Page:Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1904).djvu/87

 were not only childish, but indicated an utter indifference to them. Although having just completed his translation of the Paradiso portion of Dante's trilogy, he seemed quite at a loss to know what Rossetti's pictures represented.

From the midnight gatherings and conversations that I have mentioned, it will be seen that Rossetti's hours were very late ones. As a matter of course, he was not an early riser, and it was not his wont to commence work much before eleven o'clock in the morning. But when he did, he began right earnestly.

When a design germinated in his brain, it was all thought out and shaped into a pen-and-ink or pencil reality before the subject was transferred to canvas. When the sketch was to his liking, then came the question, What model was best fitted for the subject? And exercising the same fastidiousness as when composing poetry, several drawings of the model's face would be made ere he was satisfied. This accounts for such a number of carefully-finished chalk heads continually cropping up. They are all valuable, because they tend to show the progress and development of his most notable pictures. When all these careful preliminaries had been gone through, the painting would be commenced. But never in a hurry: no attempt was made to partially cover his canvas at once; his invariable rule being to do so much in the time that the model was present as could be well done, and required no alteration the next day. F—2