Swinburne, Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll!

As many of you will know, I visited the Isle of Wight at the weekend.  Whilst there, I paid my respects to a rogue...

I really should know more about Swinburne than I do, after all he lived at Cheyne Walk and knew Fanny well (and disliked her with a vengeance)....

 Swinburne attempted to remain nonchalant as his chair sunk into the lawn....

It struck me that I really did not know enough about the little rascal, and so here is a little history of one of the best connected men in Victorian poetry.  Really, there is more than naked banister-sliding....

Swinburne and his Sisters (1843) George Richmond

Algernon Charles Swinburne was born in 1837 to a rather illustrious family.  His father was Admiral Charles Henry Swinburne (son of Sir John Henry Swinburne) and his mother was Lady Jane Henrietta Ashburnham (daughter of the 3rd Earl of Ashburnham) and so, as their eldest child and a son, great things were no doubt expected of little Algernon.  He grew up in lovely East Dene in Bonchurch on the Isle of Wight (or as I like to call it, the 'Isle of Victorian Splendidness') and went off to Eton, then to Oxford.  So far, so traditional.  You can see by the portrait of him at six years old (above), he already had his vibrantly red hair, and by 16 he was already writing poetry.  The only blip on his record was being temporarily expelled (or 'rusticated', which sounds like a type of bread.  I do like a rusticated loaf) for publically supporting the attempted assissination of Napoleon III by Felice Orsini.  We all do crazy things as students...

Swinburne at Oxford. I love how easy he is to spot...

The family's house was in Northumberland, and it was there he fell in with the intellectual circles of William Bell Scott and Lady Trevelyan and his connection to the Pre-Raphaelites was assured.  Swinburne had been at Oxford while the painting party of the Union occurred and had met Rossetti, Burne-Jones and William Morris.  When he moved to London in the early 1860s, his friendship with Rossetti strengthened, and Rossetti referred to him as 'my little Northumbrian friend'.

Algernon Swinburne William Bell Scott

Swinburne was a constant visitor to Chatham Place and he became very attached to Elizabeth Siddal.  It's easy to speculate that the little red-haired boy in the first picture found a surrogate sister in the small, redhaired woman.  He and Lizzie would rush around the studio as Rossetti painted and the artist was sometimes forced to 'call them both to order, as he might a pair of charming angora cats' (according to one observer).

Swinburne (1861) D G Rossetti

Swinburne's intimacy with the couple was such that he was one of the last people to see Elizabeth alive.  He dined with the couple at the Sabloniere Hotel on 11 February 1862 and gave evidence at the resultant inquest of Elizabeth's death.  Whatever the truth of that evening, Swinburne was destroyed by the death of his friend, and the letter he wrote home to his mother in the aftermath was filled with the sadness at his loss and worry for his friend, to the detriment of his own health.

Swinburne (1860s)

Rossetti had fled to his mother's while the matter of his new home was sorted and when Swinburne visited him, his friend begged him to move in.  It is tempting to speculate whether Rossetti was trying to replace one redhead with another.  That is not to suggest that there was any sort of homosexual motivation behind his actions, but that simply put, Swinburne reminded Rossetti of Lizzie and their happier times, chasing in the studio.  What never seems to be examined in any detail is what the loss of Lizzie did to Swinburne.  His behaviour quickly became a bone of contention in the household, and the famous story of him sliding naked down the banister with a friend in the middle of the night comes from this period.  He continued to write poetry, praised and admired, and his circle of friends expanded to included important figures in the artistic and literary worlds.

Swinburne in 1865

He met and became intimate with Burne-Jones and Simeon Solomon, and they formed an unholy trio, swapping obscene drawings and poems.  Swinburne is blamed for encouraging Solomon into alcoholism and risk-taking homosexual activity.  Swinburne championed Solomon's gentle, sensual style and in many ways it was a reflection of his poetry.  Between them, they were trying to reveal a person, neither male nor female, but a blend and something different.  Swinburne became an algolagniac (word of the day!  Try and drop it into conversation, or simply announce it outloud wherever you may be right at this moment.  Go on, I dare you.  All together now: AL-GO-LAG-NIAC!  It means someone who enjoys a smack around the nethers.  Sorry about that.)

