# William Blake in his relation to Dante Gabriel Rossetti/Chapter 4

Influence of William Blake's painting.
In the foregoing pages I have shown how Blake's philosophy can be traced in the art works of Rossetti; how it was this philosophy which to no small extent directed the bent of Rossetti's genius and made of him a painter of imagination. Next to the influence of Blake's mysticism on Rossetti's art we have to place the influence of Blake's thoughts and criticisms upon art as laid down by him in his "Descriptive Catalogue" and in his "Marginal Notes to the Discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds". Though Rossetti's admiration for Blake's drawings, engravings, and coloured prints must have been great, as the reminiscences of these productions were used in one of Rossetti's best poems, in the Blessed Damozel, as I pointed out before, yet the traces we find of Blake's artistic influence in Rossetti's art works are few and of a comparatively small value.
In 1798 there appeared the works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, his "Discourses on Painting". Blake wrote marginal notes to these works, first in 1803 and for a second time about 1820, and vehemently criticized them. His other critical opinions have been expressed in a descriptive Catalogue which he wrote for an ​exhibition of his own works, which took place in 1809. Both in his Marginal Notes and in the descriptive Catalogue we find the most violent abuse of the Venetian and Flemish Schools, of the contemporary English school of landscape painters, fathered by Gainsborough and against the art of J. Reynolds himself. Blake found that the typical in art had a higher effect on the mind than the individual; this he sees in Raphael and Michael-Angelo, while in Titian, Rubens, and Rembrandt he sees the individual, the form of the model who sat for the pictures. Further he accuses those painters of generalizing viz. of an arrangement of effects of colouring, texture and shadow so put together as to prevent a picture to present clearly its individual parts, limbs or features. This last fault he thinks no oil-painting escapes, hence his preference for water colours and drawings. Lastly he strongly objects to the colouring of those painters. The terms in which Blake puts forth these opinions are those of the most violent abuse and the grossest exaggeration.
"O! Reader, behold the Philosopher's grave! He was born quite a Fool, but he died quite a Knave".
On Dante the following note has been written by Blake on a drawing of Homer:
"Everything in Dante shows that for tyrannical purposes he has made this world the foundation of all and as poor Cha-Bell (?) said: Nature not memory, thou art my goddess".
Of Swedenborg he tells us in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell that "he wrote down all the old falsehoods" by which falsehoods Swedenborg's belief in Nature must be understood. And in Jerusalem we find in the following lines the idea expressed that Newton and Locke's doctrines are pernicious to mankind.
"The Spectre like a hoar-frost and a mildew rose over Albion; Saying: I am God, o sons of men, I am your rational power. Am I not Bacon and Newton and Locke who teach humility to men! Who teach doubt and experiment".
We see in the foregoing examples that besides the Venetian and Flemish schools of painting Blake's hatred was enflamed against the belief in nature, against empirical science and rational philosophy; for Blake saw here everywhere hindrances for the development of the imaginative faculties. Faith in mysticism, in supernatural agency, in heavenly inspiration, in the exulting purifying influence of the art of the visionary could not be expressed in the solid worldliness of style of the aforenamed painters, neither exist in the minds of men who accepted nothing that had not been sufficiently proved. For Blake to whom "imagination was the principal goddess" this was ample reason for violent hatred. It was not against the art itself of those painters he revolted, but against the meaning and influence of it.
​That he could even appreciate Rembrandt as an artist is proved by his letter to the Rev. Dr. Trusler (16th Aug. 1799) to whom Blake writes alluding to paintings he had made for him: "You will have a number of cabinet pictures that will not be unworthy of a scholar of Rembrandt and Teniers, whom I have studied no less than Michael Angelo and Raphael". But Blake wanted with all the power that dwelt in him to bring back the art of painting in new correspondence with the world of imaginative and intellectual ideals. He considered as the greatest representatives of artists, who entirely neglected the intellectual and metaphysical meaning in art, those of the Venetian and Flemish schools. Here the evil had taken root which resulted in an entire absence of lofty ideas and poetical motives. It must not be forgotten at what a low ebb the English art of the beginning of the nineteenth century was, and how difficult a position Blake had taken up against the current ideas of conventionalism.
