Rossetti on paper: Re-examining the drawings of a Pre-Raphaelite painter-poet

This talk examines the drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82), the painter-poet who was one of the key figures in the founding of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848. Although Rossetti’s paintings and poetry have enjoyed an extraordinary degree of critical attention in the past two decades, his drawings, while given some prominence in recent major exhibitions surveying Pre-Raphaelitism, remain relatively unexamined.  ‘Rossetti on paper’ will look chiefly at the ‘early’ drawings – from around 1847 to 1856 - to examine closely the artist’s graphic subjects and themes.  It will identify the ways in which these early enthusiasms were worked out in later works. 

The talk identifies a conflict between Rossetti’s enthusiasm for collecting the graphic works of contemporary artists, such as the French illustrator ‘Gavarni’ (1804-66), alongside his growing appreciation of prints by artists from a remoter period, those hitherto neglected Northern European artists whose work he viewed initially in the British Museum Reading Room.  It assesses the impact of Rossetti’s trip to Paris, Antwerp and Bruges in 1849 in consolidating Rossetti’s approach to the pictorial subject expressed, sometimes with surprising results, in his drawings and watercolours.

Image: Dante Gabriel Rossetti  'Clara Vaughan Morgan' c.1874-76, George Powell Bequest, Aberystwyth University School of Art Gallery and Museum