Rossetti’s Portraits

Dante Gabriel Rossetti,Blue Silk Dress (Jane Morris), 1868, Kelmscott Manor, Oxfordshire. © Society of Antiquaries of London: Kelmscott Manor

Rosetti’s Portraits is the first ever exhibition dedicated to Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s portraits. Rossetti’s Portraits features such iconic artworks as The Blue Bower (1865) and Blue Silk Dress (Jane Morris) (1868), which reveals the artist at the height of his creative powers, alongside less well-known, but equally compelling drawings of his inner circle, including his intense and thoughtful portrait of William Holman Hunt, made on the morning of 12 April 1853 at John Everett Millais’s studio, when members of the Brotherhood gathered to draw each another.

Best known for his sensuous visions of female beauty painted in oil, Rossetti (1828–1882) also produced portraits of at least 90 different people throughout his career, including his family, members of the Pre-Raphaelite circle, patrons, models, friends in the wider art world and the three women — Elizabeth Siddal, Fanny Cornforth and Jane Morris — who dominated his art and life. The portraits Rossetti made of the people who mattered to him record an irrecoverable moment in the life of the individual represented. At the same time, each tells us much about the artist and how he viewed those closest to him.

Many of the works in this show demonstrate Rossetti’s conventional portraits, made as tokens of friendship, respect and affection. We have also included several examples of works that blur the boundaries between portraiture and abstract or narrative compositions, in which the models’ identities are brought to the fore as they pose as literary or biblical figures whose lives parallel their own. This entanglement of art and life, character and model, subject painting and portraiture, highlights the multiple layers of meaning behind many of Rossetti’s work.