Seven Towers, as well as effects in contemporary paintings by Edward Burne-Jones (Green Summer, 1864) and J. M. Whistler (Little White Girl, exh. 1865), observing that in the 1850s and 1860s music becomes in poetry and art \"an