Figures
- Cover imageDante Gabriel Rossetti, Mariana, 1870, oil on canvas, 109.8 × 90.5 cm, Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums.
The cover image relates to two essays by Pater, one on Rossetti himself (whom Pater described in 1880 as ‘the greatest man we have among us, in point of influence upon poetry, and perhaps painting’), the other on Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. Pater shared the unusual enthusiasm of the Pre-Raphaelite group for this play, and it is likely that two Pre-Raphaelite works helped inspire him to write about it: this painting by Rossetti (which we know was on the easel in Rossetti’s studio, where Pater must have seen it, between 1868 and its delivery in 1870 to William Graham), and William Holman Hunt’s Claudio and Isabella, which Pater had the opportunity to see in 1865, and mentioned in print a year later, the strong memory of which informs the passage in the essay where he emphasises the relationship between Claudio and Isabella. He also highlights the page’s song to Mariana, almost certainly under the abiding impression of the Rossetti. Rossetti is the modern British artist most important to Pater from the time of his first visits to Rossetti’s house in Cheyne Walk in the late 1860s through to the portrait of Marguerite de Navarre as Jane Morris in Gaston de Latour. We know that Pater had seen works by Rossetti, with great admiration, from the reference in ‘The School of Giorgione’; indeed Mariana would be of particular relevance, partly because of the music-making subject and partly because it is very much in Rossetti’s ‘Giorgionesque’ manner. The other painters who were particularly significant for Pater – Solomon, Burne-Jones, Legros, Whistler – were all members of the circle around Rossetti, the imaginative leader of this whole artistic movement. 1William Blake (1757–1827), ‘When the morning Stars sang together, & all the Sons of God shouted for joy’, Illustrations of the Book of Job (1825), plate 14, 40.6 × 27.3 cm, Yale Center for British Art, Gift of J. T. Johnston Coe in memory of Henry E. Coe, Yale BA 1878, Henry E. Coe Jr., Yale BA 1917, and Henry E. Coe III, Yale BA 1946 (B2005.16.15).
2Louis Schiavonetti (1765–1810), after William Blake (1757–1827), ‘The Reunion of the Soul & the Body’, illustration to The Grave, A Poem. By Robert Blair. Illustrated By Twelve Etchings Executed From Original Designs. To Which Is Added A Life Of The Author, London, Published Mar. 1st 1813, by R. Ackermann, 101 Strand, sheet 38.1 × 28.9 cm, plate 29.8 × 22.9 cm, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection (B1974.8.6).
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