As landscape painters we find Callcott, Thomas Creswick, Stanfield and Frederick Lee, all good executants but not free from artificiality. Other painters are Fuseli (Füssli) and Benjamin West, who undoubtedly not without genius, stood under the several influences of Dutch, German, and Italian schools and produced not a single original, inspired picture with an intellectual grasp of the subject or a rendering of feelings neither melodramatic nor theatrical.
Sick of the correctly drawn, but highly conventional insipid genre pictures of the day Blake fell into another extreme and followed the rule that by far the principal aim of painting was to bring home to men intellectual or emotional truths, that for this purpose correctness in drawing, adherence to the natura evidence of the senses in colour and form might even be sacrificed. These principles found utterance in his violent criticisms on one hand and besides were expressed in the quaint and weird, often even grotesque, qualities of his pictures and drawings. Before everything else Blake's paintings want to express his ideas and in this he succeeded, perhaps because he really had ideas to express. Therefore his pictures, though full of ​mannerisms and misdrawings, touch us more even than any amount of capable and accomplished works dealing with imaginative themes, but lacking imagination. We find in these works a great preference for the Gothic style; Blake, in 1773, when an apprentice to Basire, the engraver, had been sent to make drawings in Westminister Abbey. For five years he was occupied in copying the monuments of the Abbey, and his love for the Gothic style never left him during all his life. "Gothic" he would say "is living form". Nowhere he has given more perfect expression ol his love for it than in his Illustrations of the Book of Job.)
Also he owed much to the formation of his style to Michael Angelo, but his knowledge of the master was derived from copies and prints, the only material available, which exaggerated the muscular development. (It was not until photographs of the Sistine frescos were available for study that Michael Angelo became truly known). Hence we find exaggerated muscular human figures in Blake's works, especially in his illustrations to the Prophetic Books, his male figures above all suffer from this fault. In his females is notable a graceful sweeping curve of the back-line, which together with the large eyes and oval faces gives these figures a peculiar charm and a great tenderness of expression. His innumerable floating angelic figures can hardly be surpassed by any artist as to their immaterial, heavenly aspect.
Remarkable is also Blake's colouring, which is of an extraordinary great brilliancy and transparency. Wonderful in colouring is e.g. Blake's representation of Jehovah which we find on the title page of the Book of Europe. Jehovah is represented here as an old man, the personification of the rigid rational laws, the creator of bodily existence, in accordance with the contents of the Book. From a fiery red sun he bends himself down in the ​vast black masses of space and with a pair of golden compasses gives measure and number to infinity.
Splendid in colour are also many of Blake's "frescoes". Blake indicated with this name a particular process which in its details is as yet not known to us, but which mainly consisted in painting on a basis of plaster and carpenter's lime. A process partly already used by Cennino Cennini in 1437 and which George Cumberland mentions in his "Thoughts on Outline". In all probability Blake, who was an intimate friend of Cumberland had his knowledge of this process from him, though he himself professes that his dead brother Robert in a dream advised him a particular mixture of water colours, and that further the Greek artist Appelles, viz. his spirit, had been his teacher in colouring. One of the most beautiful frescoes is the Procession to mount Calvary, a symphony of colours of an exquisite tenderness and great satiated mellowness. Very beautiful and executed with infinite care and patience are the accessories in Blake's drawings and water colours; everywhere in his illustrations of the Prophetic Books, in his engravings of the Book of Job or of Young's Night Thoughts we find marginal drawings and small interspersed symbolical paintings, which are perfect miniatures. Generally these sketches are of a decorative character consisting of animals: serpents, spiders, and fishes; often also sprigs of green with a great tenderness of outline are used, and after Blake's stay in Felpham, we find occasionally small landscapes introduced in his paintings, a low horizon, a winding path, a ​running stream, all showing great beauties of colouring and patient carefulness of execution. To Blake's mannerisms, to his preference for long noses and flabby cheeks, to his impossibly contorted figures, I need not draw attention, they are only too apparent from all his works. His innumerable misdrawings which he might easily have corrected, of course lessen the impression his pictures make on us, so does his want of dramatic power; we feel astonishment when we look at the violent passions, the awful scenes Blake puts before our eyes, we never turn away from them with a shudder of dismay. Neither did Blake escape altogether the faults of the century he lived in, often e.g. in the illustrations of Young's Night Thoughts we find the theatrical stiffness and melodramatic effects of the later 18th century painting.
