The Rossettis -- Tough Going at the Tate

Sometimes less is more, and conversely, more is quite often less. We'd been in The Rossettis at Tate Britain for over an hour, when we realised with a sinking feeling that we weren't even half way through yet. This is a sprawling, confused, long hard slog of an exhibition, and in room 4 out of 9, we could already sense that many of our fellow visitors (and it was pretty packed in there) were flagging, overwhelmed by so much stuff. 

There are essentially three of them in this show -- Christina the poet, her brother Dante Gabriel the painter-cum-poet, and his wife and muse Elizabeth/Lizzie (née Siddal), who also painted and drew, posed and composed, but died early. However, this was always going to be an exhibition focused on Gabriel, whose gorgeous paintings dominate the walls (once you get to them, which takes time). Most of Lizzie's artwork is really minuscule, and as for poetry.... well, presenting poetry is a bit challenging to the crowds flowing through a gallery. 

Room 1 is devoted to Christina's verse.... a strange way to start an art exhibition, even if she is the most famous of the three. There's one painting -- Gabriel's early Ecce Ancilla Domini! (The Annunciation), with Christina the model for Mary -- in the centre, but the walls are covered with extracts from the poems, of which Remember is probably the most familiar. "Remember me when I am gone away/Gone far away into the silent land,'' it starts, concluding: "Better by far you should forget and smile/Than that you should remember and be sad." After a bit, you work out that if you stand on the circles on the carpet, you can hear the poems narrated from overhead speakers.

In rooms 2 and 3 we learn about the influences on the young Gabriel and then of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood they founded in opposition to the art establishment. Much of this is somewhat tough going; there are a lot of smallish drawings, and those early Pre-Raphaelite paintings, seeking to convey "truth to nature", can be quite wearying in the profuse detail of their medieval and religious scenes. And why was Gabriel, an atheist, painting religious pictures in any case? Here's his first Pre-Raph painting, The Girlhood of Mary Virgin, again featuring Christina as Mary and their mother, Frances, as St Anne.  

And while Gabriel might have been obsessed with the Florentine poet Dante Alighieri, to the point of assuming his name, and Dante's unrequited love for his muse Beatrice, who died at a young age, it's hard for us to share that obsession when confronted by such dense pictures as Dante's Dream at the Time of the Death of Beatrice. 

When his own muse, Lizzie, died in 1862, Gabriel compared himself with Dante and painted her as Beatrice in a Florentine setting. 

He returned from teaching to find her unconscious by her bed with an empty bottle of laudanum beside her. Laudanum -- a mixture of opium and alcohol -- was widely used in the Victorian age, and in this picture a bird brings her an opium poppy as a messenger of death. It's a picture that presages both the aesthetic movement and the Symbolism that would feature in art later in the century.  

We've leapt over a fair chunk of the show to get to this point, but we found it quite difficult to follow the chronology; at one point a wall caption talks about Gabriel and Lizzie becoming estranged, before, as far as we could see, it had been established that they were an item in the first place. 

One of the key paintings in the first half of the exhibition is Found, Gabriel's last Pre-Raph work and one he never actually completed, which is on loan from the Delaware Art Museum. It's a strange picture, depicting a countryman discovering his former sweetheart is now roaming the streets of London as a prostitute and trying, it seems, to rescue her as she turns away from him. There's a calf held down by a net in the drover's cart in the middle ground, as well. So it's a very moralistic painting, but the lost woman has the face of Gabriel's new-found muse, Fanny Cornforth.   

When Lizzie died, Fanny moved in with Gabriel as his "housekeeper", though there's not really a vast amount on his rather complicated love life in this show; as with the exhibition on the Pre-Raphaelite women at the National Portrait Gallery a few years ago, the curators seem to want to draw a veil over it. Earlier, Fanny sat for a painting that's more typical of the kind Gabriel is best known for: Bocca Baciata (Lips that Have Been Kissed). 

Fanny is cast as Alatiel, a princess with a history of sexual adventures from Boccacio's poem, The Decameron. 

Now, footsore and a little disorientated, we can finally get on to the crowd-pleasing part of the show. But first, this being the Tate, the politically correct room.  

The Beloved ('The Bride'), not a painting we were previously familiar with, gets a whole section to itself. It was partly influenced by Edouard Manet's Olympia, which Gabriel saw on a visit to Manet's studio in Paris, but rather than a naked white courtesan with a black maid, Gabriel gives us a biblical vision of a bride surrounded by her attendants meeting her bridegroom. The wall texts castigate Gabriel for creating an orientalist fantasy that idealises whiteness in the shape of the central figure and casts working-class models in situations far from their own real world. But wasn't so much Victorian art like that?    

And so much of Rossetti's. Casting Fanny Cornforth in fantasy roles, dressed to kill and looking sultry with all that big hair. Alexa Wilding was the central figure in The Beloved, and here she is again, pretending to be a character from Dante as Monna Vanna. 

These are incredibly luxurious paintings, so full of colour, texture, and swirling movement, made for a wealthy mid-Victorian clientele. So much for the Pre-Raphaelites' early commitment to social justice. 

We've seen before that Gabriel's drawings are much more direct, much less swathed in extra baggage than his paintings. This coloured-chalk portrait of Christina has her simply dressed, with a single book demonstrating her calling as a poet.  

There's one more woman in Gabriel's life, of course: Jane Morris, wife of William. Along with Wilding, Morris features in many of the large-scale pictures that fill the later rooms of this show, such as here, as Proserpine. 

Reeling past a screening of clips from Ken Russell's 1967 BBC film Dante's Inferno featuring Oliver Reed as Gabriel (as over-the-top as it sounds), we left this show quite exhausted and, we'd have to say, somewhat dissatisfied. Some gorgeous pictures, sure, but we didn't feel we'd learned much, or seen a lot that was new or startling. 

Rather bizarrely, the curators haven't included the most renowned of all the images of Siddal, even though it's in Tate Britain's own collection. So if you want to see Ophelia by John Everett Millais, for which she famously posed for months on end wearing a wedding dress in a filled bathtub, you'll have to pop upstairs afterwards. If you've got any energy left, that is. 

Practicalities

The Rossettis is on at Tate Britain in London until September 24 and is open daily from 1000 to 1800. Full-price tickets cost £22 and are available online here. We spent a good 2 1/2 hours in the exhibition, even though we skipped some bits. Be warned: There's not a lot of seating to rest weary legs. The nearest London Underground station to Tate Britain is Pimlico on the Victoria Line, about five minutes walk away.

Images

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), The Girlhood of Mary Virgin, 1848-49, Tate. Photo: Tate
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Beata Beatrix, 1864. © Tate
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Bocca Baciata, 1859, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Beloved ('The Bride'), 1865-66, Tate. Photo: Tate

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Monna Vanna, 1866. © Tate
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Portrait of Christina Rossetti, 1866, Private collection
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Proserpine, 1874. © Tate