Swinburne and Adah Menken, the American actress

In an attempt to sort him out (or should that be 'straighten him out'), Rossetti threw Swinburne (possibly literally, he was only small) at the American actress Adah Menken. She threw him back, declaring it a failure, as she complained, "I can't make him understand that biting's no use."

He went through cycles of drinking, debauching, de Sade and degeneration, at which point his family would swoop in and carry him back up North until he was better.  He would then return back to London, strip off with a bottle in one hand and a whip in the other and the cycle would begin again.  He was tarred with the same brush as Rossetti in terms of the 'Fleshly poets' but his behaviour made it impossible for any defence to be made.  He was wreckage.

Move forward to 1897, and look who is Mr January in the Modern Poets calendar!  How on earth did the tiny, masochistic drunk become the 'Modern Poet'?  The answer is this gentleman...

Theodore Watts-Dunton

By the late 1870s, Swinburne had almost killed himself with his lifestyle.  Instead of his family swooping in, his legal advisor (and friend of Rossetti) Theodore Watts-Dunton came and removed him, taking him to live in his home outside London.  There he dried Swinburne out and changed his behaviour.  His poetry which had been in decline, had a new, gentler flourish in the last years of his life.  Swinburne became detached from his former friends, and people accused Watts-Dunton of holding him prisoner, but in truth Swinburne had grown deaf and just wanted to stay at home and not have his belongings whipped.  Swinburne finally got respectable...

Swinburne (1900) Robert Ponsonby Staples

He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1903, 1904, 1905, 1906 and 1907, then again in 1909, the year he died.  It was thanks to Watts-Dunton that he made it to 72 years old and had the opportunity to be remembered for the energy and drive of his poetry.  H P Lovecraft declared that Swinburne was the only real poet on either side of the Atlantic after the death of Edgar Allan Poe.  While not  as popular now as he has been, Swinburne's legacy remains with us and hopefully the interest generated by the Pre-Raphaelites will extend to his work.

Swinburne (1974) David Levine

But remember, reading Swinburne may lead to more outrageous behaviour.
Friends don't let friends read Swinburne while drinking....

Arthur Hacker, King of Beauty

Whenever I show this picture on my blog or on Facebook I always get loads of comments...

The Temptation of Sir Percival Arthur Hacker

Of all the pictures I have ever shared with you here, this may well be a strong contender for the most beloved by you lot.  It's a winning combination of beautiful and unintentionally funny that people can't help falling in love with.  It seems to encourage no end of captions and all I can say is that Leeds City Art Gallery are very lucky indeed to have it.  This made me start to wonder about Arthur Hacker...

Christabel Cockerell (1900)

Here's a bold statement for you: if I had to be a Victorian artist, then I think I fancy being Arthur Hacker.  Yes, his quality (in subject if not technique) was patchy, but when he got it right, he blows you away.  When I was gathering the images for this post I did a fair amount of squealing, clapping and, conversely, scratching my head in puzzlement.  I also had a little snigger at some over-the-top drama, such as this...

The Cloister or The World (1886)

Oh no!  What a choice!  Sod this for a lark, I'm off into the world to randomly lob petals at people like a right hussy.  You have been warned.  I love how the purity angel is looking at the naughty girl's bowl, like she's hiding a load of malteasers in there.  It's enough to make a nun go funny.

Right, a little background on Arthur Hacker:  His father was an animal engraver and his mother was the daughter of an attorney.  They lived a rather nice comfortable life in St Pancras, the Hampstead areas of London.  Arthur had a brother Sidney, who ended up being coroner for Devon, and a sister Adeline, who remained home and unmarried until both of her parents had passed away (both at quite a ripe old age).  Just after his father died, Arthur painted this rather touching portrait of his mother...

