Method in Mad-Hair’s Madness

“… If a particular kind of reddish brown, crêpe wavy hair came in (his studio), he was away in a moment struggling for an introduction to the owner of said head of hair. He is not as mad as a March hare, but hair-mad,” Elizabeth Gaskell once wrote of the hair-mad Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Readers of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, too, will attest to that: Rossetti was hair-mad, specifically red-hair-mad. He was married to Elizabeth (“Lizzie”) Siddal, a red-head, his model, who was once his student. He had an affair with William Morris’s wife, Jane Morris, a red-haired model, his muse. Fanny Cornforth, his model, his mistress, his housekeeper (in the future), too, of course, had long red hair.

Water Willow (1890), model Jane Morris, William Morris wallpaper holds the painting.

Stepping into the Delaware Art Museum’s Pre-Raphaelite gallery, the visitor must gather a taste for that Rossetti-madness. Straight in view stands collector Samuel Bancroft Jr.’s first purchase: Rossetti’s Water Willow (1890), a painting of Jane Morris, nailed to a wall adorned with William Morris wallpaper. Jane Morris will resurface later in the exhibition in Rossetti’s Mnemosyneas the titular goddess of memory and the mother of the muses. Elizabeth Siddal, Rossetti’s wife, shows up only once in the entire collection, and even then, it is in a replica of Beata Beatrix by another artist, Charles Fairfax Murray, Rossetti’s studio assistant and Bancroft Jr.’s adviser in collecting. Interestingly enough, Siddal wasn’t his wife at the time the original Beata Beatrix was created; she, too, was another of his muses, his models, his lovers.

Found (1854), model Fanny Cornforth, painting unfinished.

Rossetti presents a greenish-faced Fanny Cornforth fallen and resisting an old lover in his painting Found. Rossetti was unable to complete the painting, not to suggest it looks at all incomplete. In Bottles, he adds Cornforth later. The museum also had featured Rossetti’s Money to the House, which he sketched to accompany a letter he wrote to Cornforth. The slight joke depicted in the sketch was that Cornforth had gained weight from overeating and become an “elephant.” Whether the intimacies were of writing her joking letters or painting her as a sensual object, the patron who commissioned Rossetti to paint Lady Lilith cared not for Cornforth and wanted the sensual, intimate portrait altered. There came use of Alexa Wilding, one model he was not, and would never be, romantically involved with. Wilding became Lady Lilith.

Lady Lilith (altered 1872-73), model Alexa Wilding, ever admired.

Alexa Wilding has been credited with being Rossetti’s most painted model. In three paintings from the exhibition featuring Wilding, Lady Lilith, Veronica Veronese, and La Bella Mano, Rossetti has his model accompanied by lines in romantic languages inscribed in gold frame; Veronica Veronese allegedly has his lines in French, and La Bella Mano has his Italian sonnet.

There, certainly, was method in the mad-hair’s madness, not all just a passion-chase.

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