Yet though his faults be many, his work leaves an impression on the mind, and this is one test of vital work; for after all it is expression which counts in art.
It was to rebel against the total want of expression in works of art that in the autumn of 1848 the celebrated Praeraphaelitic Brotherhood was constituted. The story of the origin of the brotherhood has been told again and again, so I may assume it to be generally known and will not repeat it here. The central idea of it was a revolt against conventionality. As Blake had done thirty years before, they stood up in arms against the degeneration of the English art, now in the hands of men like Wilkie, Leslie and Mulready, men who traded with cheap emotions and conventional optimism, who had no fundamental conception, no imagination, no force of expression. William Rossetti thus enumerates the Praeraphaelitic aims:
a) To have genuine ideas to express;
b) To study nature attentively, so as to know how to express them;
c) To sympathize with what is direct and serious and heartfelt in previous art to the exclusion of what is conventional and self-parading and learned by rote.
​They thought that the age in which these principles were mostly cherished, was the age of the early Italian masters. They saw from Giotto to Leonardo strong evidences of grace and decorative charm, observation and definition of certain appearances of nature, and patient and loving, but not mechanical labour. They did not take these earlier painters as their models, but they wished to revert the principles of an artistic age in which painting was carried on, not after a dominating tradition but on strong individual lines. In technique the Brotherhood took the the use of primary colours, avoided low tones and dark backgrounds and developed each individual portion of a picture with the same fidelity. The only modern painter in whom they found an original and independent spirit was Blake. Moreover the movement was literary as well as artistic as its leader was both poet and painter; the theories written on art were as many as the pictures painted. In Blake's critical opinions Rossetti found many criticisms which he held among the best ever expressed on art. Blake's aversion to Rembrandt and Rubens, to Reynolds and the Venetian painters was shared for the greater part by Rossetti who, himself a man of violent temper), could appreciate Blake's strong abuse of these painters, who had abandoned the high ideals of art. When in Brussels 1849 visiting the Picture Gallery, Rossetti writes to his brother: "One room was full of Rubens, so we held aloof". In his journey through Belgium he admires the mystic paintings of van Eyck, especially his Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine and the Saviour, but it is interesting to see how he was to a greater extent fascinated by the power of another Flemish primitive, Memling, on account of the intellectual superiority of the latter. Of Rubens he writes from Antwerp again: "Rubens seems to be considered here a common fool enough". The aversion to Sir Joshua Reynolds showed itself in the nick-name "Sloshua" given to him by Millais and suggested ​by the adjective "sloshy" which was applied to all indefinite, feeble and superficial work.
Rossetti however did not share Blake's antipathy to the Venetian masters, whose colouring deeply affected his paintings, neither did he partake of Blake's admiration for Michael Angelo to whose pictures, which he saw in Paris, he had a great aversion.
Except the abuse of the afore-named painters he also found here the rule not to generalize, but to execute everything, down to the smallest detail, with equal care. We see how he followed this rule in his first pictures e.g. in his "Girlhood of the Virgin" we find a trellis work overgrown with leaves executed with minute care; exactly the same carefulness is bestowed on the many accessories of a symbolic nature which are found on this picture e.g.; the dove with a golden halo round its head; the lily and the scroll on which we find written the words: "Tot dolores, tot gaudia". Though afterwards Rossetti did not exhibit these characteristics to the same extent, yet we always find that great care has been taken in the execution of the details, as may be seen in the dream-like little landscapes which often form the background of his pictures. Such a mystic landscape we find in Dante's Dream seen through a window at the back of the pictures, also in the Blessed Damozel we have little peeps of Heaven; in both pictures the landscapes are beautiful examples of minuteness of execution.
Like Blake Rossetti thought the typical in art of a higher effect than the individual, like him he sought to free himself from the model. This has given rise to the idea that Rossetti used as his models only two types of heads, that of his wife and that of Mrs. Morris. This is a great error. He painted from seventeen models in all. Mrs. Beyer sat for the picture Joan of Arc; Mrs. Hannay for Dante's Dream; Miss Herbet, the actress, for Bocca Baciata etc. Rossetti omitted accidental individual differences, and this produced together with his favourite mannerisms, the long necks, over-slim hands and over-full lips, the impression of his painting for ever the same woman.