Portrait of the Artist's Mother (Sophia Hacker) (1907)

I didn't realise that Hacker painted quite a number of portraits, some of them rather beautiful and delicate, despite their very formal nature...

Sir Frank Short (1918)

This rather lovely image of the engineer and engraver Frank Short tells you so much about the subject.  He looks industrious but with a smile, a warm humour and an enthusiastic love of his work.  I think he is smiling under that impressive mustache.

Charlotte A. Ferguson of Largham, Donor of Victory Park

This reminds me of the portrait of Annie Russell-Cotes (of the Art Gallery fame), and no doubt countless other images of wealthy women of the late Victorian period, but there is something eminently tactile about that boa of fur and the great bundle of bows on the front of her dress.  It treads a very fine line between respectable and glam, which is nice to see in a woman of a certain age. She looks jolly.

Arthur Hacker (1858-1919) was a well-known painter of moderate success, a classicist with a strong vein in genre and fantasy.  His scenes of everyday life remind me of the Cornish fishing scenes of Holl but without the utter doom...

The Fisherman's Wife

We know her husband's line of work thanks to the tangle of nets and baskets behind her, but what is the message of the piece?  She looks at her baby with a mixed expression, both blissful and fearful.  What clues do we have?  There is a clock, there are daffodils, so are we looking at time running out?  The daffodils are to do with Spring and life, but a number of them have been left from the bowl.  I'm putting money on a fishing accident and a number of sailors lost from their boat.  Mind you, I don't always look on the bright side...

A Difficulty

Again, a clock ticks just out of shot, symbolising time.  I think the little girl and the old woman are the same person.  Time has ticked on and the little girl who used to think sewing was fun has now gone blind and can no longer thread her needle and will starve, which is a bit 'difficult'.

I think we probably know Hacker for his religious and legend subjects, like lovely Sir Percival.  It was what he was primarily known for at the time, probably because of the magnificence of some of these...

By the Waters of Babylon

Pelagia and Philammon (1887)

The first of the religious images should be familiar to you as the subject of a Boney M song.  The second is from a now-obscure Charles Kingsley novel Hypatia and shows the monk Philammon giving the holy sacrament to his nudey sister in the desert.  That's alright then, nothing strange there.

Persephone 

Daphne (1890)

The lush image of Daphne goes in my collection of fictional Amos Roselli paintings (from The Arrow Chest by Robert Parry).  The picture of Persephone is a bit overwrought but seems rather more up-beat than Rossetti's take on the subject.

Yes, Hacker could be dismissed at times as being a painter of pretty girls with pink bits, but he is much more than that.  He can also be a painter of extreme oddness...

Vale or Farewell

So many questions!  Who is going where?  Is the figure on the left leading the one on the right, is she leaving her or are they both going off but in separate directions?  Is one of them death? Is one of them dead?  It has a sepia-silence about it, not telling the viewer anything other than this is a painting about saying goodbye.

The Drone

So does the title refer to the sound of bees, filling up the flowers that surround the beautifully dressed young woman?  Or is she the drone?  A drone is a bee that doesn't 'work', just exists for breeding purposes, so maybe he is making a comment on the position of the woman whose posture echoes the flowers.

Imprisoned Spring (1911)

This has to be a contender for my favourite picture by Hacker.  Again, it's 'woman as nature', with both the girl and the flowers trapped in the meagre space, looking sadly towards the gay sunshine, streaming through the window.  I wonder if this reflected upon his sister at all, remaining home until both her parents died, only then going out into the world, getting married to the preposterously named Edmond Jean Marie Louis De St Quentin, at the age of 71.  She died the year after, in 1922.

