Page:William Blake in his relation to Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1911).djvu/52

— 52 — illustrations for Young's Night Thoughts where a virtuous old man converses with the past hours of his life, some of the hours, winged females, bring their report to heaven, others crowd around him.

In Rossetti's "Boat of Love", an illustration to Dante's Vita Nuova, we discern Blake's influence in the angel standing at the stern and in the graceful back-line of the woman. More distinctly Blakean is the floating figure of an Angel Rossetti drew as frontispiece for his sonnet sequel; compared to Blake's sweeping figures this angel, however, lacks in grace and seems hopelessly solid for a soul of one "dead deathless" hour which it represents. Many other pictures and drawings of Rossetti besides the above mentioned prove that he for a while tried to express his ideas like Blake by scenes full of action, full of movement; here emotions are represented by floating angels, strange half-human beings, winged flowers etc., though Rossetti never falls into the exaggeration of Blake, always keeps the interpretation of his visions within certain limits.

At last after years of seeking and striving Rossetti's genius found in the above mentioned female portraits its full development, the true medium for its mystic and emotional outpourings. Could not he have found the prototype of his women in a copy of Blake's Book of Thel in the British Museum? This conjecture is not impossible, for here we find a wonderful lovely image of Thel, tall, slender and graceful with a small full mouth and large expressive eyes. On a background of deep satiated red this fair-haired long-necked maiden clothed in pale yellow, stands out in beautiful relief and reminds us of many a sketch of Rossetti's splendid women-figures.

A considerable influence Blake has had on Rossetti's colouring. I have found that Blake's colours are always, at least as far as time has not spoiled them, of great simplicity, purity, brilliancy, and transparency. These same qualities I have observed in many of the pictures of Rossetti, for instance in "Beata Beatrix", the "Day Dream" and "Ecce Ancilla Domini"; in others I saw a certain dim, opulent richness of colouring viz. in the watercolour Lucrecia Borgia; in his later works his colours seem to have