​Rossetti is a lover of the Gothic style as many of his pictures clearly show, and though of course, it is difficult to say by whom this love was kindled, yet it is certain that his study of Blake could not but strengthen it.
In the different works about Rossetti's art there is generally found the idea that his art may be divided in two or sometimes three different periods. In his first period, called Praeraphaelitic, Rossetti is represented as the painter of religious pictures; then a second period, a kind of transition, is assumed to prepare as it were the great change that comes over Rossetti and makes of him in his last and most important period a painter of imagination. I believe this view of Rossetti's art to be not the right one. Rossetti was a painter of imagination from the very first of his artistic career. The idea that the art of his day, in order to rise from its low ebb, ought to be brought into contact again with the world of intellectual and emotional ideals Rossetti found in Blake's doctrines on art and in his works. This idea he adopted enthusiastically from the very first, and never abandoned it throughout his life. Hence the relatively small attention he pays to technical shortcomings in his paintings. Always the idea predominates over the matter; actions are allowed to appear as strained; compositions as naive, even the due proportions of things to each other may be lost sight of, provided only the emotional and intellectual parts are given due prominence.
In the beginning of his career Rossetti thought that the early Italian art was the most fitted medium to express his conception. His two pictures dealing with religious subjects "Girlhood of the Virgin" and "Ecce Ancilla Domini" try to render mystic feelings and thoughts by stiff decorative gestures, naive grouping, and a wealth of mediaeval symbolic accessory. Rossetti however seems to yearn after a simpler, deeper way of expressing the same thing. It is interesting to see how he tries all different styles of painting and of colouring and slowly through many phases finds the way of expressing his emotions and ideas best fitted to his exotic genius, and gives us that strange series of half and three-quarter length female figures which to most people are all that is meant in art by the name of Rossetti.
​After having left the early Italian style Rossetti tries the genre-picture painted from modern life. From all kinds of paintings this kind of picture is perhaps suited worst of all to express real emotion and represent a true phase of the intellect, hence Rossetti's greatest genre-picture "Found" was never finished, though in 1882, more than twenty-five years after the original painting was begun, Rossetti made a fruitless attempt to finish it. It would carry me too far to talk in particular of all the different phases Rossetti's genius passes through, phases which were often taken up again after some intervening years and are crossing and recrossing each other.
From all his different efforts to find expression for the same thing I will speak only of that one more in detail which was directly influenced by Blake. We find paintings by Rossetti full of movement, crowded with figures, all of which have a symbolical meaning. The best example of this is his pencil drawing "The Question". It symbolizes the cruel fate of men in dying. In a solitary wood far from the haunts of men a Sphinx is sitting, the three ages have found their way to her, wanting her to solve the riddle of life. The boy has put his question and the answer has made him fall down; the man inquires after his fate, the old man painfully strives to reach the Sphinx. Blake deals with the same subject in the illustration of Blair's Grave (Plate 5) "T is here all meet", viz. in the valley of death, which Blake depicts as a mountain cave. Here old age creeps about, here come the father and his daughter, the mother and her children, the lonely virgin and the hardy peasant, all those whom death reaps.
Besides this drawing many others of Rossetti use Blake's way of expressing emotions or ideas. In a water colour "The Gate of Memory" a woman half hidden behind a pillar sees the past years of her life before her in the figures of ever so many maidens. The same allegorical image Blake uses in one of his ​illustrations for Young's Night Thoughts where a virtuous old man converses with the past hours of his life, some of the hours, winged females, bring their report to heaven, others crowd around him.
In Rossetti's "Boat of Love", an illustration to Dante's Vita Nuova, we discern Blake's influence in the angel standing at the stern and in the graceful back-line of the woman. More distinctly Blakean is the floating figure of an Angel Rossetti drew as frontispiece for his sonnet sequel; compared to Blake's sweeping figures this angel, however, lacks in grace and seems hopelessly solid for a soul of one "dead deathless" hour which it represents. Many other pictures and drawings of Rossetti besides the above mentioned prove that he for a while tried to express his ideas like Blake by scenes full of action, full of movement; here emotions are represented by floating angels, strange half-human beings, winged flowers etc., though Rossetti never falls into the exaggeration of Blake, always keeps the interpretation of his visions within certain limits.
