Dante Rossetti and the Pre-Raphael Movement (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1894 edition. Excerpt: ...the Corporation of Birmingham. It was his visit to Gravesend, to bid farewell to Woolner as he embarked for the Antipodes, at the time when the emigration movement was at its height, that inspired the elder painter with that homely idyll of emigrant life--that masterpiece in the dramatic and emotional presentment of modern and familiar romance. In 1857 he painted his great symbolic picture " Work," which has been pronounced " the finest Pre-Raphaelite picture in the world;" a verdict not without justification, but bordering on those facile abstractions of criticism wherein the sense of comparative excellence is apt to lose itself in the confusion of diverse methods in art. The picture now hangs with the masterpieces of Rossetti, Millais, and Holman Hunt, in the Walker Art Gallery at Liverpool. Among the many friends of that period who gave sittings to the artist for the principal figures were Frederick Denison Maurice and Thomas Carlyle. Of the achievements of Madox Brown in the more obviously romantic and naturalistic fields, perhaps the best known is the intensely passionate and brilliant "Romeo and Juliet" parting at daybreak in the loggia to Juliet's chamber. In the same category, though of various range and style, ntay be briefly mentioned "Waiting" (1855), a fine study of firelight and lamplight, which appeared in the Russell Place Pre-Raphaelite Exhibition of 1856, "The Death of Sir Tristram," " King Rene's Honeymoon," the much earlier " Parisina and Manfred on Jungfrau," and "The Dream of Sardanapalus," a work of recent years. The romantic treatment of historical subjects is THE MANCHESTER FRESCOES 155 represented by the cartoons before mentioned, executed prior to 1848, and by such later compositions as " Cromwell Dictating to his...