The Beloved

Rossetti, Dante Gabriel
Oil on canvas, dated 1865-6
82.5 x 76.2cm


The painting depicts the Bride from the Song of Solomon,
the Old Testament book in which religious and erotic imagery are fused.

Rossetti shows the bridesmaids lifting her veil, revealing her beauty for the first time to her bridegroom the King - and to us, the viewers of the painting.

On the frame are words spoken by the Bride and part of Psalm 45, describing the Bride's gorgeous dress, represented in the painting by a Japanese kimono:

My Beloved is mine and I am his. (Song of Solomon, 2:16).
Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth:
for thy love is better than wine. (Solomon 1:2).
She shall be brought unto the King in raiment of needlework:
the virgins her companions that follow her shall be brought unto thee (Psalms 45:14)

The quotation might imply that the 'Beloved' is not the woman shown,
but the male figure before whom she appears.

Such an idea is one of the constant features of Rossetti's compositions of this period. Many share the sense of direct address from the depicted figure to the viewer.

The figures and accessories reflect diverse ethnic and cultural origins. The presence of multiple figures is unusual for Rossetti's work of this period. Most concentrated on a single, female, figure.

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'Beloved' 1865-6', by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828 - 1882)
'The Beloved'is one of a series of half-length portrayals of women painted by Rossetti during the 1860s. The celebration of woman and through her the power of love was central to Rossetti's art.

He believed that women enshrined the mystery of existence. All of his work concerns women in different aspects - female virtue, ideal love, beauty, sexuality and the power of women over men. It was the theme of female beauty that came to the fore in the paintings of the 1860s.

'The Beloved' is unique in Rossetti's series of beauties of the 1860s. It shows many figures, not one. It also shows a black figure, the only one ever painted by Rossetti.

Why a black woman? The answer starts with the subject, which comes from the Song of Solomon. This is a love poem from the Bible that has a dual interpretation; it is phrased in erotic imagery, describing passionate feelings of physical love, but it can also be interpreted as religious love, the love of God.

Rossetti, as a writer of poetry with erotic content, must have known the Song of Solomon well. He may also have come to the subject through his obsession with the Florentine poet Dante and Dante's love for Beatrice.
In Dante's 'Divine Comedy' when Beatrice appears, her handmaidens sing lines from the Song of Solomon 'Come with me from Lebanon, my spouse', comparing Beatrice's beauty with that of the Biblical bride.

The subject of the painting combines the eroticism of the Song of Solomon with the scene described in the Psalms.
Rossetti depicts a bride (the Beloved) brought by her bridesmaids (the virgins her companions) before the bridegroom (the King).

According to the Middle Eastern custom, her face is unveiled for the bridegroom so that he sees her for the first time. This is the exact moment shown in the painting - she draws back her veil to reveal her beautiful face.

This still does not explain the black figure, but the Song of Solomon famously includes the lines, spoken by the beloved, 'I am black but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem.'

This may have given Rossetti the idea for the black figure, which was originally going to be a little girl. But Rossetti, unlike the writer of the Song of Solomon, did not show the bride as black - she is fair-skinned and red-haired (the sitter was a professional model, Marie Ford). Thus Rossetti could not or would not break away from the traditional Western European canon of beauty.

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Each of the bridesmaids has a darker skin than the bride.

Quite early on in the planning of 'The Beloved', Rossetti wrote to the man who commissioned the picture (the Birkenhead banker, George Rae) of his wish to include a little black girl carrying a cup before the Bride. This was later changed to a black boy, when Rossetti spotted on the steps of a London hotel a slave boy travelling with his American master. He came to Rossetti's studio in Chelsea to pose. This was the period of the American Civil War and the questions of slavery and abolition were hot topics in the newspapers.



In addition to the array of racial types of the figures, there are references to different ethnic cultures in the picture - the bride wears a Japanese robe, her hair ornaments are Chinese feather-work and the pendant worn by the black boy is North African.

The picture’s lush exoticism is accentuated by the flowers and the bride’s luxurious Japanese dress and Peruvian headress. Her attendants are of varying physical types and ethnic origin
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DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI (1828-1882),
English poet and painter, whose full baptismal name was Gabriel Charles Dante,
was born on the 12th of May 1828, at 38 Charlotte Street, Portland Place, London.
He was the first of the two sons and the second of the four children of Gabriele Rossetti (1783-1854)

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Sudden Light

I have been here before,
But when or how I cannot tell:
I know the grass beyond the door,
The sweet keen smell,
The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.

You have been mine before,--
How long ago I may not know:
But just when at that swallow's soar
Your neck turn'd so,
Some veil did fall,--I knew it all of yore.

Has this been thus before?
And shall not thus time's eddying flight
Still with our lives our love restore
In death's despite,
And day and night yield one delight once more?
~~ Dante Gabriel Rossetti
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Severed Selves

Two separate divided silences,
Which, brought together, would find loving voice;
Two glances which together would rejoice
In love, now lost like stars beyond dark trees;
Two hands apart whose touch alone gives ease;
Two bosoms which, heart-shrined with mutual flame,
Would, meeting in one clasp, be made the same;
Two souls, the shores wave-mocked of sundering seas:--

Such are we now. Ah! may our hope forecast
Indeed one hour again, when on this stream
Of darkened love once more the light shall gleam?--
An hour how slow to come, how quickly past,--
Which blooms and fades, and only leaves at last,
Faint as shed flowers, the attenuated dream.
~~ Dante Gabriel Rossetti

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The picture was commissioned in 1863 by George Rae, for £300, but was not finished until the winter of 1865-6. Rossetti also made further alterations in 1873 when he idealised the Bride's head and left hand and the head of the attendant on the right.

The model for the bride was Marie Ford, whose beauty Rossetti greatly admired. The virgin bridesmaid in the left foreground was modelled by Ellen Smith, the woman on the right by the artist Frederick Sandys's gypsy mistress Keomi.

The young black boy was intended to add a note of exoticism, but his dark face also provides an effective contrast with the pale complexion and auburn hair of the bride. Rossetti encountered the boy by chance at the door of a hotel and added him as an afterthought, replacing a mulatto girl. He may also have been inspired by the figure of the black servant in Manet's Olympia, which he saw during a visit to Manet's studio in November 1864.

The painting has a number of symbolic readings: the boy offers up roses, a symbol of love, but also a Christian image indicating someone who is matchless or without peer.
B The virgins hold lilies, normally a symbol of purity, but their red colour suggests passion and physical love.

The composition is extremely shallow, and the attendants crowd around the bride, providing a rich and sumptuous setting for her jewel-like beauty.

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SONNET VI.
THE KISS.
* What smouldering senses in death's sick delay
* Or seizure of malign vicissitude
* Can rob this body of honour, or denude
* This soul of wedding-raiment worn to-day?
* For lo! even now my lady's lips did play
* With these my lips such consonant interlude
* As laurelled Orpheus longed for when he wooed
* The half-drawn hungering face with that last lay.

* I was a child beneath her touch,—a man
* When breast to breast we clung, even I and she,—
* A spirit when her spirit looked through me,—
* A god when all our life-breath met to fan
* Our life-blood, till love's emulous ardours ran,
* Fire within fire, desire in deity