Page:Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1904).djvu/111

 earlier, and had nothing to do with the Præ-Raphaelites, except that Rossetti and Ford Madox Brown exhibited there two or three times.

67.The full title of this picture is the Girlhood of Mary Virgin. It was painted late in 1848 and in the Spring of 1849, and shewn in the latter year. The first completed oil picture of Rossetti's is a head of Christina Rossetti (June, 1848); then began the Girlhood of Mary Virgin, and then, before this was finished, came the head of Gabriele Rossetti (October, 1848). The tutor of the B. Virgin (it is the Annunciation lily, of course, which she is embroidering) in the picture under notice, is not S. Elizabeth, but S. Anna, the mother of Mary; in the background occurs her father, S. Joachim. The head of the B. Virgin is that of Rossetti's sister Christina; that of S. Anna was done from his mother. In this picture the mystic adoration and faith of mediævalism is wonderfully and finely realized.

68.Cordelia at the Bedside of Lear—Rossetti sat for the head of the fool. The picture now belongs to Mrs. Rae, of Birkenhead.

69.This bed, in which Rossetti was born, had belonged to his father and mother, but was now the property of the painter.

70.First published in the early months of 1850. It was brought out by the Præ-Raphaelites with the cooperation of some friends, and afterwards called Art and Poetry.

71.The first verses and the first prose published by Rossetti. He contributed various other poems also.

72.And the Blessed Damozel likewise.

73.Poems by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (London, 1870), not the Ballads and Sonnets (1881), which Henry T. Dunn evidently had in mind.