Fire Fancies

It's not hard to fall in love with Arthur Hacker, his art is so beautiful and, at its best, celebrates the beauty of this world and a world beyond ours.  He paints women with skin like pearly shells and fabric that could slide through your fingers like silk.  His muse is often unknowable; who can tell what the woman in The Drone is thinking, and what is happening in Vale or Farewell?  Sometimes it is not a subject he gives us, just a mood, a feeling that is unsettled.  This is at odds with his traditional genre images, but even then he gives us unfinished stories, no guarantee of a happy ending.  His glory exists in a canvas of uncertainty, but the beauty will always remain true.

Musicienne du Silence

Facing Rossetti

Happy Birthday Dante Gabriel Rossetti!  It only seems five minutes ago that you were a baby, but 185 years later you're all grown up, so I think it's about time we had a look at the many faces of the artist we know and love...

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (c.1844) Filippo Maenza

This is reportedly the first portrait of Rossetti as a teenager, drawn in Boulogne by the son of the family whom Rossetti was staying with.  William Michael regarded it as little more than a caricature of his brother but admitted that it was still like him.  While it is completely unlike all portraits that followed, it is possible to discern the large Disney eyes and the pouty lips.  He certainly looks far more Mediterranean than in any of his own portraits or those by his friends.  How interesting that he seemed to have found his romantic groove by 1845...

(Sept 1845)  Paul Jonnard after John Hancock

Well, he grew his hair out for the medallion, and this image gives some credence to everyone's favourite portrait of Rossetti.  Brace yourself, the screaming is about to start....

(1848) Dante Gabriel Rossetti

He's late teens and looking as hot as York in August.  All the girls love this image of the revolutionary artist, forming the brotherhood and working on his smolder.  Look at the faint shadow forming on the bridge of his nose between his eyebrows.  That deepens as the years pass, but in 1848 he was looking beardless and gorgeous.

Detail from Isabella and Lorenzo (1849) 

Sketch for Detail (1848) J E Millais

Millais is an artist who spoke the truth, especially in his sketches, so in the detail sketch on the right, you have a very honest image of the young, flowing-haired man, not completely removed from the very romantic self-portrait.  It's possible to discern the curl of his hair on his forehead.  I think I better have a bit of a sit down.

(1849) Dante Gabriel Rossetti

What a difference a year makes.  By 1849, Rossetti has started morphing into a more familiar figure.  Bearded, slightly unkempt and looking strangely haunted due to the emphasis on the large eyes, Rossetti appears to be whippet-thin and has had his lovely long locks all cut.  What a shame.

William Michael and Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1853) Henry Mark Anthony

As if you needed concrete proof that by the early 1850s, DGR was not the fabulous-haired cupcake he had been in his late teens, here is a photo from 1853.  The brothers look like stray members of a Prog Rock group on a particularly arty concept album cover.  He should not have been allowed to stand with his hands on his hips, it's not a good look.  Anyway, despite being rather foggy, that outline, the profile, is unmistakable.

(1853) William Holman Hunt

We don't need to squint through the fog, Holman Hunt conveniently did a portrait the same year.  The crease on the bridge of his nose is missing, but those enormous eyes glimmer with the sort of intrigue and naughtiness that should make a lady grasp her sixpence.

It is then almost ten years until the next clear image of Rossetti is taken, this time in photo form, where nothing can be glammed up, airbrushed or faked.  If you had no notion of what had occurred in the years between 1853 and 1862, surely the look on his face would tell you something devastating had happened...

(December 1862) W & D Downey

A mere ten months after the death of his wife and their unborn child and Rossetti faces a camera.  Put in that context, this just breaks my heart.  He looks like his coat: he is holding it all together, but he is slowly coming undone.

(7 October 1863) Lewis Carroll

A year later, and he had settled into Cheyne Walk with a vengeance   The series of photographs taken by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (better known as Lewis Carroll), show Rossetti of the Middle Years, plump and vaguely dapper.  I don't think it is even vaguely ironic that he is pictured playing games with his family.

(October 1863) Lewis Carroll

The formality and control appears to have returned to Rossetti in this very self-aware portrait.  He looks like someone has actually pressed his clothes for a change.  Comparing the image to the year before, you can see how much he has pulled himself back in.  He is neat, he is ready and he knows people are looking.

