Page:William Blake in his relation to Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1911).djvu/50

— 50 — Rossetti is a lover of the Gothic style as many of his pictures clearly show, and though of course, it is difficult to say by whom this love was kindled, yet it is certain that his study of Blake could not but strengthen it.

In the different works about Rossetti's art there is generally found the idea that his art may be divided in two or sometimes three different periods. In his first period, called Praeraphaelitic, Rossetti is represented as the painter of religious pictures; then a second period, a kind of transition, is assumed to prepare as it were the great change that comes over Rossetti and makes of him in his last and most important period a painter of imagination. I believe this view of Rossetti's art to be not the right one. Rossetti was a painter of imagination from the very first of his artistic career. The idea that the art of his day, in order to rise from its low ebb, ought to be brought into contact again with the world of intellectual and emotional ideals Rossetti found in Blake's doctrines on art and in his works. This idea he adopted enthusiastically from the very first, and never abandoned it throughout his life. Hence the relatively small attention he pays to technical shortcomings in his paintings. Always the idea predominates over the matter; actions are allowed to appear as strained; compositions as naive, even the due proportions of things to each other may be lost sight of, provided only the emotional and intellectual parts are given due prominence.

In the beginning of his career Rossetti thought that the early Italian art was the most fitted medium to express his conception. His two pictures dealing with religious subjects "Girlhood of the Virgin" and "Ecce Ancilla Domini" try to render mystic feelings and thoughts by stiff decorative gestures, naive grouping, and a wealth of mediaeval symbolic accessory. Rossetti however seems to yearn after a simpler, deeper way of expressing the same thing. It is interesting to see how he tries all different styles of painting and of colouring and slowly through many phases finds the way of expressing his emotions and ideas best fitted to his exotic genius, and gives us that strange series of half and three-quarter length female figures which to most people are all that is meant in art by the name of Rossetti.