This page of sketches was drawn by Rossetti in around 1874 and shows him experimenting with three different compositional studies for a painting of Venus with two doves. William Michael Rossetti noted when he gave this drawing to Effie Richie, that Rossetti ‘thought of painting this’ although a finished picture was never completed. Such loose, compositional studies are comparatively rare in Rossetti’s oeuvre and offer valuable evidence for Rossetti’s working method. Given the date, it may be that Rossetti was contemplating a painting of Marie Spartali Stillman the Greek model and painter who was the subject of a number of Rossetti’s late single figure paintings. William Michael Rossetti gave this drawing in 1905 to Stillman’s daughter, Effie Ritchie. On the back of the sheet is an interesting series of miscellaneous notes by Rossetti, including a list of favourite colours.
By 1870 Rossetti was in the midst of a period of personal crisis. The publication of his Poems met with profoundly hostile criticism, most notably from Robert Buchanan who attacked him in the Contemporary Review for embodying ‘the fleshy school of poetry’. The criticism precipitated Rossetti to suffer a complete breakdown. When Rossetti returned to painting, he began to produce a sequence of pictures that depict a single female figure from classical mythology, literature or an embodiment of a female characteristic. Rossetti had painted a depiction of Venus Verticordia in 1864-8, showing a naked model posed against a rich backdrop of roses and honeysuckle. The complex iconography suggests Rossetti was interested in showing the ability for a woman to turn men’s hearts from fidelity to lust. His rapid studies of Venus with two doves were perhaps conceived as a continuation of this theme, the second study specifically shows the female figure naked whilst clutching two doves, suggesting Rossetti was contemplating a composition as explicitly erotic as Venus Verticordia. These were themes Rossetti was exploring in his poetry, specifically the sonnet he composed in 1871, Venus Victrix. Each of the studies shows a woman posing with two doves and long, dark hair – suggested by the use of wash – Rossetti’s female architype, embodied in the models he was painting at this date, particularly Jane Morris.
The previously unknown manuscript note on the verso of the current sheet, refers to two books that give a clue to the dating of the sheet. The first Ballads, Lyrics and Hymns by the American writer Alice Cary was published posthumously by the New York firm of Hurd & Houghton in 1874 and the second English Eccentrics by the British writer and antiquarian John Timbs which was published in 1866. This gives us a terminus post quem for the sheet of 1874. The note on Rossetti’s chromatic preferences is particularly interesting as it points to his ‘love’ of ‘pure light warm green’ and ‘Shadowy sea or steel blue’ the colours that predominate in his painting of Proserpine, now in the Tate, which was completed in 1874.
Inscription verso:
‘Ballards. Lyrics & Hymns by Alice [Cary]
New York, Hurd & Houghton
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English Eccentrics by John Timbs
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Squares 12 3/8 x 91/2 circles 9
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27 Feb £50 – 27 March 50 [crossed out]
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Thinking in what order I love colour
Found the following:
Pure light warm green
Deep gold colour
Certain tints of grey
Shadowy sea or steel blue
Brown with crimson tinge
Scarlet
Other colours (comparatively)
only lovable according to the
relations in which they are place[d]’
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