At last after years of seeking and striving Rossetti's genius found in the above mentioned female portraits its full development, the true medium for its mystic and emotional outpourings. Could not he have found the prototype of his women in a copy of Blake's Book of Thel in the British Museum? This conjecture is not impossible, for here we find a wonderful lovely image of Thel, tall, slender and graceful with a small full mouth and large expressive eyes. On a background of deep satiated red this fair-haired long-necked maiden clothed in pale yellow, stands out in beautiful relief and reminds us of many a sketch of Rossetti's splendid women-figures.
A considerable influence Blake has had on Rossetti's colouring. I have found that Blake's colours are always, at least as far as time has not spoiled them, of great simplicity, purity, brilliancy, and transparency. These same qualities I have observed in many of the pictures of Rossetti, for instance in "Beata Beatrix", the "Day Dream" and "Ecce Ancilla Domini"; in others I saw a certain dim, opulent richness of colouring viz. in the watercolour Lucrecia Borgia; in his later works his colours seem to have ​become hot and jarring. Though both painters show the same brilliant and glowing qualities in colouring, yet it is not necessarily to Blake that Rossetti had to go for the studying of this brilliancy and transparency of colouring, as many other artists, for instance the Venetians, also possess these qualities in a high degree. However Ruskin in his "Art of England" tells us that Rossetti as to his colouring was much affected by studying illuminated Mss. and we may conclude from this that it was highly probable that Blake's illuminated Mss., splendid as they are, were consulted for this purpose.
I believe that it has been made clear in the foregoing pages that the epithet of "great artistic forerunner of Dante Gabriel Rossetti" so often bestowed upon Blake in the several biographies of Rossetti, is indeed fully deserved by this poet. When we consider the influence of Blake as a philosopher, as a poet, and as a painter, we see that it is above all Blake's mysticism which penetrates all Rossetti's work and lends it such a peculiar, indefinable charm; a charm which will cause his pictures and poems to be remembered when the works of far greater authors and painters will have been forgotten. The influence of Blake's mysticism has also been the only philosophical influence which I could trace in Rossetti's works, the very few cases excepted, which of course cannot be traced, in which Rossetti was influenced directly by Swedenborg. At least one example of this exists in the Sonnet "Her Heaven" where the lines occur:
"If to grow old in Heaven is to grow young (As the Seer saw and said), then blest were he With youth for evermore, whose heaven should be True Woman, she whom these weak notes have sung."
In an explanatory note to this sonnet W. M. Rossetti informs us that in those lines with "the Seer" Swedenborg is meant. Though of course the possibility is not excluded that in more cases Swedenborg directly influenced Rossetti, yet compared to Blake's, this influence is so small, and moreover tends in the same direction, that we need not take it into consideration.
​Thus far I spoke of the direct influence of Blake on Rossetti, in one case at least I could clearly trace an indirect influence. Rossetti's prose tales "Hand and Soul" and "Saint Agnes of Intercession" show, especially in their style, the influence of Charles Wells.
Rossetti cherished at a time an exaggerated admiration for the works of this author. He even proposes to have his scriptural drama "Joseph and his Brethren" acted, but is kept back, from this purpose by Ruskin, who judges this drama to be not without some good descriptive parts, but as a whole finds it "wrong" (Letter of Ruskin to Rossetti, Denmark Hill, 1854). And indeed this drama full of incongruities and quite Blakean in its exalted and primeval poetry, would have been a decided failure on the stage.—This same admiration Rossetti had for the prose tales of Wells, collected under the title "Stories after Nature". These stories possess a sort of incongruous beauty, a savour of impossibility which baffles us and more or less spoils our delight in them. But nevertheless their beauties are undeniable, beauties of a subtle etherealised style as we also find in "Hand and Soul" and "Saint Agnes of Intercession"; beauties consisting in a great wealth of imagery, subtly chosen, in order to show forth the mysticism which underlies all of these stories. I need hardly say, that the prose tales of Rossetti abound in this kind of imagery, though Rossetti for all the melody of his style never absolutely sacrifices sense to melody as happens occasionally to Wells. Another quality which both authors have in common, is that, perhaps owing to the dimness of the plots, the stories are not carried to a satisfactory end. "Saint Agnes of Intercession" breaks off in the middle, as is also the case with the most poetical story ​of Wells called "Zara, the rich Man's Daughter"; but even when the stories are brought to an end, we feel the effort, which it cost the author, and more or less our delight is spoiled. When considering the influence of Blake's literary productions, I found that it was greatly surpassed by Blake's influence as a philosopher and also that the works of several other poets made as deep or perhaps a deeper impression on the mind of Rossetti. In the first place Dante must be named here, whose sonnets' sequel "Vita Nuova" was translated by Rossetti and greatly influenced the sonnets of The House of Life. Further I found the influence of the Italian poet Cavalcanti (namely in Rossetti's Italian songs); nor is it wonderful that Rossetti loved Italian poetry, when we consider that his father was a full-blooded Italian, a poet himself and a Dante commentator of some fame. Besides Dante we find Shakespeare (indeed which English poet is not influenced more or less by him!), Browning, Coleridge, and in the last period of his career Thomas Chatterton, who influenced Rossetti. (William M. Rossetti's Preface to the Collected Works of D. G. Rossetti. London 1906.)
