Why a new Rossetti exhibition is a must for depressed coiffeurs

While one sad beauty with a mass of hair might enchant us, the collection is more like a despondency of depressed Victorian women

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Gallery assistants pose with artworks entitled 'Mnemosyne' (L), 'The Blessed Damozel' (C) and 'Proserpine' by English artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti, during a photocall at Tate Britain in London on April 4, 2023.

Why a new Rossetti exhibition is a must for depressed coiffeurs

Bryn Haworth

last update on 20 May 2023

Sometimes a retrospective exhibition shows us hidden aspects of an artist. We learn that while they were doing the things they’re famous for, they were also doing good stuff on the side. Surprises like these are the almost inevitable result of seeing a great deal of their work in one place.

In the case of The Rossettis, however, the sheer quantity of pictures serves only to demonstrate how obsessive an artist can be. At times it reminded me of the gallery in Holyrood Palace up in Edinburgh, where the walls are lined with the faces of past Scottish kings.

With little pictorial evidence to go on, the local artist used the same regal template with the minimum of variations. The effect was dynastic line as production line.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti La Ghirlandata 1873 (Supplied Photo)

If Dante Gabriel Rossetti was a one trick pony, you sense he himself was happy that way, stretching the term ‘happy’ for a moment. A picture (now lost) of his studio indicates as much.

Just like this show, we can see stacks of portraits of very similar-looking women. The sitter was Jane Morris and her image got everywhere. He even put a tiny example on the flyleaf of a copy of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.

A despondency of Victorian women

Now, one sad beauty with a mass of hair might enchant us, but this is more like a murder of crows, a mass-produced multitude that deserve a collective noun all of their own – a despondency of Victorian women, each as depressed as the monarch herself.

This slough of despond might not have been so hard to endure if the presence of Gabriel had been sufficiently relieved by the inclusion of other family members. In a worthy attempt to put the more famous Gabriel into context, the show looks at his three siblings.

Not much is said about Marie and William, but his poet sister, Christina, gets a lot of attention. In the first room, extracts of her poetry appear on the wall and, if the visitor stands on a spot marked on the floor, the poem is voiced by an actor.

It’s a valiant effort, but sadly galleries are not ideal venues for poetry. The business of reading, or even listening, feels like a task. Your eye wants to linger over images instead. Here, Christina’s words sound contrived and childish. A passage familiar from Christmas, that great collective surrender to sentiment, comes across as twee.

It's a valiant effort, but sadly galleries are not ideal venues for poetry. The business of reading, or even listening, feels like a task. Your eye wants to linger over images instead.

In fact, twee is a word that applies to a lot of the things here.

Also putting Christina's words alongside those of her equally sentimental brother has the unintended effect of making the whole family seem afflicted by the same wilting disease, as if they were the Brontës, but without backbone or a saving dash of no-nonsense Yorkshire grit.

Social realism attempts falter

Even the rare attempts at social realism falter. Gabriel abandons Found, a picture of a fallen woman, altogether. Too real, perhaps. He's far more at ease in the realms of Tennyson's medieval hallucinations.

We see Saint George, for instance, cradling the woman he has just saved from a dragon. The dragon's head is to one side, decapitated by a swift blow to the neck. Incidentally, this would be the saint's fate one day.

If you peer closely, you can see that the damsel, no longer in distress, has just twined a hank of her hair through a convenient loop in the saint's armour and, scissors at the ready, is about to tie it there. Hair is a very Victorian keepsake.

It is not an isolated example.

Attention to detail

In a vitrine, there is the hair of Gabriel's deceased wife, along with a curl of his own. I think it was fair of the Evening Standard's critic to point out how big the hair is in Rossetti's portraits. It qualifies as a fetish. His sad beauties are shown plaiting it, toying with it like, listlessly, twiddling or combing it, even, in one case, sucking a strand of it.

Above these various images is the single most useful quote from a poem in the exhibition: 'And round his heart one strangling golden hair.' A lot of Freudian terminology begins to rear its ugly, dragon-like head at this point, and I think forgivably, because Rossetti's women are not simply hairy.

So, on close inspection, is his brushwork. In one case, he even depicts a hairbrush with a method that he applied to the women's hair itself.

While the flesh of these women is flatly rendered, smooth, opalescent, the fuzziness with which he surrounds them is achieved with almost obsessive attention to detail. He literally paints hairs, one strangulation at a time.

While the flesh of these women is flatly rendered, smooth, opalescent, the fuzziness with which he surrounds them is achieved with almost obsessive attention to detail.

He does the same with the dresses. This might have involved a very fine paint brush, or else it was achieved by scratching to reveal a layer of paint beneath.

The effect is to turn each portrait into a keepsake long before the owner of the hair is dead. The rest of the picture, with its expression of unappeasable melancholy, is like a memorial to the deceased. The honeysuckle has wilted.

This meticulous painting technique was not the way painting would go. Appropriately enough, it was a dead end.

For all his dabbling in progressive politics, the dark star of this exhibition was actually a prisoner of his time, a natural for the aesthetic movement that would succeed the Pre-Raphaelites, but without the draughtsmanship and perverse humour of Aubrey Beardsley or the wit of Wilde.

Instead, he was a bit of a bore. Morbid to a fault, he committed his poems to his wife's grave, then changed his mind and had them exhumed. He took his adopted name of Dante in utter earnest and fixated on his very own Beatrice, but lacking the medieval Italian's theology, just got stuck staring at her.

And this is the result. Vapid repetition, and enough hair to stuff a medium-sized settee.

'The Rossettis' is on at Tate Britain, London till 24 September 2023

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