Rossetti's Portraits

Chris, not the normal sort of interview you and I do because the gallery is still being hung. You have a load of art critics down here from London and I'm just getting in there to get a quick word with you. We're standing beside what must be one of the most iconic pre-Raphaelite images there is. For the benefit of those who don't know who this is, would you mind telling me? Of course this is Dante Gabriele Rossetti's portrait of Jane Morris known as the Blue Dress. Jane Morris is one of several women who through his life Rossetti became fascinated, obsessed with. She was the wife of William Morris but she and Rossetti had this very intense relationship which focuses around a series of works of art of which this is the great masterpiece and it's so exciting to see it here. Rossetti of course one of the founder members of the pre-Raphaelites. Again because I'm trying to pull in people who may not know who the pre-Raphaelites were, what made them so special? The pre-Raphaelites were a group of artists formed in the 1850s, really wanting to take art back to sort of earlier essential values but actually what the heart of what they did was a sort of romanticism and a profound belief in the beauty of things, the celebration of beauty. So what you see in Rossetti's paintings is this kind of intensely coloured, sumptuous arrangement of colour, of texture, of fabric, and natural objects and man-made objects. It's a beautiful celebration of beauty. One must say, thinking of the average Victorian parlour, how dull and colourless. The pre-Raphaelites work with amazing colour, it's such intense colour. Yeah absolutely, I mean they are, they're called the pre-Raphaelites but in a way what you see particularly in Rossetti is a celebration of Venetian painting, the tradition of Venetian painting as typified by Titian which was all about intense colour and sumptuousness as opposed to what was seen as a much more rational design-based art of Florence. And I think Rossetti stands out amongst the pre-Raphaelites for his complete indulgence of those kind of aesthetic qualities. A lot of pre-Raphaelite painting is quite moralistic. Rossetti's much more indulgent in that. Three women who were very important in his life, you have chosen to feature them for this exhibition. Why? So the reason we're doing this show, Rossetti's Portraits, is no one amazingly has ever done a this theme. Rossetti painted many, many portraits, he did other things as well. What's fascinating is that he repeatedly made portraits of certain people close to him, in particular these women, Lizzie Siddle who's also an artist, Fanny Cornforth who modelled many, many times with her amazing red hair and Jane Morris. But what's interesting particularly about Rossetti's portraits is that often they're simply portraits of someone close to him who he wants to depict maybe as an act of friendship. But he also paints literary paintings, scenes from literature or history or mythology, and uses those same models to stand in for the characters in those pictures. And at times you're not quite sure whether something is a portrait or it's a literary painting. The two genres, if you like, the edges blur. And even in some instances the biography of the sitter echoes the biography of the character in the story. Who were these paintings being done for? So the paintings are made for private reasons. I mean the pictures of Lizzie Siddle actually are mostly drawings, so they were intimate things that he would do, you know, every evening as they sat together. There's a beautiful drawing of her at her easel, so showing her as an artist as well. And other things were made, you know, for a market as well. So some were commissioned, some were for the market, some were for friends.