William bell Scott, John Ruskin and D G Rossetti (29 June 1863) W & D Downey

In between those two images lies this series of oddities.  Really, I don't know where to start with how peculiar this now appears.  No, Bell Scott, no-one wants to hold your hand, you horrible man.  Mind you, Rossetti just got further with Ruskin than Effie did. Moving on.

(1870) Dante Gabriel Rossetti

The portraits then become quite same-y for a period.  His neatly shaved beard and tidy little suits don't seem to differ even though we know that he went through some appalling emotional upheavals during this period.  Looking at his self-portrait in 1870, it's hard to imagine this was a man on the brink of a series of appalling breakdowns after the disturbance of his wife's grave.

(1871) G F Watts

Interestingly, this portrait from the same time by someone else shows a slightly less chipper little fellow.  Rossetti didn't like this picture and quickly handed it over to Fanny for her 'Elephant's Hole' of pictures.  I agree, I don't like it much either, I find the head to be rather 'skull-like' and that wavy hair is not in evidence. Everything looks ghost-like and haunted all at once.

(1875-1880) D G Rossetti

The few lines of this pencil portrait give a very clear picture of the painter towards the end of his life.  He looks unravelled, transient, but those large eyes and that line between them catch you as everything else is barely rendered.

Broadlands Portrait (mid 1870s)  DGR is allegedly far right, leaning on the pillar

Curious one this, not sure if I believe it is Rossetti, but as we have very little to compare it to, apart from the sketch above, it's hard to call either way.  He looks peculiar in the image but then, he was peculiar at this point, having broken with Jane Morris and tumbling into the last troubled years of his life.

The end came all too soon and despite his wishes not to be recorded in death, both 2- and 3-dimensional renderings were taken.

The Dead Rossetti (1882) Frederic Shields

Death Mask (1882) Brucciani and Co

Thinking about the rights and wrongs of the situation, it's hard to accept that my own wishes to see an actual cast of Rossetti's face overrides the man's wishes.  I find it all rather heartless, but yet another example of how his family owned him because he gave up control to them too readily.

In my opinion the worst portrait of Rossetti is the memorial by Ford Madox Brown where he resembles a Panto Shakespeare...

So there it should end, but just as Rossetti's fame cause his dead body to be recorded, then too, his likeness rose again with the advent of film and television.  You want your Rossetti alive again?  Well, how about this...

Oliver Reed in Dante's Inferno (1967)

In my humble opinion, Oliver Reed makes such an outstanding Rossetti that no-one else should have bothered.  Despite bringing a certain level of hotness to the role, he also brought the charisma.  He made you feel irritation, pity and happiness, plus he oozed utter madness.  The film is bonkers but I like it because it has courage of its bonkers convictions.

Ben Kingsley in The Love School (1975)

Beautifully displaying the youthful enthusiasm of the young Rossetti is Ben Kingsley, a brilliant actor even on his off days.  I want to see more than just the snippet on YouTube, BBC, release this soon!

Aidan Turner in Desperate Romantics (2009)

Arguably the portrayal Rossetti would have liked the best has to be Mr Turner's hot gitweasel because Rossetti was a vain man and Aidan Turner is an exceptionally handsome man.  However, the characterization of Rossetti bore as much relevance to the internal machinations of the man himself as Brown's plaster bust resembled the outside.  This does him no service and is poor thanks for the beautiful art he gave the world.  Shame on you BBC.

Rossetti and Watts Dunton at 16 Cheyne Walk (1882) Henry Treffry Dunn

His life was lived in the public eye, reflected and captured in art from his teenage years onwards.  As Rossetti created image from others, he too was flattened and caught on canvas and plate.  We see him in hope and expectation, we see him in despair, we see him as he cannot see himself and through all of it he stands before us, not shielded by his canvas, not armed with his brush, but waiting for us in a moment that is gone in an instant but will exist forever, a candle that can never be blown out.