It is not the place here to enter more into details concerning the further influences on Rossetti. I think I have shown sufficiently clearly in the foregoing pages that Blake already in the beginning of Rossetti's artistic career had a strong hold on his imagination and that it was Blake who inclined the bend of Rossetti's genius in the peculiar direction which through his long artistic career it was never to leave. It was indeed Blake who anticipated the Praeraphaelitic movement and might be called the spiritual father of this movement.
But though Blake stood up against untruth and conventionality in art, his too fantastical mind and the unfortunate outward ​circumstances of his life were the cause, that he could not change the current conception about art; the genius of Rossetti was wanted to mould his ideas into proper form and have them accepted by a large circle of artists.
* ↑ It may be that the colouring of Rossetti's pictures forms the one exception here; but as comparatively few pictures of D. G. Rossetti were accessible to me in the originals, I cannot form an adequate opinion in this matter.
* ↑ A descriptive Catalogue of Pictures, poetical and historical Inventions painted by William Blake in Water Colours being the ancient Method of Fresco Painting restored and Drawings for public Inspection and for sale by private Contract. London 1809.
* ↑ These illustrations were made in 1821 for Mr. John Linnell after some drawings previously executed for Captain Butt. These engravings are reproduced with great fidelity and clearness by Alexander Gilchrist.
* ↑ Blake took the image from Milton's Paradise Lost VII, 225 where we find the following lines: "He took the golden compasses, prepared In God's eternal store, to circumscribe This Universe, and all created things."
* ↑ George Cumberland was a contemporary of Blake, a native of Bristol. Blake writes to him "I study your outlines as usual, just as if they were antique". (26th Aug. 1799).
* ↑ National Gallery London.
* ↑ Blake spent three years of his life 1800—1803 on the sea coast in Sussex, in the village of Felpham.
* ↑ In F. Madox Brown's diary we find written about Rossetti's temper: "He has left off abusing his enemies, that apparently having lost its zest from overuse — and now vituperates his friends — or those of the person addressed, as more provoking".
* ↑ Robert Blair (1699-1746) was a learned Scotch clergyman of great virtue, he wrote one poem "The Grave" which shows a great resemblance to Young's Night Thoughts.
* ↑ House of Lite, Sonnet LVIII. Vol. 1. p. 204.
* ↑ Charles Wells, † 1878, wrote under the name of H. L. Howard. He wrote "Stories after Nature", printed in 1822 and reprinted in 1891. London. In 1824 appeared his scriptural drama "Joseph and his Brethren" reprinted in London 1876. Wells is an author of great skill and excepting J. J. Garth Wilkinson the author of an obscure book "Inprovisiations of the Spirit", seems to be one of the few direct poetical imitators of Blake, using the same phraseology and having the same mystical faith as his great predecessor.
* ↑ Guido Cavalcanti, born in Florence about 1250, was a friend of Dante and a poet who wrote admirable Sonnets (translated by D. G. Rossetti, vol. II, 116—163). He came of a noble family, took active part in the struggles between the Guelfs and Ghibellines, was banished to an unhealthy wild district, whence he returned with a sickness and died probably in 1301.